The witching hour
Yes, my children, there is a witching hour.
A witching hour? Hey, do you know it’s not Halloween?
Absolutely nothing to do with Halloween, just to assure you. This witching hour, yours and mine…..
….. is biologically driven and can play havoc with our values.
Wait, wait, why don’t I know about this witching hour thing?
Actually, you’ve more than likely experienced it, countless times, but didn’t know what it was called. Now, you know.
The witching hour is a daily emotional minefield that no one, NO ONE, ever told us exists. No one! Yet, there we are, often experiencing behavioral wipeouts of our cherished values and bowing to temptations.
No, no! That can’t be true.
It is true! Let’s do a quickie treatise on the witching hour and our human biology. (No, no, really, not boring!)
Our good ‘ol’ biological constructs (commonly called human bodies) need sleep for bridging to daily restorative and cognitive functions. Voila, a restored human arises in the morning. Yay for us! This daily restoration means we arise with a relatively full tank of self-discipline. Ready to express, and model, our cherished values all over the place. Damn right!
Go, girl!
But, humans that we are…..
“We can only exert so much willpower…and make only so many decisions, before we exhaust our stores. We go on autopilot until we can replenish by the next morning.”
Autopilot?
You got it. Autopilot leads me to greater temptations and less willpower. My fuel tank of self-discipline plummets right on down to empty and autopilot takes over. For instance, the Snickers bar, hidden (from myself) in the freezer, the one I’ve been able to ignore all day, oh god, by the evening it’s probably going to be a goner. Self discipline, where are thou?
Truthiness: in conversation, my tongue becomes much sharper when I’m under the spell of the witching hour. I watch my values of kindness and connection dribbling, bit by bit, out of my emptying tank of self discipline. Followed by embarrassment and oodles of self-judgment.
Now, c’mon, what’s a human, who cares about her values, to do in the face of biologically-driven rhythms and diminishing willpower at the end of the day? I mean, swathes of embarrassment and self judgment aren’t good for me (or you.) And that Snickers…..
I’m certainly not a bad person, just an ordinary human. A normal, tired, human being, whose ability to enact her values is reduced when her self-discipline tank runs out at the end of a day.
I can’t stop the plummeting of my biological rhythms as the day progresses. Such a bummer! But I can remember those rhythms change with the diminishing of my inner fuel allotment. Do they ever!
On occasion (more occasions than I’d like) my downward self-discipline spiral doesn’t serve me, or others well. My remembrance of ill-serving others, and myself, is sometimes a corrective when I’ve plunged into the witching hour. As a last resort, I have to place a decent-sized order, for self compassion, at the end of the evening. Could be a lot worse…
So true1