Our theme for the month of March is “light.”

My spouse and I have a rule in our household: no worrying past 8 pm. It’s a slightly altered version of the meme pictured above, in which a friendly Sonic advises you not to trust how you feel about your life past 9 pm. There are several versions of the meme that I’ve seen, but this is the most iconic one, at least to me.

The idea is pretty straightforward, I think. When you’ve been awake all day, and it’s getting late in the evening, it’s much easier to fall into patterns of anxiety, self-doubt, and especially an overall doomer-ism about the state of your life or even the world more broadly. It’s not as though there’s any shortage of things to worry about in the world.

But there’s a reason we’ve adjusted the language for ourselves. Just as often as my spouse and I find ourselves worrying about our life as a whole or the state of the world, we also find ourselves worrying about smaller, comparatively inconsequential aspects of the coming day or week. In both cases, the evening tends to be a time where nothing much can be done about these things—in fact, spending time thinking about them is almost invariably a counterproductive effort, accomplishing nothing and making us feel decidedly worse. Thus, the rule has been expanded to include all worrying.

I know It might seem like too easy of a shortcut. Like “Ah yes, if I’m worrying, I will simply stop worrying, and then I’m not anxious anymore.” Obviously it’s not as reliable as that. But you’d be surprised how much you can snap out of a clearly irrational thought pattern when someone else invokes the rule for you. Ironically, the absurd triteness of the rule tends to actually help lighten the mood. Oh, you’re worrying about doing a good job tomorrow at your job that you know you’re good at? Too bad, it’s 10:30 pm, shut up and keep playing Stardew Valley. Oh, you’re anxious about voter suppression in the United States? That’s totally valid, honey, it’s 7:48 so you can worry for 12 more minutes and then you have to be done.

Inevitably, come morning, the irrational worries tend to feel washed away and the more rational ones feel at least approachable. If I had to guess, the reason why this works—and the reason the rule got pushed to 8pm in our household—is because of the sun. It really is as simple as that. When the sun is out, you feel a little more capable, a little more confident. And when the sun sets and it gets dark outside, the resilience falls away a little quicker, and those anxiety spirals have a much stronger gravitational pull.

In the summer, 8 pm is a pretty safe milestone for the rule, but in the dead of Minnesota winter, the sun sets as early as 5 pm, so perhaps a better amendment to make would be ‘no worrying allowed after the sun sets,’ or maybe just ‘no worrying allowed after dusk.’ The sunlight is the part that matters, after all.

Today, we’re setting our clocks forward, displacing an hour of that sunlight from the morning into the evening instead. If, like me, you often get up for work earlier than the sun rises in the winter, this might mean that you spend a bit more time in the winter darkness before the dawn arrives. But I do enjoy being awake to watch the sun rise. If nothing else, it’s a nice reminder that the days are getting longer again, one at a time.

Philip Rienstra

Phil Rienstra (they/he) (’21) studied writing and music, and since graduating has developed an interest in labor rights and coffee. They’re an amateur chef, a perennial bandana wearer, a fledgling dungeon master, and an Enneagram 4. He lives in St. Paul with his spouse, Heidi.