I don't know what it is about this particular trip, but jet lag has just been kicking my ass since I got home six days ago. My first day back I went to work, and felt OK, I made it through the day and felt pretty tired at the end of it, but no big deal. The second day, I felt like a giant cotton wad was behind my eyes, and it wasn't capable of cognitive thought. I went home early thinking it was just a bit of jet lag and I'd be alright the next day. Hah, silly man. The next day, Friday, I went into work for about six hours (I normally don't work on Fridays), then went to go run errands, and then visit with my sister who had shoulder surgery that afternoon. One of my errands was to get my hair cut. I managed to leave my jacket at the barber shop which required me to have to go back and get it at some point. When I got home, the neighbor's dog I was supposed to be watching had decided to go walkabout some thirteen hours earlier. Now neither of these things has anything to do with jet lag, but they were things that I simply didn't want to deal with. Picking up the jacket I could pretty easily put off, the barber shop is owned by friends and they would hold it for me, but the stupid dog was out somewhere, and it was heading towards freezing that night, and I was worried about him. I sat in my office wondering what to do since I had no way of knowing where he was, so no way of going to get him. It was about 9:30 in the evening before I had the brilliant thought of walking across the street to listen to my neighbor's messages (which incidentally is how I'd learned that he'd been picked up by another neighbor about a mile away about thirteen hours earlier). I was loath to call these folks this late at night, but I felt responsible for the dog, and they were just good Samaritans. Now, had I had cognitive ability earlier in the day when I knew he was gone (I ran home to do some other things and the side gate was open and he wasn't there), I'd have simply walked across the street to listen to messages, and he'd have been rescued hours and hours earlier. This simply hadn't occurred to me. No brain function. I spent the rest of the weekend with ambitious plans that came to naught, the only thing I'd planned to do that I actually did was get my hair cut. And I screwed that up by making another errand for myself.
I think it would help if we experienced actual sunlight here in the Seattle area during the winter, but it's more of a general greyish-ness, so I don't get the visual cues my body's circadian rhythms are expecting as clues to sunrise/sunset cycles, so the transition from SE Asia time to Seattle time is taking longer than usual. In Singapore & Malaysia, the sun pretty much rises and sets w/in ten minutes either way of 7:30, day in-day out, 365 days a year since you're so close to the equator. Here in Seattle at this time of year, the days are still fairly short, and the nights long, so even the length of the day/night cycle is out of whack from the SE Asia version. Add to that the dark days, and it's not overly surprising that your body takes a while to synch back up.
Now I've experienced jet lag before, but not on this scale. I find myself simply falling asleep in front of the TV fairly regularly, only to wake up 45 minutes to a couple of hours later, completely out of touch (which isn't what I want to say, but I can't think of the phrase). Then I go to bed, sleep a few hours, wake up, feel motivated to do something, which lasts till about the time my feet hit the floor. Last night I went to bed at around 11pm, woke up about 2am, and I've been up since. Today's going to be a long day.
I think it would help if we experienced actual sunlight here in the Seattle area during the winter, but it's more of a general greyish-ness, so I don't get the visual cues my body's circadian rhythms are expecting as clues to sunrise/sunset cycles, so the transition from SE Asia time to Seattle time is taking longer than usual. In Singapore & Malaysia, the sun pretty much rises and sets w/in ten minutes either way of 7:30, day in-day out, 365 days a year since you're so close to the equator. Here in Seattle at this time of year, the days are still fairly short, and the nights long, so even the length of the day/night cycle is out of whack from the SE Asia version. Add to that the dark days, and it's not overly surprising that your body takes a while to synch back up.
Now I've experienced jet lag before, but not on this scale. I find myself simply falling asleep in front of the TV fairly regularly, only to wake up 45 minutes to a couple of hours later, completely out of touch (which isn't what I want to say, but I can't think of the phrase). Then I go to bed, sleep a few hours, wake up, feel motivated to do something, which lasts till about the time my feet hit the floor. Last night I went to bed at around 11pm, woke up about 2am, and I've been up since. Today's going to be a long day.
No comments:
Post a Comment