"It's quarter to 3/There's no one in the place..."

With good reason, Frankie: totally global insanity begins in 15 minutes.

Most of us are in bed when the demons hit, and we’re not singing about it.

IN THE ‘80s, when I was living and working in New York—Eastern Time Zone— my aunt in Ferndale—Pacific Time Zone—would call me as soon as she woke up in the morning. I’d be at my desk, and Kathryn, my assistant, would buzz me and say, “Auntie Hazel is on line two.”

Hazel—who was in her 80s at the time—would immediately begin with apologies, sorry to bother me at work, she feels silly about this, but she just has to ask a few “quick questions” that had obsessed her in the middle of the night.

Do you have fire alarms? Have you changed the batteries recently? Does Max wear a bike helmet? When you work late, do you use the subways? Did you ever find the key to your front door? Are you aware of toxic shock? How close are you to New Jersey?

I thought she was daft.

Then, in late ‘88, I discovered Winston Churchill’s Afternoon Nap: A Wide-Awake Inquiry Into the Human Nature of Time, by Jeremy Campbell. Did I buy it? Did it come to me free¹, like everything else in the world at that time? If I didn’t purchase that first copy, Campbell need not be nonplussed: over the years, I’ve bought and given away at least five more copies, and I’m about to buy another, because I just discovered I am once again without a copy.

(Caveat: The book is occasionally a tough slog, not because of content, but because somewhere in the publishing process at Touchstone—a now-defunct imprint of Simon & Schuster—someone forgot to assign Campbell an editor.²)

That being said, this book is near the top of my Ten Books That Changed My Life Forever.

Here’s why: In this book—and I have to go from memory, since the book is no longer on the shelf—Campbell introduces us to the 20,000 unique, timed systems that operate our body. The cycles of these symptoms range from fractions of a second to seven years.

One of those cycles is almost daily—every 23 hours. It’s the drip of our cortisol (hydrocortisone). The drip is continuous until about 3 a.m.—and then, like these devices PG&E have to control your refrigerator³, it shuts down for an hour.

Does your body notice? Cortisol is, as defined by the Cleveland Clinic, “a steroid hormone that your adrenal glands— the endocrine glands on top of your kidneys—produce and release. Cortisol…mainly helps regulate your body's response to stress [italics mine]…”.

Author Campbell is more direct, he states flatly that cortisol “has the molecular structure that keeps us sane.”⁴ Wait. In case you’re a rushed reader, let me put that in a pull quote:

Cortisol has the molecular structure that keeps us sane.

Drum roll: the sanity drug withdraws, on all of us, for an hour, every day, around 3.am.-4 a.m. Or, what Hazel calls, “the middle of the night.”

The Mamas and The Papas were right. The darkest hour is just before dawn. I was telling this to a nurse recently, and she said, “Uh-huh. We all know this. We lose a lot of patients in that hour. They don’t call it graveyard shift for nothing.”

About now, aren’t you thinking WTF? Why isn’t this one of the first things we’re taught in kindergarten? Hey, Sweetie Pie, if you wake up in the middle of the night and you’re really, really scared, just blame it on this elf we call Corty Saul. Corty’s a good little guy, except at three in the morning, when he slips out the back door and smokes a joint under the bridge. ⁵

Now you know. Awareness is all. At 3 a.m., when the dance of the demons begins and we start to struggle with doomsday scenarios of everything from nuclear war to that marinating round steak you left too long in the cooler—put the brakes on.

Tell those cortisol-free devils you’re busy right now, you’ll get back to them later— and hold tight onto that adorable little Corty Saul you’ve just crocheted.

All is well.

Sort of.

How close are you to New Jersey?

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1. In New York, even when the magazine of which you are the editor is not Vogue, and you are definitely not Anna Wintour in your thrift-shop rabbit coat, you are showered with gifts and privilege from dawn unto dusk. Remember when George H. W. Bush visited the grocery store and was amazed at barcode scanners? When I left as the editor of Savvy, I eventually had to buy a bottle of shampoo. “$15!” I said, to the cashier at Duane Reade. “How long has shampoo been $15!?” She looked at me and said, “Ever since I can remember?”

2. Everyone needs an editor. Everyone. I write. I read. I edit, sort of. I post. I return to the original post and die a thousand deaths. I fix, too late. I light a candle for reader forgiveness and move on.

3. It’s called OhmConnect. I signed up, bought a couple of the plugs (that look like props from a 1970 StarTrek episode) and let them shut me down randomly when “the grid is overloaded.” That was four months ago. It appears to have made a 10-15% decrease in my monthly PG&E bill.

4. Some people get up “in the middle of the night” when the cortisol has stopped dripping and write terrifying things on their very own, multimillion-followers-social-media site. This should be discouraged.

5. Okay, that isn’t a acceptable imagery for a kindergartner. I don’t have any kindergartner subscribers as of now.