Five a.m. is a sucker punch to the gut.
It’s cold and it’s ugly and it’s lonely.
At the same time there’s a specialness to 5 a.m. And if you’re one of the people who start their day that early you wear that specialness like a tiara, setting you apart from everyone else because you have the discipline to get up at 5 a.m. when everyone else is sleeping.
I willingly take the gut punch every morning. So does the rest of the family. We have to in order to get to work, the gym, water polo practice, and whatever else needs to be done when you know there aren’t going to be enough hours in the day.
Therefore our morning starts with a caucophany of grunts and groans. First from my husband as he hits the snooze, then me as my feet hit the ground. Then my son as I wake him for practice. Then my other two boys groan as they cover their heads to shut out all of our racket—they get an extra hour of sleep.
There is one big difference between the achy groans of the adults in our house as we fight off the effects of age, and the teens who are fighting off the grip of sleep. Recent research shows that teens not only don’t want to wake up early, but they have a solid legitimate excuse. Which makes me want to just wake my teens up at 1 a.m. and smack them in the shoulder without explanation. And I would totally do that except for the fact that it would cause them to wake from their angelic sleep and angrily question me with a snarl so mean I’d be afraid they were about to cast a spell.
This research—that I found on the interwebs, so it must be credible—by a neuroscientist, sleep advocate, and hero to teens everywhere, showed that teens can’t fall asleep before 10:45 p.m. because of circadian rhythms and melatonin (and Victoria’s Secret catalogs and the internet).
Therefore they can’t rightly awaken at 7 a.m., because then they wouldn’t get the sleep they need to rejuvenate and create those magical cells that cause youthful glowing skin and those lines that the recesses of my mind remember being called abs.
On the same day I saw that article I saw another one that made my crackly joints bristle. While teens get a pass to sleep in, adults on the other hand have real reason to sleep next to a heating pad and muscle relief ointment. Men’s Health reported that people who aren’t teens also need lots of sleep, but simply because we are old, and that the rejuvenation that happens is pretty useless being that we wake up tired and sore. But at least there is scientific reason to back up all that pain.
Adult bodies suppress inflammation when we sleep, leading to worse pain when we wake up and the suppression stops. Talk about sleeping it off—and then back on.
And though I’m probably not considered “old” to anyone other than my kids—and the whole Hollywood industry—I fall into the “oh God, why?!” category of morning risers.
I recall a warning from my mom about this. When I was young my mom told me a story about when she was young. She said that she remembered staying at a relative’s house, awaking early, and seeing her relatives get out of bed and just sit there on the side of the bed as she bounded past their bedroom still in her jammies. When she told me this story she was probably my age now. She said that she always wondered as a child why they did that. Then she said, “Now I understand.”
My response to the story was, “Gee you’re old.” Of course that response was in my head. My actual audible response was more like “Oh really?” Because if I gave any response similar to how I responded in my head, my mom would’ve responded with an action that had my young self aching the next time I tried to sit in a chair.
But now I get it too.
My alarm goes off at 5 a.m., and, I wasn’t exaggerating, I wake up with a gasp, that same desperate inhalation as if someone had punched me in the gut and I was trying to catch my breath. And my body is sore. Like a rag doll run over by a semi truck.
On my best days I fling my feet over the sides of the bed, sit there for a few moments, and gingerly allow my swollen feet to touch the ground before easing my weight onto them. On my worse days I lay in bed staring bloodshot and bleary-eyed at the ceiling until my snooze button gives me permission to move. Then I painfully adjust my hips so that they align with my legs and upper torso. Once my body is aligned I grab the mattress and adjust my entire body as one entity onto my back. Then onto my opposite side, and then with a push I assist my upper body into a sitting position.
And then I put on my gym clothes and head out for an hour and a half of blissful workout time. I may wake up with sore muscles but I never said I didn’t like it.
When it comes to gym time, if there’s no pain, no gain. Sleep, however, doesn’t follow the same rules. Send Shelly some soft zzzzz at scone@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Sep 29 – Oct 6, 2016.