Friday open thread: black coffee in bed

[dolorosa_12]

Today's Friday open thread is brought to you by the increasing number of posts I keep seeing on social media trying to lift the spirits of people exhausted by the darkness of the northern hemisphere winter. Cheer up, they say, it's only one month until the sun sets at 7pm. For me, however, the time that the sun sets isn't the problem. I'm all about the sunrise: I am a morning person (when I was an undergraduate I frequently got up at 5.30am, went for a run, had a shower, and wrote 1000 words of my Honours thesis or whatever essay was due that month, and was completely finished with the day's university work by around 8.30 or 9am), and my energy is at its peak when it is a daylit morning. So the thing about the long dark winters that saps my energy and lowers my spirits isn't the early sunsets: it's waking up at 6 or 6.30am in complete darkness, or not being able to tell whether it's 2am, 5am, or 7am without checking my phone. I never feel properly awake when I have to get up into darkness.

In that spirit, then, today's question is: what are the things that wake you up in the morning (other than alarm clocks)?

Other than daylight, the things that clear the morning cobwebs away for me include going for walks in cold, clear air (walking in warm weather makes me tired), and going swimming — whether that's lap-swimming in a pool, or swimming in the ocean. (I've very rarely had the opportunity to swim in lakes or rivers but I imagine the effect would be the same.) Coffee and tea work, and I do need to drink something caffeinated before about 9am or I get a raging headache, but waking myself up with caffeine never feels quite the same.

What about you?

Comments

[dolorosa_12]

Oh wow, if you live by the sun, living in a Nordic country would make things extremely difficult! I think personally I'd struggle as well — really southern England is about as far north as I could live comfortably. I've visited Iceland and Sweden in May, and Finland and Norway in June, and those long, long summer days are fine for a holiday but I'm not sure I could cope with it for months on end, or the reverse in winter.

Commuting out in the air — whether by bike or on foot — seems to be a common way to wake up, and it makes sense. I've always walked to work (although these days I have to catch a train first, and then walk for half an hour, and I only work one day a week in the office), and it's a great way to get your brain into the right state to begin the working day.

Caffeine doesn't exactly wake me up, but I get a really bad headache if I haven't had a cup of tea or coffee by about 9am. And I can't drink it after 3pm or I won't sleep at all.

[nerakrose]

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.