A Riot of Zeitgebers

Flickr image: Jun

As if toenail anomalies weren't enough, with age comes the inevitable disentrainment of our internal and external zeitgebers, and you know what that means.  My own have jumped slam off the rails since November 6th and  I despair of ever getting those suckers re-entrained.



The weather, which conservatives would have us know bears approximately the same relationship to climate as the economy does to Wall Street, has not helped one bit. I guessed something might be wonky when, around Halloween, I saw a mallard hen with five new ducklings queued up behind her on our little pond. Azaleas have bloomed all winter. The Carolina Jessamine was covered in yellow blossoms in January and jonquils are up right now. I discovered that my car needed a freon fix when the temperature here topped 78 in the last week of January. T'aint right. You can't just dick around with external zeitgebers and expect the flora and fauna, among which I count myself, to go blithely along with business as usual. There are bound to be consequences.

Which might help explain why I began "sundowning" during this sorry excuse for a winter. As the sun sagged toward the horizon before five o'clock, I noticed an increasing uneasiness, a restlessness, an agitation of the humors, as it were. There was a little vertigo, a heightened anxiety and a speedier pulse as dark came on and all for no apparent reason whatsoever. The symptoms seemed independent of activity or environment. It was alarming enough to trigger my infallible reaction to change: worry that I was losing it, fed to a fever pitch by massive internet research, which, as usual, scared me nearly into next week.

If you search on sundowning, 95% of the results will associate it exclusively with dementia and residential care for old folks, which simply can't be right. Any mother will tell you that, as suppertime approaches, her kids get wild. The little ones whine and importune and pick fights and pull the cat's tail; the teenagers growl at everyone and sulk in their rooms; it's as predictable as peas and universally known. Or take cocktail hour, which begins at dusk the world around in most cultures (where not prohibited by scripture). Or the universal tendency of humans to gather in and gaggle up at sunset, generally, and bask together before a roaring fire or a blaring television. It is definitely not just me. Besides, I have not given permission for an aged discombobulation of my cholinergic Nucleus basalist Meynert neurons, so pfffft to the very idea.

Evolutionary psychology points out that darkness, especially winter darkness, is hazardous for the vulnerable and that sleep may have evolved as an adaptation to conserve energy during periods where activity was likely to be less productive and more perilous. If I get the creepy crawlies as the sun sets, it's merely a sign of my advanced and highly evolved adaptability and it has nothing whatever to do with the fact that I'm edging closer to Medicare eligibility.

No, no, sundowning can't just be a symptom of dementia. I put the blame on entropic chaos of the stochastic process and so, I suggest, should you. As long as there's Wikipedia, Thesaurus.com, and Lancome concealer, I'm younger than Springtime.

Oh, and speaking of disentraining one's zeitgebers, we're headed for southern California for ten days--just long enough to recover from jet lag at this age--for our grandson's fifth birthday and I'm leaving the laptop at home. I should be a circadian train wreck by the time I get back. I'll be able to read your posts on my new Kindle Fire, but any responses will be short because I tend to stab at the wrong letters on that tiny digital keyboard and can't seem to get the hang of typing with my thumbs.