Sleep and Electricity: Tales from another world
As soon as I heard about the bodystorming exercise I went very quickly to check the bills that my roommate and I pay every two months. We share a small apartment in Milan and it’s just the two of us, so I was not expecting a huge consumption, but I was quite surprised when I realized that we consume very little electrical energy. About 2/3 kWh a day. Our bills reveal a consumption of an average of 160 kWh in 60 days!!
But analyzing the devices that we use it made sense: all our lights are Led lights, we don’t have a dryer or any other appliance that is not strictly necessary in a household and we also have a gas boiler and a gas stove, so all of this makes for our consumption to be this little.
Of course, there is room for improvement, so we set some guidelines to follow for the last weeks so that we could reduce our consumption and be more aware of our energy usage:
· Don’t let lamps and other devices plugged in, since we learned that even if they are not turned on they’re still consuming energy — we realized that we were always keeping the devices plugged in, so this is something that we will keep doing in the future
· Don’t charge devices overnight, it’s better to do it during the day so you can plug them in just for the time needed
· Start doing laundry together, instead of doing separate laundry all the time
· Reducing screen time when possible, so that devices can be charged less times; this was hard for me because I had to work on my computer and ipad, but it was a very interesting step for my roommate, because she plays a lot with her PlayStation and for this challenge she decided to reduce her playing time and substitute it with reading time!
After deciding these steps though, I kept thinking that maybe there was something more that I could do, a bigger change that I could try to introduce in my routine.
To find out what this could be, I decided to video call my mom and dad and interview them on their experience.
My mom and dad have lived a very different childhood and adolescence from what I have lived: they were born and raised in Albania during the communist dictatorship and, although they have shared a lot of stories with me, that experience and the consequent struggles that they had to face are something that I will never be able to understand. But, having acknowledged this, it’s very important to me to try to ask questions and understand as much as I can, to reconnect with a story that started way before I was born.
So, this challenge seemed like the perfect opportunity to ask more: how did mom and dad experience electricity when they were little? This is something I had never asked, and this was the perfect moment.
When we started to talk, they shared some stories and experiences that really felt like tales from another world to me.
Both of my mum’s and dad’s families lived in the countryside and energy was something not secure, something that they surely could not take for granted.
I learned that they did have little electricity, but the power cuts were very frequent. Also, nobody had a fridge at that time, which is something that I really struggle to even imagine.
Their food supply was organized in the following way: they had some vegetables that they grew in the garden and the other part was bought fresh and eaten in a couple of days, milk was bought fresh every morning and cheese was preserved in big buckets with water and salt. Meat and fish didn’t need a lot of preservation: they were sold by the government only on some days and on a specific small amount in relation to the members of the family, so it was consumed right away. Mom said that they had a room in the house which didn’t have windows and was never reached by the sun rays and usually that was where they kept their food.
Trying to live two/three weeks without the fridge would have been a nice challenge, but I share my apartment with my roommate, and unplugging the fridge was a big no for her, so I had to look for something else.
While talking about their daily activities, my dad told me that when the sun went down, in the surroundings of their house in the countryside there was absolutely no light, just total darkness, and that there was this rush to get everything done before sunset, trying to make the most out of sunlight. Dinnertime would be as soon as the sun started to go down and then, for a few hours later, if they had electricity they could use the light, otherwise they would use candles.
Of course, all of this speaks of a very different way of living that the one that I’m lucky to experience today.
When I asked them to share their experience, I was also secretly hoping that they could share some life changing trick that I could use for the challenge, but the thing that really stuck with me was a very simple concept.
When I asked them how it was possible to live with such little energy and frequent power cuts, especially at night, when everything around their houses was in total darkness, their answer was:
“We slept more. We went to bed early, few hours after sunset and woke up at sunrise.”
This simple concept started a big flow of thoughts: in modern life we are completely out of connection with nature’s cycles and our bodies’ cycle, and this shows in a lot of different areas, including sleep. It just seems logical and natural that our activities and our bodies would follow the sun’s cycle, right? The availability of constant electricity has played a big role in the way we conceive our sleep schedules nowadays. We sleep later because we have the possibility to do everything we would do with the light of the sun using artificial light. I started researching and I found some interesting articles among which this one:
How much of a privilege is it to be able to have a messed up sleeping schedule? I have had one for as long as I can remember. Right now, I usually go to bed at 1am/2am and wake up at 7 if I have classes or at 8/9 if I don’t. This has been going on since I was 14. I’m very far from following the sun’s cycle.
This seemed like a very interesting challenge and a change that I could implement in my routine.
I asked my mom and dad about their sleeping schedules, and they told me that in autumn they would go to bed around 9/10 pm and wake up at 6:30/7.
Here in Milan, at this moment, the sunset happens at around 6:30/7 pm and the sun rises at around 7:30. Of course I could not sleep 12 hours, but I tried to change my sleep schedule by going to bed at 11:30 pm and waking up at 6:45 am, to benefit also from the light of the morning dusk.
In the next post I will share how the challenge went and the reflections I have made during it!
