Sunlight and entropy

Three few weeks ago, my doctor let me borrow a lightbox in hopes that it would control (not cure, but temporarily manage) my sleeping problems. The idea is that it helps the body keep track of what time the day began, so that it knows when it's time to shut itself down to go to sleep.

Three weeks later, I'm sleep deprived and my house is the messiest it's ever been. The lightbox definitely worked - it just didn't work the way we had hoped.

I was skeptical of it at first, because my body seems to be pretty well aware of what time I'm getting out of bed. It's traumatic enough, anyway. The problem happens 16 hours later, when my body seems blissfully unaware of what it's supposed to do next. However, the lightbox is supposed to affect your body's production of melatonin, which then (theoretically) solves everything.

HA.

Originally, the doctor told me to start with fifteen minutes' exposure each morning. Being an ambitious sort of person, especially when the required effort is virtually nil (you sit close to the light, but you can read or watch TV), I asked if it would be okay to start with 30 minutes instead. He said sure, try it.

I tried it. One week later, after unwillingly staying awake later and later each night, I finally pulled an involuntary all-nighter, which SUCKED.

Being unable to get to sleep at a reasonable hour each night did not mean that I never got tired. It's just that I got tired at inappropriate times, like while I was at work. The sleep deprivation aggravated my ADD, and I also became very anxious. My body still had no idea when bedtime was supposed to be, in spite of my efforts to create a bedtime routine and all that other sleep hygiene junk that the normal people always recommend (because it works well for normal people).

After the all-nighter, I decided to cut back to ten minutes each morning. This was less awful than when I had been getting 30 minutes at a time - the anxiety went away and I was able to get some sleep - but otherwise, I was still worse off than when I hadn't been using the lightbox at all.

Most of the hours when I was awake were not of the highest quality, either. I was able to muster adequate alertness when I really needed it, but the rest of the time, I was pretty slow. Doing anything other than the absolute minimum (job, basic personal and household sanitation tasks, cutting postage-stamp-size yard, killing centipedes) was out of the question. I think I cooked twice. The rest of the time, it was fast food and frozen pizzas.

The three best, most productive hours of each day? 10 pm to 1 am. Nice. Meanwhile, for the last week, it was a struggle to keep my eyes open during my light exposure. (You don't have to look directly into the light, but you do have to keep your eyes open.)

I spent the last two Saturdays mostly in bed, catching up on sleep. (Saturdays had been a problem for the last few months anyway, but not this bad.) This Saturday may end up the same. That left Sunday, my one well-rested day, for whatever I had to do all week. You know it's bad when I'm almost too busy to watch a Lakers vs. Celtics game.

There's stuff all over my floor - the floor in every room, I mean - not gross stuff, just general untidiness. I took to throwing things on the floor as a reminder to myself that they needed to be properly put away later, when I was feeling more energetic and could figure out where they were supposed to go.

Today the doctor said, "let's not use the lightbox any more," and admitted that he's had only about a 50% success rate with it. Maybe we'll try it again when I'm in the middle of my late-winter slump - but I'm not going to give it a whole three weeks next time if it makes me feel worse.

It's amazing how quickly a simple tweak to your sleep-wake cycle (what little you may have) can plunge your work, body, and life into total disorder. Ironically, that's why I don't consider this experiment to have been a failure - instead, it proved that it's possible to quickly induce meaningful (if temporary) changes to something that I had believed thoroughly intractable.

Incidentally, I did suggest to the doctor that I should try the light at bedtime instead of morning. He thought it was a terrible idea, but I'm not so sure. Surely there was once an evolutionary advantage for some people to respond paradoxically to light exposure. These would have been the people who were naturals for keeping watch at night, hunting at night - or conducting nighttime attacks. Maybe bright light is our signal to call it a "night."