I bring joyous news: tonight, literally without doing a thing, you can get more sleep. You don't even have to do yoga stretches exactly 17 minutes before sleep whilst balancing an orange on your head and breathing from your toenails (this isn't a thing - I don't think - I just made that up). All you need to do it, is to make sure you're asleep before midnight and you'll gain a whole extra second of Zzzs. Yes, one second. Okay, it's not exactly life changing but in a world where we're about 5 years from all walking around with coffee IVs, every little helps, right?
This is because tonight, instead of time going from 23:59:59 straight to 00:00:00, it will turn 23:59:60 before hitting midnight. This is because the the time it takes for the Earth to rotate is slowing down. I could go into why exactly this is happening but I started reading about 'tidal bulges' and, from there, it was kind of a slippery slope. But to simplify, the moon's gravity (which affects tides) is causing the Earth to lag behind so the time correction needs to happen to keep in line with traditional time. This change could cause quite a lot of trouble to computer systems though; in 2012 when the last 'leap second' happened, Mozilla, Reddit and LinkedIn crashed.
So what should we take away from this? Well, get to bed before midnight (you know what they say: an hour before bed is worth two after), and you're in for a whole extra second of sleep. Exactly what we need in preparation for the humpday.
Although, here's hoping you don't have to go to work because the computers are all confused...
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.