So apparently I'm a morning person now...

 ...and I'm not entirely happy about it.

For some context, I actually was a morning person in my teens (shocking, I know), and even up through college, where a combination of job shifts occasionally starting at 6 AM and having at least one class at 8 or 9 AM almost every semester enforced a certain "early to bed, early to rise" ethos. Over time, after college, this gradually shifted to being more of an evening person; this was in turn partly due to jobs (like working at the Visitor Information Station or as a telescope operator) that required staying up late, but even while working a desk job for the JCMT I found that my most productive time of day was typically in late afternoon to evening, and I would usually find myself getting to bed later in the evening.

Starting grad school, with the attendant need to conform my schedule to that of the morning train into Swinburne, represented a good opportunity to readjust my schedule slightly earlier in the day, though not terrifically early; I'd usually get into Swinburne about 9:30 in the morning. However, all that gradually eroded with the pandemic and the endless centuries months of working from home. With no need (or ability) to catch the train, it was only morning meetings or events that necessitated my wakefulness, and thankfully Swinburne was pretty good about not scheduling such things earlier than 10 AM. Over the course of several months, my natural sleep cycle settled on going to bed between midnight and 1 AM, and waking up between about 8 and 9 AM. (Setting your own work hours is the [very] double-edged sword of grad student life.)

Upon getting the job offer with Gemini, I contemplated using the move to reset my schedule forward a bit again. This was partly because, due to the time difference between Hawaii (Gemini North) and Chile (Gemini South), events scheduled for both locations have to happen in the morning in Hawaii (which is afternoon in Chile). The flight from Melbourne to California was enough of a time difference that after three or four days of heavy jetlag I completely readjusted to Pacific time during the week I spent with my family. Then, upon moving to Hawaii, the jetlag from traveling west manifested as being (to me) a very early morning person, waking up at 5 or 6 AM and getting tired by 9 PM.

I was far too busy taking care of things upon my arrival to pay too much attention to my sleep schedule, and it was only some time later that it slowly dawned (no pun intended) on me that I was still waking up with the Sun and getting tired at what felt like a very early time of night. I think I've well and truly switched my chronotype to morning person at this point, and I'm not sure how to feel about it. As a former evening person, it feels like I'm now permanently jetlagged. I start getting tired after 9 PM, when before I would sometimes start creative projects (sometimes pretty hefty ones) at that time of evening due to being awake and alert and creative. Even if I'm up later than usual some night or don't have an alarm set the next day I can't really sleep in, forcing me to get to bed far too early from my point of view.

That said, I'm not entirely unhappy with it, nor am I in a huge hurry to change it. (Partly because it's not obvious to me how I would even go about doing so, since I don't understand the change in the first place.) It's useful for waking up for early morning meetings at Gemini, and I don't actually mind being awake soon after sunrise; I do enjoy the early morning feel, especially with how it's not ridiculously cold at that time of day here in Hawaii. From lockdown I got used to making breakfast at home rather than getting it somewhere on my way to the office, and this lets me enjoy a relatively leisurely breakfast before work. We'll see how it goes; perhaps old habits will reassert themselves over time and I'll shift back towards a later chronotype again, but for now I'll enjoy the post-dawn feel in the air when I wake up. A hui hou!