Everyone's catchall advice about how to cope with life today follows the same lines: "Be Regular, Understand how your Bodyclocks and Trust your Instincts." Okay, you say, but everything in the whole wide world is conspiring against our trusting our instincts, trusting our bodyclocks, trusting anything at all in this universe.
As the years go by, we fall into human error and out of sync with the universe biorhythm. The problem is compounded by the fact that we can't stop the heartbeat of the universe. But we can try to get back into step with it. For, like it or not, you are on your own when it comes to fixing your bodyclock—you are either a morning butterfly or a night moth.
Morning persons are beloved of parents as well as homemakers. "Early to bed and early to rise/Makes you healthy, wealthy and wise" is their anthem, perhaps boring to the extreme but certainly the best for health. Morning persons are introverts by nature. Their lives are said to be functional and conservative. You won't find adventures here.
In many societies, a night person is considered dark and unfathomable. Dracula wore night like a cape around his shoulders, Mary Shelley allegedly wrote her novel Frankensteinby the light of a candle of whale tallow. Most Greco-Roman tragedies reached their crescendo at night. Almost all aesthetes—artists, thespians, the whole creative zoo, in fact confess that they work best after dark. Serial killers, sociopaths, politicians and vampires are creatures of the night. Most wars all down human history began after eight p.m.
In contrast, most wars down human history were concluded at mid morning. Florence Nightingale did most of her rounds and saving lives by the light of the sun, not as legend would have us believe—by her trademark lantern. The one way you can discover which part of the day is your natural ambiance is by marking, on a scale of 1-10, your temperature every four hours and alertness levels every hour. Morning people, whose temperature begins to plummet before 8 pm, are anatomically inflexible, reaching a body temperature and alertness peak on the dot in the early afternoon. Night people are more adaptable and also to conquer the demands of the body. We tend to fall asleep when our body temperature is on the decline and wake up when it begins is mercurial escalation. What is good for us is that neither category is fanatical about its identity; the truth is that the difference between morning and night people is never more than two hours. But your body knows the subtle difference; which is why it is always safer to take second or even third opinions—at different times of the day when it comes to measuring your blood pressure. Here's another mystery demystified: Why are Monday mornings called 'blue Mondays", Simple: over weekends, many of us tend to splurge on pleasure—saying up late, falling out of step with our inner rhythms, leading to a disruption of our sleep-cycle. Waking up on Monday Mornings thus entails getting up in the middle of our sleep-cycle, an incompleteness that dogs us throughout the day, rendering us lethargic, irascible, physically challenged and generally mean minded.
Only senior military officers love what Monday mornings do to soldiers; they put them in a frame of mind where they are courageous, to the point of being foolhardy. The wily Napoleon, in fact, is said to have noted that even if he had a ragtag, unruly army and if every day were a blue Monday, he could win any war, anytime, anywhere. As for that biggest bogeyman and mass murderer of the second half of the 20th century, stress,the main culprit is the desynchronization—read "messing up"—of our daily life cycle.
