I have one thing, and one thing only that will ever completely stop me from going out, and that’s showering. Once I have showered, all other deals are off, and I am crawling into bed to stay there. I call it a nighttime ritual.
The other weekend, I turned down going out with some friends simply because I had already showered. I knew that I had wanted to go, but I still declined them anyway. This got me thinking, “Why did my showering have priority over my decision to go out with my friends?” I asked around to see if anyone else experienced similar situations.
Pre-education major Livi Fisher said, “I usually wash my make-up off and take a shower, and once I’ve done that, I am not going out. It would take too long to get ready again.”
When I asked her why that particular ritual was so important she said, “Oh, I wouldn’t go anywhere without make-up on, honestly I probably schedule my entire life around it.”
Interested, I thought that one over. In my own case, I would not be willing to leave again after having showered, because showering was important to me in terms of finishing out the evening. I like to go to bed clean – not that going out with friends would inherently make me “dirty,” but it’s the principle.
All of these actions have come to symbolize that time in the evening when we start settling down, but do they inherently cause us to start to fall asleep? Possibly the very rituals that keep us from going out are the ones that we perform because our body is subtly telling us it’s time to rest.
When psychology major Megan Ollivera finally takes out her contacts for the night, she sees it as a sign from her subconscious that she is ready for bed.
“Yes, obviously logically I could put them in again and be fine, but there is a mental war with whether I should listen to my body and stay home, or not and go out,” Ollivera said.
It would seem that it isn’t just a will of the mind that influences our affairs, but a will of the body first and foremost. Of course nighttime rituals aren’t quite so important to everyone in the same way.
Environmental science major Mark Levin said, “Yeah, I brushed my teeth, but I’d probably still go out. I mean, I can always brush them again.”
This particular comment made me curious. The logic is so true, even though we brush our teeth in the morning, we still go out through our day. So what is different at night, how does the meaning change? After pre-education major Sydney Hustler gets home from a long day, she likes to change into comfortable clothes.
“It isn’t so much appearance as the routine of being ready,” Hustler said. “At that point, my body has gone through a routine to go to sleep. Doing other things, like inviting friends over would be fine, just going out would not be good. My body has already been convinced that it’s time to go to bed.”
Listening to what the body has to say is always important. It would make sense that after going through so many hours of the day, we would exhaust the energy in our reserve. Conducting familiar actions in a familiar order could certainly trigger something in our subconscious that it will soon be time for bed. The most important thing to remember is that it isn’t only the will of the mind you should be worried about, but the will of the body first and foremost.