It’s evening right now. 7:59 PM, to be exact. I have been up for the past five hours after going to bed at 11:00 PM the night before. I slept for over 12 hours and that’s just a typical, infuriating day when you have Major Depressive Disorder.
I have worked hard my entire life to take my meds and go to therapy and journal my feelings, but something as little as oversleeping is enough to make me feel worthless. I feel amazing when I can wake up at 9:00 AM and have the entire day to accomplish my goals, but days like this–days when I sleep too much or too little–make me feel like I’ll never truly have my life under control.
It’s embarrassing to admit that my irregular sleep schedule is one of my greatest insecurities. It’s hard to explain to others that my aversion to concrete plans or fear of following through has nothing to do with a lack of confidence and everything to do with sleep being the most unpredictable variable of my life. Sleep affects me so much that I have noticed two, distinct versions of myself: Morning Jo and Night Jo.
Morning Jo is a powerhouse. She’s organized, she cleans, she accomplishes all of the day’s tasks and then some. She’s social and jovial and makes small talk with ease. She is Superwoman and Spongebob all-in-one and I like to think of her as my true self. But if I sleep one hour too short? If I sleep one hour too long? If I dare to wake up at 12:00 PM instead of 11:59 AM? I become Night Jo and I hate Night Jo.
Night Jo procrastinates–hard. She’s crabby and doesn’t believe in helping humanity. She’s late to everything, she can barely remember what day it is, and her aspiration in life is to watch YouTube for hours, play video games all day, and sleep right before the sun comes up. She is the enemy of productivity and Morning Jo’s nightmare.
As much as I would like to claim that Night Jo is a fluke and the byproduct of unfortunate sleep circumstances, I’ve had to accept that both Morning Jo and Night Jo are two halves of my whole self. I’ve also learned that the massive switch in my personas is partially the result of my chronotype.
Everyone talks about knowing your love languages and attachment styles, but no one has ever said jack-sh*t to me about chronotypes. According to Psychology Today, “A chronotype is your body’s natural timing for sleeping, waking, and energy level — and it can affect everything from productivity and exercise to relationships and intimacy.” I personally don’t know the scientific validity of chronotypes and I’m too lazy to look into it at this exact moment, but from personal observation, I have noticed that my chronotype is 100% on the nose.
I took a chronotype test about two years ago or so and I got the “Bear,” which means that my energy levels are most aligned with the sun. Bears tend to feel their best in the morning, have a strong surge of exhaustion in the afternoon, and are ready to go to bed in the evening. Even though I have a bad habit of staying up too late (usually due to revenge bedtime procrastination), being at work past sun-down genuinely pisses me off. Once the day turns to night, I am in hibernation mode. I want to be in my cave, by myself, and have very little interest in expending energy.
The problem is, the two family members who raised me were both the “Wolf” chronotype, a.k.a. bonafide night owls. It wasn’t until some random day when I woke up at 9:00 AM where I felt my happiest and my strongest that I realized I may have actually been a morning person all along. I stayed up super late because that’s what my mother and grandmother did, and since no one else in my immediate family had a preference for mornings, I thought waking up past noon was normal. So I spent most of my life waking up and going to bed at times that weren’t optimized for my internal clock. Add Major Depressive Disorder onto a mismatched sleep schedule for my chronotype and we finally have an explanation as to why my life occasionally becomes an absolute disaster.
Luckily, I ended up in a career with flexible work hours, so my insomnia and oversleeping don’t impact me as dramatically as they used to. Despite my setback today, I was still able to accomplish everything on my to-do list. I forced myself to complete an at-home pilates session, I baked guava and cream cheese pastelitos, I wrote this blog post, and now I’m going to do some serious damage to my reading goal. I would say this is the first day I’ve really been able to recover from an oversleeping episode and still maintain productivity. Maybe Night Jo isn’t a total lost cause after all.
That’s all for now.
Keep going!
-Jo
Keep Going, Jo! 
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