selenology
It’s amazing to me how two peoples’ sleep habits can be so different. It’s like Diane’s and my “sleep polarity” is completely reversed. She is the definition of a morning person and I am a night owl par excellence. Even our behavioral patterns surrounding falling asleep and waking up are reversed: She falls asleep in fits and starts but can wake up readily and easily, whereas I can fall asleep at the drop of a hat but always have trouble getting up, no matter how much sleep I’ve gotten. In the evenings, she gradually “shuts down” as bedtime approaches, and while I do get progressively more tired, there isn’t any real loss of capacity until the moment I fall asleep. And of course, in the mornings she is ready to go almost from the moment she wakes up, and most days it takes my brain an hour or so to come fully on line. This is all irrespective of the amount of sleep we’ve gotten as well.
I try to refrain from making value judgments about our sleep habits, since we’re really awake for the same amount of time, and thus objectively have the same amount of resources to work with when it comes to getting things done. If you pressed me, though, you’d know that I really wished I was more of a morning person. There’s just something about it that seems more self-disciplined, and that attracts me. I spend several spells in a given year trying to get up earlier, but so far none of it has stuck. Maybe it will yet–I’m going to keep trying.
I think the real winners, though, are our kids, since in any given 24-hour period there’s only a 5-6 hour span of time when we’re both asleep and no one is actively vigilant over the goings-on in the house. So if one of them has an issue, there’s less chance that both of us will be unavailable. That’s good for them, I think.