Spring Forward, Fall on my Ass

It’s been less than a week since Daylight Savings time started and I feel like crap.

I have not sprung forward with any spring in my step, that’s for sure. More like shoved into a vicious cycle of lethargic-bitchy-lethargic-bitchy-lethargic…you get the idea. I’m the one in line in back of you at Starbucks, desperate for coffee, ready to snap if you chit chat with the barista while pondering Chai options. Move it.

How can moving the clock up one hour, which accounts for a mere 4% of our day, affect me so completely?

I keep bumping into things. Forgetting where I put my keys. Burning eggs. Missing tennis matches I committed too. Losing reading glasses. Leaving pens on buses. Leaving commas out of word docs.

And it somehow feels worse this year. But then I have to ask: Is it me and my menopause, or a real thing? One would think after all of these years of losing an hour, I’d have built up a tolerance.

In search of anything to corroborate my time-change collapse as “normal” and not related to “old”, I went to Google.

The most easy to digest and comprehend piece appeared on CNN Health last week and can be found here. The good news, I suppose is this: Daylight Savings Time does not age discriminate. It hits us all. Thank fucking god I don’t have to put this in the “crap, another thing that sucks about getting older” box.

In any event, here are some things removing that one hour of sleep can cause:

• Workplace injuries

• Auto accidents

• Moral decision making ability

• 8% increase in having a stroke during the Monday/Tuesday following the time change

• A 10% increase in heart attacks

Clearly, none of this is good.

There are loads of suggestions for how to remedy this situation, all involving getting more sleep.

So if you try to reach me during the day, there’s a good chance I’ll be taking a nap. Perhaps in these beautiful PJs by Olivia Von Halle, whom I just discovered during my hunt for suitable nap-wear. Her stuff is awesome. Check out her stuff here.