Beyond Selidor

it has been, a little! blackout curtains are extremely popular in Scandinavia for this exact reason. I use them on occasion when I've really needed to sleep, but I don't like them - the artificial dark just keeps me asleep for longer than I need to and when I wake up I'm tired. waking up with the sun, even if I only got, say, 6 hours of sleep, doesn't make feel tired, it feels natural to wake up that way. I actually have a blackout curtain in my room here in London but I've used it only a handful of times, and that was in the summer during the heatwave when I needed to block the sun out during the day. my window faces south.

as a kid growing up in Iceland where the differences between summer and winter are extreme, I struggled every winter. That's partially also because Iceland is in the wrong timezone for its location (nobody wants to fix it, apparently, so we all just suffer) so in the winter the sun wouldn't come up until 10-11am. imagine having to get up at 6 or 7 to go to school and it's still dark for the next four hours. man, that should be illegal. (the Christmases we spent at my grandmother's, further north, we'd have about an hour of daylight between approximately 12 and 1pm.) getting up for school once we hit October through to March was a major struggle and I have many, many absences on my record from those years.

Denmark is so far south that we don't get those extremes. it's probably very drastic compared what you're used to if you're from a place like, idk, southern Europe where this doesn't really happen (I'm guessing, the furthest south I've actually been is Vienna in November, but it was also 20 degrees that week and felt like late autumn rather than deep winter), but for me it's like a medium setting, lmao. the summers are bright, I think in june the sun sets round 11pm (but we still have bright skies for about an hour after that) and comes up again a few hours later, again with bright skies for an hour before. actual dark night is maybe 3 hours. That's not so bad, and the bright season feels shorter than further up north because it's not so extreme. the winters though, because thanks to global warming it doesn't snow much anymore it's just dark and rainy and miserable for five months.

(also what I would often do, especially as a child and teenager, I would get up with the sun in the wee hours, have some breakfast, watch pokemon or read a book, and then about 7ish I would go back to bed for a bit and wake up again around 9 and have second breakfast. Everyone always thought I slept in but I was just...napping...those summers were great. ofc as I age I don't need as much sleep so just get up.)

London is the furthest south I've ever lived and it's *so weird*. it's hard to explain but I can *feel* that I'm further south than usual, the climate is different, the light is different. I'll get used to it eventually, but it still feels weird.


also, yes - the combination of fresh air with physical activity plus the actual act of physically transitioning from home to the workplace (or university) has always been very effective for me to switch brain modes.