Three Weeks Until the Dark

Every year it ambushes me.

The first Monday in November, I walk out of my last meeting at a quarter after five and it’s already dark. Not dusky. Dark. My body thinks it’s nine o’clock. So I skip the gym, eat something beige on the couch, and scroll until I’m annoyed with myself. Do that for six weeks and by Thanksgiving I’m heavier, shorter with people, and wondering why the most important quarter of the year feels like wading through wet cement.

For a long time I thought that was a willpower problem. It isn’t. It’s a light problem. And once you see it that way, it’s one of the easiest problems you’ll fix all year.

You’ve got three weeks. Let’s use them.

Daylight saving time ends Sunday, November 1, at 2:00 a.m. The clocks fall back an hour. For a couple of weeks your mornings get brighter and your evenings collapse. By early December, a big chunk of the country is watching the sun go down before 4:30. Even in Florida you lose the long evenings that made summer feel easy.

Here’s the part most guys miss. The time change itself isn’t the villain. The sleep scientists have been pretty clear about this. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has argued for years that standard time, the one we’re about to switch back to, is the better match for human biology, because morning light is what sets your internal clock.

So November actually hands you a gift. More morning light.

And most men throw it away. They sleep through it or spend it staring at a phone in a dark kitchen. Then they sit under office lights for nine hours. Then they finish the day in front of screens until midnight. Their body never gets a clear signal about what time it is, and it responds the way any confused system does. Badly.

Here’s a number I can’t stop thinking about.

Researchers looked at more than 400,000 people in the UK Biobank and found that time spent in outdoor daylight was tied to better mood, better sleep, fewer symptoms of insomnia, and lower odds of depression. The average person in that study got about two and a half hours of daylight a day.

Now think about your average Tuesday in November. Out the door at 7:30, into the car, into the office, back into the car at 5:15 in the dark. How much real daylight did you get? Twenty minutes? Mostly through a windshield?

And no, sitting near the window at work doesn’t cover it. Typical office lighting runs a few hundred lux. An overcast morning outside runs into the thousands. A sunny one is ten times that. Your brain can tell the difference even when your eyes can’t.

You’d never let a client run a fleet of trucks on half the oil they need. That’s basically what you do to yourself every winter.

Build this over the next three weeks so it’s already running when the clocks change. Seven pieces. None of them are hard. All of them matter.

Pick a wake time and hold it seven days a week, starting now. Weekends included. Especially weekends.

When the clocks fall back, everybody talks about the “extra hour of sleep.” Don’t take it. On the morning of November 1, get up at your normal clock time. Your body will feel like it slept in an hour, which makes it the easiest early morning of the year. Guys who use that hour to sleep in spend the next week feeling jet lagged in their own house.

Ten to twenty minutes outdoors, early. Longer if it’s overcast. Walk the dog. Drink your coffee on the porch. Walk to the end of the street and back. No sunglasses, and obviously don’t stare at the sun. Just be outside with your eyes open.

Phone stays in the house. This isn’t a time to check email. This is the time you tell your body, in the only language it actually understands, that the day has started.

If you get up before sunrise, flip the order. Do your inside stuff first, then get outside as soon as it’s light.

If you train after work, the dark is about to eat your workouts. Every guy knows the move. You drive home first “just to change,” you sit down for a second, and the gym becomes tomorrow’s problem.

So for the next four months, change the slot. Morning or lunch if you can. If you can’t, put the gym bag in the car the night before and go straight from your last meeting. You never go home first. Home is where workouts go to die in November.

Look at your calendar right now. At least one call a day doesn’t need a screen. A check-in with your ops lead. A follow-up with a vendor. A catch-up with a friend. Take it walking. You’ll get daylight and steps, and you’ll be sharper on the call, because nobody does his best thinking slumped in a desk chair at 2:30 in the afternoon.

If you’re at a desk all day, get as close to a real window as you can. If you’re up and working before sunrise, or you live up north where December is basically one long overcast afternoon, look at a 10,000 lux light box for the first half hour of your workday. They’re cheap and they work. If you’ve got an eye condition or a history of bipolar disorder, talk to your doctor before using one.

The other half of the signal is darkness at night. Once the sun goes down, bring the lights down and warm them up. Smart bulbs make this automatic. Set them to shift warm and dim at sunset and stop thinking about it. Screens go down an hour before bed. Your body can’t feel like it’s night if the house looks like a car dealership.

Early darkness makes everything feel later than it is. Dinner drifts. Snacking drifts. The couch shows up at 6:30 instead of 9:00. Set a real dinner time and a real kitchen closing time and stick to them. Not because you need a diet. Because a guy who eats at 9:30 at night on a dark couch for four months is going to feel exactly how you’d expect come January.

The dark doesn’t just hit your body. It hits your work, and most of us never notice where.

Here’s what I’d do. Install Rize this week if you don’t run it already. Let it track your focus in October while you still have long afternoons. Then compare the week after November 1. Most guys find their focus falls off a cliff earlier in the day once it gets dark early. The 4:00 slump becomes a 2:30 slump.

Once you can see it, plan around it. Move your hardest thinking work to the morning, when your energy is highest and the light is on your side. Proposals, strategy, writing, the hard conversation you’ve been dodging. Push calls, admin, and inbox to the afternoon. It’s the same day and the same number of hours. You just stopped asking the worst part of the day to do the most important work.

Most guys get a mild version of the winter blahs. A little lower energy, a little less patience, a little more appetite for carbs. That’s normal, and the protocol above handles most of it.

But some men get hit harder, and they’re usually the last to notice. It’s called seasonal affective disorder, and it’s real. If you notice for a couple of weeks or more that you’ve lost interest in things you normally like, you’re sleeping a lot more and still feel wiped out, you’re pulling away from people, or everything feels heavy for no reason, don’t tough it out. Talk to your doctor. Light therapy is a standard, effective treatment. Asking for help with it is no different than getting your knee looked at.

And while you’re at it, ask your doctor to check your vitamin D at your next visit. A lot of people run low in winter. Get it tested before you start guessing at doses.

Here’s something I didn’t think about for years. My family feels the dark just as much as I do. The kids get squirrelly. Everybody gets a little shorter with each other. The evenings get long, and if nobody plans them, they turn into everyone on their own screen in a different room.

So plan them. Winter evenings can be dead couch time, or they can be the best family time of the whole year. You decide which.

Pick one or two “after dark” rituals for the house:

None of that costs real money. All of it beats staring at your phone while your kid watches his tablet three feet away.

Here’s how I’d run the next twenty days.

This week (October 12): Set your wake time and start holding it today. Start the morning light walk. Install Rize so you have a baseline.

Next week (October 19): Move your training slot. Order the light box if you need one. Set your smart bulbs or lamps to dim and warm at sunset. Pick the daily call you’ll take outside.

The week after (October 26): Sit down with your family and pick your after dark rituals. Book your physical if you haven’t had one this year. On Saturday night, October 31, set your alarm for your normal wake time.

November 1: Get up at your normal time. Get outside. Enjoy feeling like the only guy in your neighborhood who isn’t groggy.

“I’m not a morning person.”

You don’t have to be. You just have to be consistent. The wake time can be 7:00. What matters is that it’s the same every day and you get light early. A “night owl” is often just a guy who never gives his body a clear morning signal.

“I live somewhere warm. This doesn’t apply to me.”

It applies less. It doesn’t apply zero. You still lose your evenings, you still spend most of the day indoors, and the habits that drift in the dark drift here too. Ask anybody who’s lived there through a few Novembers.

“I don’t have time for this.”

The morning light is fifteen minutes. The walking call takes zero extra time because you were making the call anyway. Everything else is just moving things you already do to a better time of day. Compare that to losing the sharpest version of yourself for four months.

Three things before the weekend:

Do that and November will feel like a different month this year. Same calendar. Same sunset. Different man.

Friday we’re asking a much harder question. If you didn’t come home one Tuesday, would anybody know how to run what you built?

Refined. Relentless. Unapologetic.

Marcus