Day 7

The most difficult habit

The Advent Cal(m)endar contains habits to increase clarity, focus and calmness. Every second day, I open a door and post about my experiences.

Hi readers, happy Saturday (or whenever you read this)! Well, sooner or later it had to happen – today’s habit is the one I am most likely to break. For many people (e.g., those who are morning people or who have fixed working hours), this one would sound easy, but for me it goes against firmly established routines:

Stop work at 9pm (or earlier)

Have you heard about the experiments where participants lived in a windowless bunker for weeks and scientists studied their perception of time? One goal was to understand whether humans have an internal clock, i.e., whether they can tell when a day has passed without any external cues (such as sunlight, clocks, or other people’s behaviour). In the bunker, people settled into their own sleep-activity rhythms – but their days did not have 24 hours, but were somewhat longer. So, when the participants left the bunker, their internal time did not match the actual time of day anymore. The interpretation is that humans (like many other animals) do have an internal clock – but it is not set to exactly 24 hours. Normally (i.e. if we don’t happen to live in a windowless bunker) this rough internal clock is adjusted by daylight and other pieces of information.

Well, I have the feeling that my internal clock is set to 25.5 hours, and I push it beyond that by spending much of the evening looking at screens. I work flexible hours, and if there is no strict outside control (such as many early morning meetings), I wake up later, work later and go to bed later every day, never mind the daylight! It doesn’t help that I enjoy my job as a researcher and often get immersed in data analysis, having trouble to stop. A colleague with the same issue once told me that he just decided to embrace it – he allowed his daily rhythm to shift further and further (which meant that at some point he was up all through the night), until he eventually found himself on a “normal” schedule, aligned with daylight, again.

Embracing the darkness

Why did I include this habit?

I am not quite ready to adopt my colleague’s approach, but I do want to adjust my activity to match the daylight better again, instead of doing most work in the afternoon and evening and often working past midnight.

In the same way that living with the seasons can ground us and make us feel more connected and healthy, it might also make sense to live attuned to the rhythm of day and night. That means work should happen during the day - and evenings are for winding down and getting tired, not for artificially extending the day with light from screens. I want to embrace the darkness, read by candlelight or go for walks and look at the stars. Stopping work earlier will mean that I have time for that.

I am very grateful for my flexible working hours (and I believe the option should be given to employees whenever possible!), but for a healthy balance, especially the workaholics and perfectionists among us probably need to set some schedule for ourselves. If there is no “official” time to stop working, there is also no “official” time to relax.

What will I do instead of working?

As I said, this habit will probably be the hardest for me to stick to – simply because I am so used to working very late that I hardly remember what to do on a free evening. (Please don’t get me wrong – I don’t work non-stop! It’s just that almost all my free time is during the day. Even on weekends I often do volunteer work in the evenings.) So, I need some nice evening activities, ideally screen-free ones! These are some ideas:

• Reading physical books by candlelight

• Working out

• Painting (I am not a good painter, but I enjoy it, and I want to make Christmas cards for my friends)

• Listening to nature podcasts while watching the stars through the window

• Walking (it is nice to be out in the cold and to look at the Christmas lights or the sky, especially with meteor showers coming up)

Today, I will probably spend the evening reading and planning an upcoming walking trip. Planning outdoor activities is one of my favourite things to do indoors in winter, in fact – unfortunately difficult to do fully without a screen (even though I do still use paper maps).

Do you have a set time to stop working? What is your favourite thing to do in the evening?

Happy weekend,

Hannah