On sleep, sunlight and new discoveries
As I mentioned in my previous post, for this challenge I decided to introduce a change in my sleeping routine, trying to make the most out of sunlight in the daily hours.
The goal that I set was to go to bed at 11:30 pm and wake up at 6:45 am and to not turn on the lights until it was really necessary.
The decision to try this challenge didn’t come primarily with an intent to reduce my artificial light consumption: we have led lights in my house so it’s a little consume at the end of the day, but we have a low consume in general so it’s still something!!
The main reason that made me decide to try this change in my sleeping routine was to challenge myself into doing something that I have never done. Sleeping at 11:30 pm and waking up at 6:45 am probably sounds really easy to a lot of people, but I have always gone to bed late (1am/2am) and the time I wake up varies from what I must do, going from 7:30 am if I have lessons to 8 am or 9 am if I don’t.
I also realized that going to bed earlier in the evening would have had positive collateral effects:
I am used to watching Netflix or Disney + before going to bed and I also have an addiction to asmr videos before going to sleep, but having decided to sleep at 11:30 pm wouldn’t have led much space for these activities, so I decided to give them up.
I tried this challenge from the 7th of October to the 18th and I was able to follow it 10 days out of 14, this is because I am used to working at night and on delivery days it was harder to follow the challenge.
Here I will write the strategies that I adopted for avoiding turning on the lights unless necessary:
· I decided to wake up at 6:45 am so that I could also enjoy the rising light of the morning dawn, but of course this light was not enough to be able to do activities inside my home without turning the lights on. I am very lucky to have a balcony, so I decided that, unless I was in a rush to get at university on time, I would have enjoyed my time on the balcony, where there was enough light to have breakfast and start the morning slowly, until there was also enough light inside the house.
· I decided to adapt this strategy also at sunset, moving my activities on the balcony until it was so dark that I needed to turn on the lights.
These are the main considerations that I was able to draw during these days:
· It was very interesting to be able to experience how everyday the time of sunrise would change a little bit, it’s such a simple and obvious concept, but I had never had the chance to focus on this. In the timespan of my challenge the time of sunrise changed by 10 minutes. On the 7th it was at 7:30 and the 18th at 7:40.
· Avoiding screen time before bed led to less battery consumption on my devices (I usually use my ipad up to 2 hours un the evening for tv series/movies etc) and consequently less charging time.
· Avoiding screen time also led to less weird dreams over the night
· I really enjoyed spending time on the balcony in the morning and at sunset, because I started to notice things in my surroundings that I had never noticed.
Touching on the last point, after a few days of the challenge, during my balcony time, I started to notice the lights that were coming from the houses in the building in front of me. That is something that I had never even focused on, but since I was so aware of the fact that I was trying not to turn on the lights if it wasn’t really necessary, the lights of other people just caught my attention.
I noticed that when I woke up at 6:45 some lights were already on, but it was 3–4 houses in all the building, while I noticed that in the afternoon a lot of people would start to turn on their lights as soon as 5:30 pm, while I was able to benefit from the light on my balcony and not turn the lights until 6:30 pm. From 5:30 to nearly midnight most of the lights are constantly on in most of the houses.
So, in comparison, there are few people that turn on the lights very early in the morning before sunrise, but a lot of people that turn on their lights 1/1:30 hours before sunset.
At this point I started thinking about the fact that in October, on the night from the 28 to the 29, the hour is going to change into the solar hour, we are going to sleep one hour more and wake up an hour later, anticipating the time of sunset of an hour. I had never asked myself too many questions on the time change that happens twice a year: I had always presumed that there were valid reasons for this to happen and I though that it was also a way of saving on energy and other consumptions by adjusting our lifestyle to the sun.
But after paying attention to the actions of other people, it didn’t make that much sense anymore and I was so curious about this that I started to research a bit and was very surprised by what I found.
I discovered that there has been a lot of discussion around this topic, that in 2018 the European Parliament approved the abolition of the obligation to change hours twice a year even though Italy continues to do so and that there are studies that demonstrate the negative impact on energy consumption of moving the clock two times per year. The platform Change.org had opened a petition to ask to maintain the legal hour all year long and apparently the positive impact would be very big on physical and mental health but also on the economy, on environment and on energy consumption, since in the afternoon a lot of activities take place and having one less hour of sun has a big impact.
It is calculated that if we would keep the legal hour all year the emission of CO2 would drop of 200.000 tons a year and Terna has calculated that in the 7 months in which we had the legal hour in 2022 we saved 420 million KWh, that equals to the average yearly consumption of 150 families. *
At this point I am not sure why Italy continues in its decision to switch to solar and legal hour twice a year.
It was very interesting though to see how a thought that was sparked by simply looking at the lights in the houses of the people that live in the building in front of me was confirmed by these articles.
This is what I enjoyed most about this energy challenge overall, it led me to think a lot about the practices and activities that are such a crystallized part of our life and routine that we never challenge them, even though we could find better ways and better options if we were just willing to look at them.
