One practical thing you can use, twice a month.

You leave the office at six the way you have all year. You run the same loop after work. You do the grocery run on the way home, park in the same spot, walk the same forty yards to the door.

In August all of that happened in daylight. By the middle of October, none of it does.

Richmond loses about ninety minutes of afternoon light between now and Halloween, and it goes gradually enough that almost nobody adjusts anything. Your routine is identical. Your conditions are not.

Here's what I see every year at this point in the season: people don't stop doing the things they were doing. They just start doing them a little more tensely. You walk to the car a bit faster. You keep your keys out. You cut the second loop. Nobody decides any of that — it just starts happening, and it costs you something you never agreed to pay.

Your routine didn't change. Your conditions did — and your body has been paying the difference.