No one will ever be able to convince me that there is a perfectly good reason to turn the clocks back an hour just at the bleakest time of year, thereby insuring that non-morning people like myself lose an hour of daylight and that “evening” seems to follow “morning” with nothing in between.
(Similarly, no one will ever be able to convince me that there is a perfectly good reason carpenters start work pre-9am. But let’s not go down that road.)
I try to have a good attitude about daylight savings, and there are in fact a few things about it that I secretly like. One of them is that it suddenly becomes okay to eat more, sleep more and just generally laze about more, thereby eliminating the guilt of trying to be a better, more productive person all the time. I really appreciate those kind of excuses, not being a terribly driven person to begin with.
Also, fall (my least favorite season and the primary reason I moved West from New England) is a great time to spoil your parasympathetic nervous system. The parasympathetic nervous system is the one that takes over when you’re asleep and allows your body to take care of itself. It’s the regenerative vehicle driving your body’s inherently resilient nature. And it’s the one we don’t generally give a lot of props to, given that it does most of its work silently and behind the scenes and while we are sleeping.
Aside from getting a lot of sleep this time of year (and that includes naps), here are some of my other favorite ways to nurture the ol’ parasympathetic nervous system and make myself appreciate daylight savings:
- Super lazy – yin, if possible – yoga, particularly Christy Brown’s class in San Francisco on Monday nights
- Splurging on bodywork (particular props to Andrew Castellanos at Stillpoint Wellness Center!)
- Chillaxing at the spas in Japantown
- Curling up in a chair at the Mill Valley Library and reading a novel
- Watching back-to-back episodes of How I Met Your Mother: embarrassingly, my current favorite show to obsess over on Netflix (but I guess not that embarrassing or I wouldn’t be admitting it)
- Playing Bejeweled until the battery runs out on my friend’s iPhone (I don’t have an iPhone, so this is a particularly special treat for me)
- Making soup, and then eating soup
- Meditating… And my top two favorites….
- Not meditating
- Not going to yoga
