Daily musings #620- Tuesday, 8 November 2022

Over the last two months, I had various international travel days where my days were either longer or shorter. This flurry ended with the DayLight savings ending last Sunday night here in Canada. These things do a number on your routine and impact the cycles and comfort of what one’s body is used to.

Here is the sequence of my long and short days recently:

• Sep 20 - Transitioned from Toronto to London to Warsaw - 18-hour day

• Sep 24 - Warsaw to London stay overnight - 25-hour day

• Sep 25/26 - London to Chennai India - 19.5 hour day

• Oct 24 - Chennai India to Barcelona through London - 27.5 hour day

• Oct 28 - Barcelona back to Toronto - 30-hour day

• Nov 6 - Toronto Daylight savings ends - 25-hour day

The body is encoded to work to specific routines that it understands as previously experienced as patterns. It was a struggle to adapt to these changes. There are various techniques to counter them including drink lots of water, forcing you to follow the local routine, vigorous exercise in the morning in the place where you are, melatonin, and various other options. I have tried them all and some things have worked some of the time. And different things work for different people.

This was compounded by the fact that I worked in Canada time for three weeks from India. And that meant working from 6 PM local time to 3:30 AM in the morning each day. The routine was supported by waking up late at 9:30 AM and this really meant that I did not really localize myself to the local timezone while there. That is one experiment that I hope not to repeat again until or unless a situation is forced on me.

When I returned to Canada the days and the nights had shortened and now I have to craft a brand new routine that eliminates my long early morning walks with a different routine that forces my walking to lunchtime instead. And this new routine will continue until the mid of March when the angle of the sun and its rising and setting times will change again leading to brand new patterns.

And that is the long and short of it.