Conscious Choice: Take Time to Reset Your Body Clock

January 2005 | BackWords

Take Time to Reset Your Body Clock

by Monette Louise Bebow-Reinhard

DON’T DO IT. Don’t even try. You cannot change something you were born with. That would be like fighting your DNA.

Better to get along with your body than fight it. I’m no expert, but I’d like to share how I figured a way to control a serious problem that can lead to all sorts of other problems: insomnia.

For years I sought all manner of cures.

I read articles on insomnia: Don’t drink; concentrate on relaxing your muscles; count backward, count forward, recite something; don’t think about problems of the day; don’t eat too soon before bed. I’ve tried them all and nada.

And then there are the other things I didn’t try. For instance, I was told that if you can’t get to sleep within seven minutes after your head hits the pillow, get up and read a while. I always thought that was stupid advice, so I never took it.

For a while I got in the habit of drinking booze late at night to fall into a stupor around midnight. Anything’s preferable to insomnia, right?

Then I stumbled on my body clock.

A little timer inside me tells me when to sleep and when to get up. It’s simple and cheap.

The body clock is your natural body rhythm, the waking and sleeping cycles all living beings are born with, our way of adjusting to day versus night. Some people seem to be in synch naturally — they should be bottled and fed to the rest of us. My husband can fall asleep anytime, anyplace. If his body clock tells him he needs eight hours of sleep and he doesn’t get it, he makes up for it by falling asleep in front of the TV. He takes that momentum with him to bed.

My husband doesn’t have my problem because he lives with his body clock. He is a creature of habit and an outdoorsman, while I stimulate myself through sporadic deadlines and schooling and get all pasty in front of a computer.

One gal told me her body clock demands a nap every day to stay up to a certain hour at night. We should all be so lucky to find that kind of time.

My body-clock discovery took place in grad school after I moved away from home last January, away from my husband’s snoring, and got a little apartment of my own. Alone for the first time in nearly 30 years, I was forced to confront my body’s rhythm and the clock gradually emerged.

Here’s what I discovered: If I get to bed before 11 p.m., I will get right to sleep. No tossing and turning. No counting to a million. No swearing, crying, tangled sheets or whacking my husband for snoring. No prescribed muscle-relaxers or collapsing into bed in a drunken stupor.

But, if I don’t get to sleep by 11 p.m., my second wind kicks in and it’s guaranteed I won’t get to sleep until half past midnite.

Once you’ve learned how your body clock works, you can figure out how to adjust it. The trick is to learn your body’s natural wake/sleep cycle. This may take a while, but it’s well worth the effort.

Try this. Note when you typically awaken, and count backward eight hours. With a little experimentation, you’ll find your body clock and go to sleep without stress. Even if you can’t often get to sleep within your body clock’s demands, you can at least figure out when your body has gone through its second wind, and crawl into bed at that time, instead. You may find you don’t need eight hours, but this formula gives you a good starting place. Another method is just to note on a pad by your bedside (the next morning, of course) those times when you’ve fallen right to sleep naturally. Look for a pattern.

But there still will be times when you can’t help but stay up past sleep-time. When that happens, all you have to do is stay up until you’ve exhausted your second wind. So now if I can’t get to bed by 11 p.m., I just use that time productively and then go to bed at 12:30 a.m. Even on those occasions when I use my body’s second wind, I still tend to awaken on schedule, by 8 a.m.

Sleeplessness also comes from not doing a simple little routine before hitting the bed at the right time — it’s called relaxing. If I keep working right up to 10:30 p.m., I may suffer from sleeplessness. Some nights you may fall asleep more quickly than others, and can trace this restfulness to plenty of exercise and sunshine that day. As a writer, I don’t get enough of either. In nice weather, I suppose I could take pen and paper outside, but then I’ll probably get carpal tunnel syndrome.

Sigh.

Monette Louise Bebow-Reinhard is a history grad student at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, mother of three and member of Western Writers of America.

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