I've spent this year living between two clocks. I run Bed Intentions from London while most of our community wakes up in Australia, so my days start with messages sent while I was asleep and end with calls into someone else’s morning. This month, the gap moved again. Much of Australia lost an hour and the UK gained one, and on both sides of the world, people have spent their weeks tired at the wrong times, maybe hungry at the wrong times, and wide awake at 3am.
We tend to treat it as an admin problem: change the oven clock, push through, it’ll settle. But the clock change is one of the few moments in the year when the gap between two kinds of time becomes visible: the time we live by, and the time we actually live in. Living between hemispheres, I feel that gap every day. Twice a year, everyone else feels it too.
Clock time is a surprisingly recent invention.
Until the mid-nineteenth century, British towns kept their own local time, set by the sun. It took the railways to standardise it, and Parliament didn’t make Greenwich Mean Time the legal standard until 1880. Daylight saving came in 1916 as a wartime measure to save fuel. The hour we argue about every year was designed for trains, factories and war, not for bodies.
The historian E.P. Thompson described this shift as the move from “task time” to “clock time.” People stopped working by the rhythm of the day and started selling their hours.[i] It didn’t just reorganise labour. It reorganised how people felt about their own time, which became something to be spent, saved and accounted for.
We've taken that logic all the way to the bed.
Sleep is now something we schedule, score and optimise. Desire gets slotted into the calendar as “date night.” The bedroom, which used to be the one place that ran on body time, has quietly been put on the clock.
The body keeps its own time anyway. Chronobiologists use the term social jetlag for the gap between when our internal clock wants us to sleep and when our social lives and obligations make us.[ii] Most of us live with a mild version of it all year, and the clock change makes it worse overnight. Research has linked the spring transition to measurable strain on the body, including a short-term rise in heart attacks in the days after the clocks go forward.[iii] An hour is not nothing.
Desire runs on body time too.
Arousal doesn’t respond to appointments. It needs exactly what clock time works against: unhurried attention, a nervous system that feels safe enough to soften, and the sense that there’s nowhere else to be. When we’re running on social jetlag, wired at night, foggy in the morning and always slightly behind, it’s no surprise that sex starts to feel like one more thing on the list, or quietly falls off it.
This isn't an argument for throwing away your watch.
It’s an argument for noticing what the clock change reveals: our sleep and our desire were never designed to run on a timetable, and feeling “off” this week is not a failure to adapt. It’s the body reminding us that the clock was always a kind of fiction.
From London, where we’ll soon be bringing Bed Intentions to the UK, and from home in Australia: let the body lead for once. Go to bed when you’re tired, not when the app says. Let the evening be long, or let it be short. Make time in bed that has no purpose: no score, no target, nothing to achieve.
[i] Thompson, E.P. (1967). Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism. Past & Present, 38, 56–97.
[ii] Wittmann, M., Dinich, J., Merrow, M., & Roenneberg, T. (2006). Social jetlag: Misalignment of biological and social time. Chronobiology International, 23(1–2), 497–509.
[iii] Janszky, I., & Ljung, R. (2008). Shifts to and from daylight saving time and incidence of myocardial infarction. New England Journal of Medicine, 359(18), 1966–1968.
Time in bed with nowhere to be. Start with our Massage Body Jelly.
