Why Are the Dark Evenings So Tiring?

It is the middle of November. You leave in the dark and come home in the dark. You have done nothing more than in September and you are noticeably more tired, vaguely low, and going to bed later than you mean to while feeling that the day never quite ended.

Some of that is the light itself, and worth saying plainly at the start: if the winter reliably flattens your mood, that is a real thing, it has a name, and it is worth taking to a doctor rather than to a book. What follows is about something else, which sits alongside it and is very much in your hands.

The day loses its edges

For most of human history the end of the working day announced itself. The light went, and that was the signal: stop, come in, eat, gather, rest. You did not have to decide. The day had a boundary and the boundary was not up for negotiation.

Two things have happened since. The light no longer decides anything, because we can simply turn more on. And in winter the light goes at four, which is far too early to be the signal, so we override it — correctly — and then have nothing else to put in its place.

The result is a day with no edge at all. Work does not end; it thins out and carries on in the background. The evening does not begin; it just gradually becomes later. And the thing that exhausts you is not the number of hours worked but the fact that you have never once, since about October, been properly off.

Anything without a boundary spreads

The book's word for this is entropy: left alone, things spread out and even themselves into a flat, low-grade sameness. A day is no exception. Contained between two clear edges it has a shape, and shape is what makes rest possible — you can only recover inside a boundary you know is holding.

Without edges, the same twenty-four hours smear. Work leaks into the evening. The evening leaks into bedtime. Bedtime leaks into the phone. None of it is intense and all of it is on, which is precisely the state that produces tiredness without the satisfaction of having been busy.

Summer hides this, because the light still does some of the work for you. November takes the prop away and shows you how much of your day's structure you were getting for free.

Making the edges yourself

If the light is not going to mark the day any more, the day has to be marked deliberately. Three edges are enough.

A morning one. Within an hour of waking, get outside or to a window for ten minutes, before the phone. Real morning light, even a grey November version of it, is far stronger than anything indoors and is the main signal your body uses to work out when the day starts and therefore when it should end.

A closing one, at a fixed time. Pick an hour — six, half past six — and close the working day at it, out loud if you live with someone. Say what finished, write down what carries over, shut the laptop and physically move away from where you work. Five minutes. The point is not productivity. The point is that something has to tell you it is over, and it is no longer the sky.

A last one, before sleep. A short pause that is not a screen. The book describes a few minutes of quiet that closes the open loops of the day; the details matter far less than the fact that the day now ends somewhere identifiable rather than trailing off.

The trap of the dark evening

The usual winter answer is to fill the evening: more television, more scrolling, more of anything that makes four hours of darkness pass. It is understandable and it is the one thing guaranteed to keep you tired, because filling is not resting. An evening spent taking in a constant stream of other people's noise costs energy, just gently enough that you do not notice the bill until bedtime.

A November evening with one hour in it that is genuinely quiet — no input, no screen — does more for the tiredness than an extra hour in bed at the other end. Winter is the only season that hands you the time for this. It is the compensation on offer for the dark.

Try this

For the next fortnight, pick your closing hour and keep it. Ten minutes of outside light in the morning, laptop shut at the same time each evening, and one screen-free half hour before bed. Change nothing else about your workload and see what happens to the tiredness by the end of the second week.

This essay draws on Chapter 10 of The Inward Singularity, "The Daily Routine", and Chapter 1, "Why You Feel Scattered", both free to read on this site.