Is there a name for someone who’s an afternoon person? We have, per this article, morning larks and night owls, and I thought my rhetorical question – because I assume that no, we do not – was going to be made a failure when I saw reference to “hummingbirds” in another article, but it turns out a hummingbird is not an afternoon person, just someone who vacillates between the two major bird-classes of circadian rhythm.

Could we have gone with ducks and geese? Just to keep all of our bird metaphors in a row? Yeah, yeah, they have similar waking patterns. But it would be nice to have more options for mixing metaphors.

I spent last week waking up between 6:45 and 7:45 am, which is NOT my typical pattern (people are generally aghast when I tell them that, left to my own devices, I wake up around 9:30. I’m going to bed around 1:30! I’m not some huge outlier in the actual amount of sleep I get, which per FitBit averages out to 7 hours and 25 minutes). Benefits of waking up at that time:

1. Afternoons felt less saggy. I was more tired, but I didn’t have the late afternoon gloominess that I ordinarily feel around 4 or 5. Granted, around 4 or 5 I had just finished teaching for 7 hours and wasn’t home yet, so my brain was too occupied with the logistics of transportation and the things I still needed to get done to feel post-prandial ennui.
2. I became so EFFICIENT. Or, perhaps, I rose to baseline efficiency for most adults. My days were much more scheduled than is normal for me, but I came home from work and went straight to yoga, or made dinner before even entering my room, or ignored the internet and completed my necessary tasks for the next day. You could surmise that this had nothing to do with waking up earlier and everything to do with a more regimented schedule, but that would be wrong; if my teaching day had lasted from, say 1-8, I would have probably come home, dicked around (whatever spellcheck wordpress uses wants to change this to “ducked around,” which is at least relevant), gone to bed super late, and slept until noon. My day had to be front-loaded in order to force ruthless efficiency, a phrase I’ve undoubtedly never used before in my life.
3. There’s something luxurious–probably in part because it was so unfamiliar–about going to bed before 11 pm. If I sleep into the double-digit numbers, I feel lethargic and guilty, but slipping on the mask of “early to bed,” even if only for five days, felt so VIRTUOUS.

Will I keep this schedule up? HA. But I am teaching a weeklong course in London in August with an identical schedule, so I will be undertaking this experiment again.

*There is nothing beneficial, commute-wise, about waking up early (cough at a typical working-person’s hour); I don’t even think the trains are that much more frequent, but they are certainly much more crowded.

**Why larks and not, I don’t know, CHICKENS? Granted, no rooster I’ve ever heard has actually been especially early to crow. Is it that lark and owl are both on syllable? Few letters? More exotic than the humble hen?

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