Your Wake/Sleep Plan: Are You a Night-Owl, or a Morning Person?

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Now that you're retiring, you may like just fine the schedule you always kept while working -- maybe you get up at 5:30am, and when it's time to go to work, you're ready -- to go to retirement, though, not to work.

And if that's you, that's terrific. My wife is the Original Morning Person: In her ideal world, she'd be up vacuuming at 6am, mowing the lawn at 7am, and working on her photo albums by 10am.

Oy! That's not me. But it has taken me two years of retirement for this to dawn on me.

RETURNING TO MY NATURAL RHYTHM
When I was freelancing many years ago and working from home -- back in my youth -- I worked best in the afternoons and at night -- I had to unwind around 1am to hit the sack, and didn't really function until 10am.

But that was then. In the many years since, I've gotten up on weekdays anywhere from 5:30am to 7:30am, depending on the job requirements. And I've struggled -- not always successfully -- to get to bed before 11pm so I could function in the mornings.

Yet when I retired, I tried to keep to the same schedule as when I was working -- get up at 6am -- OK, make that 7am -- so I "won't waste the day."

Trouble is, I waste the mornings anyway, as I drag myself out of bed and then sit at the breakfast table, reading both newspapers and nibbling away for two hours or more. Then I'd find ways to dither away most of the rest of the morning, in a fog, only becoming functional as noon approached.

We eat at 6 or so, then we go out for the evening, or, more commonly, watch some TV until 9 or 10, then head to bed. Where I toss and turn for too long.

The "Duh!" moment came recently when I switched my watercolor-painting class from Monday mornings to Thursday evenings. It made a huge difference.

I was a slug at the Monday morning classes. Unhappily, coffee does not wake me up and stimulate me the way it does many people, so I couldn't rely on the chemical boost. So I'd zone off through the morning class, happy when it petered out near noon.

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The Thursday evening class is a whole different thing. I am awake and alert at 7pm when I arrive, and in the next two hours I actually get more done than I had in the Monday-morning three-hour class.

Well, I'm not stupid! It only took me several months of that for it to sink in. I am still a night owl! I haven't converted to a morning person by dint of getting up at 6am for thirty years! I am not asleep mornings because I'm lazy -- or, well, not only because I'm lazy. It's how I'm built!

So I've switched my schedule: Now I get up at 8am, I don't worry about wasting the mornings (I try to do things that don't require attention or brains), and I get rolling after lunch.

Then after dinner, and after TV, at 9 or 10pm, I head back to my computer or my art desk and get back to work for the next two hours!

I go to bed at midnight, and I sleep like a baby!

TIME TO CHECK YOUR PULSE
You can do the same thing. Retired, your life is now different in many ways. Figure out what your natural sleep/wake rhythm, and adjust yourself accordingly. See how that feels.

It's not all perfect. There's the Partner thing -- my wife is a morning person and I'm a night person, but she is, lucky for me, very accommodating -- she waits to vacuum until 8am, isn't that sweet?

Give it a try.