My Biological Clock Has Been Abnormally Disrupted Lately…

——Classes on Monday and Tuesday from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., on Thursday from 1:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., on Friday from 9 a.m. to 12 noon, and the occasional or not-so-occasional Keke Forum on Friday afternoons.

At first glance, afternoon classes seem most suited to me. I can get up at noon and go straight to school; after lunch I can read for a while and then go to class, and after class I can even have dinner before coming back. Comfortable and efficient, a perfect arrangement.

But the problem lies with Friday! Nine in the morning: not exactly early, but for someone like me, for whom getting up at 10 already counts as early, getting up at eight-something is unquestionably too early. And to make matters worse, it’s precisely Wu-laoshi’s class, the one where I absolutely cannot afford to doze off.

I’m usually fine when it comes to sleeping, but once I know I need to get up early the next day, I often find it even harder to fall asleep the night before. The more I tell myself I mustn’t doze off the next day, the less I can sleep. And since I normally don’t go to bed until around 2 a.m., if I try to turn in early the night before Friday, I often end up tossing and turning for a long time, and the result is that I actually fall asleep even later.

In the end, the night before Friday often means at most a little over five hours of sleep; when it’s less, it may be only three or four hours, and at the very worst only around two hours.

Then, a new round of chaos begins. On Friday morning I attend Wu-laoshi’s class in a state of nervous alertness, but at noon there’s no way to catch up on sleep, because in the afternoon there’s often still the Keke Forum to attend. The result is that I don’t get home until evening.

The period after dinner in the evening ought to be the golden time when one is at peak alertness. Even though I was short on sleep the previous day, golden time is still golden time; I’m still quite alert, and napping is out of the question. So then there are two choices: either go to bed when I start feeling sleepy around 10 or 11; or hold out until 2, the “normal” bedtime. If I go to bed around 10, then by its very nature it is bound to be a “nap”! No matter how I turn off the computer and the lamp and draw the curtains tight, I still cannot prevent myself from waking up around 1 a.m. — because it was a nap, after all! Then, just like after a sweet afternoon nap, of course I wake up refreshed and full of energy… and then, no matter what, it will be at least around 4 a.m. before I can fall asleep again… If instead I hold out until around 2 before going to bed, the result is similar — the next day I either retaliate by sleeping until after 1 p.m., or I get up in a burst of high spirits before 10. Whether I haven’t slept enough, or have slept so much that I even miss lunch, the result is a poor state of mind the next day.

If I slept until after 1 p.m. the day before, then it will be even harder to fall asleep the night after. Often it gets pushed back to 4 or even after 6 before I can sleep, and there have been several times when I didn’t fall asleep until 7:30. The result is that I sleep later the next day, and it becomes increasingly hard to regulate. In the end, even a 2 p.m. class requires setting an alarm to be safe.

And if the day before I still haven’t slept enough, then the next day’s sleep may gradually become more normal, but my mental state will take a big hit. According to my experience, the reaction to staying up late reaches its peak the following day. Because I’m in worse shape mentally, I can hardly concentrate even when reading, and what happens quite often is that while I’m reading, I can’t help but start dozing off (note: I usually read on the reclining chair by the bed, so as soon as I set the book down I’m immediately in a sleeping posture). Then, since I often have classes in the afternoon, I generally end up dozing around 10 or 11 p.m., and the result is — yet another blissful nap!

Of course, after several days of oscillation and adjustment, the biological clock will eventually return to something like balance. And then, the next Friday arrives…

To break out of this miserable cycle, perhaps the best way is to thoroughly reset my nocturnal habits, and get up at 8 every day — wouldn’t that be great? But the problem is that there is only one Friday; on all the other days there’s no need to get up early, so setting an alarm for no reason and making life difficult for myself is honestly something I can’t quite bring myself to do. Besides, the habit of sleeping late and getting up late has long since taken root, and without any special motivation it’s really hard to resolve to change. As a second-best option, perhaps trying as much as possible to avoid “napping” in the middle of the night would also help. But the habit of reading in bed has likewise become deeply ingrained, and reading while sitting feels entirely wrong, so that’s difficult too (so I’ve only begun trying to sit up and read some light books, and it seems there still hasn’t been any obvious positive effect).