As much as I love this time of year, it does get difficult for me when it’s full dark by 6h30.  And of course, Daylight Saving Time just exacerbates the problem.  In a little more than two weeks, the sun will set a full hour earlier, for no apparent reason other than a misguided, habitual attempt to “save energy” or some nonsense.

For as little as I spend time outside, I am apparently very sunlight-driven.  If I don’t have ambient light when I wake up in the morning, it freaks me out; I can’t use blackout curtains, otherwise I tend to wake up in the middle of the night with no idea what time it is, which means I start freaking out about missing work/school/whatever.  Combine this with the fact that it’s very hard for me to fall asleep once I wake up, and it’s a recipe for badness.

In a related way, I assume that when it’s dark outside it’s time for sleeping.  Whether I want to or not, I start winding down as it gets dark, which makes it really hard to do anything remotely productive when it’s dark before I even get home from work.  Once it’s dark, I don’t want to do much else except read and play video games.  The day is done, and so is the day’s work.

And to top it all off, I start to get all wonky without enough sunlight.  The time I spent working in a windowless office was especially bad, since I would occasionally get to work before sunrise and leave after sunset.  But my exposure to sunlight, even indirectly, has a noticeable effect on my mood.

I complain a lot about not having much of an internal concept of time, and I wonder if these habits and preferences are related to that.  Is my body taking its timing cues from the sun, whether I want it to or not?  That would make sense, but it doesn’t make it any less annoying.  My inborn productivity drive isn’t the greatest to start with, so anything I can do to trick more motivation out of myself is kind of important.  It’s just hard to do so when your body is telling you it’s time to go to sleep.