Rituals, Interrupted

Sleep is overrated. This is what someone tells themselves when it's 4:30 a.m. and your body is fully awake because either believes it's in another part of the world. Sure, it might mean you drink too much coffee today, but hey, who's counting (Your body. Your body is counting.)

When Patrick decided to travel to Paris for long enough to feel like he'd lived there, it turns out that also means his body wanted to stay there when he came back, too. Outside of aging, traveling is one of the rare ways to completely upend the way your body senses the world.

Rob and Patrick decided to reflect on the ways their bodies' rhythms have changed over time. Learn how Rob was almost run over by forklift!

Patrick: So Rob, when we traveled to London, jet lag wasn’t a thing. Everyone overslept the first few days, sure, but broadly we transitioned over without skipping a beat, thanks to everyone catching a critical few hours of sleep during the overnight flight. It was awesome, and made me optimistic we could make a similar transition coming home. The results are in: absolutely not!

Handwaving an awful 24-hour stomach bug that made me deeply uncomfortable on the flight home and feeling weirdly feverish overnight, the big problem is that we keep waiting up so early.

The first few days, it didn’t matter when I went to bed. Early. Late. In-between. I’d wake up around 5am. The kids were on the same cycle, too. It’s a seven-hour difference between Chicago and Paris, so apparently our bodies were simply saying “hey, I’d like some lunch.”

Am I a morning person? Well. I’m not not a morning person—but I really, really enjoy my sleep. 

I’m also not a person who usually has trouble falling back asleep after briefly stirring awake?

But there was no going back to sleep during these moments, so instead of being frustrated, I woke up and got on with it. The consequences of lacking sleep were a problem for a future version of Patrick. It was in these early hours, as the sun slowly peered out, that I found a lot of enjoyable solace in—excuse the grindset term—”attacking” the day. I surfed through a series of indie games—Sword of the Sea, Herdling—because of the extra quiet time I had in these hours.

Honestly, the biggest problem was pumping the breaks on my coffee intake. I’m used to taking down two cups of coffee in the day’s opening hours—one while prepping the kids for the day, another slowly sipped while heading towards lunch—and I’d downed both of ‘em before 8am.

I can feel my normal routine slipping back into place, though. Days ago, I couldn’t make it past 9pm. Last night, I caught up on episodes of Alien: Earth until nearly midnight. I slept until nearly 7am this morning. My brief moment of hacking the universe and getting 2x grindset morning returns appears to be fading. Of course, I could just set an alarm and get up earlier. But that would require making a conscious effort to get up early, not respond to my body demanding it.

Are there moments in your life where your daily routine, whether it’s when you wake up or otherwise, suddenly shifted? I found this shift, however temporary, to be very pleasant. I’m not sure I’m prepared to sleep early enough to make it happen, but I very much get the appeal of it.

Rob: Probably the most intense version of this I had to deal with was when I worked at a factory where your crew rotated through shifts. You’d have a week of day shift, a week of swing shift, and then a week of night shift. It made it a lot easier to work the night shift but at the cost of just making time itself seem blurry. You’d wrap work at midnight and suddenly you’re hanging with friends until two or three in the morning like it’s nothing. Then the next thing you know you’re going on a date at five in the afternoon, going into work at 11:30, and coming home to have breakfast with your family before you go to bed. There were times it was kind of liberating to be completely divorced from any kind of normal daily routine, to just be doing whatever you wanted or needed to do whenever you had the chance outside work hours. 

On the other hand, I don’t think I ever felt like I was fully rested and healthy while I was doing that, and a lot of people I worked with were taking drugs to sand off the edges of exhaustion or overstimulation. I remember one forklift driver kept having accidents because she was jacked-up all the time, and we busted ass trying to conceal how bad and dangerous the situation had gotten. She’d nearly run you over with a shipping pallet, then she’d scatter the whole load a second later trying to take a turn too fast and we’d swarm her trying to get everything cleaned-up before the foreman could notice. Nobody liked her that much: you can only have someone come inches from inflicting grievous bodily harm so many times before you get righteously pissed about it… but nobody wanted her to get fired. And I think everyone was aware that if management got concerned about the stimulants people were taking as a matter of course, it would cause a lot of problems beyond one forklift operator.