How Come No One Ever Talks About The National Sleep Debt??
So I just finished reading a Stanley Coren book about sleep deprivation called Sleep Thieves. He talks about how the modern culture looks down on sleep as just "laziness" and something to curtail whenever possible.
Like Edison, who invented the light bulb, and who claimed to only get four hours sleep a night. He said that anything more was just a form of gluttony. Now, thanks to Edison, we have artificial light which enables work places to stay open and people to have light in their home late at night, which encourages longer waking hours.
Apparently, people in First World nations now sleep 1 to 2 hours less a night than they used to, and it continues to decrease. University students polled in 1910 slept 9 hours a night. Now they sleep 6-7 hours a night. Pulling an "all-nighter" in considered a mark of good work ethic. Our culture admires people who cut their sleep short in order to work, or take the kids to hockey practice, or study for a test. Working late into the night to meet deadlines is a sign of dedication to the workplace. People who choose to sleep instead are seen as lazy, less dedicated.
But, Stanley Coren argues, this is like admiring people who drink and drive, or people who starve themselves to look beautiful (and yes, our society tends to do a bit of THAT, too.)
After all, he points out, practically every animal in the world sleeps. Fish sleep. Insects sleep. If sleeping is this universal, and if animals in the wild commit 10-12 hours a day to sleeping instead of hunting or protecting their young, it must be pretty important! It's more important than food - you can last for over a month without food, but you'll die after 10 days of no sleep. Your body stops regulating body temperature. You hallucinate. You suffer agonies, and eventually infections rampage through your system, killing you.
People suffering from even moderate sleep deprivation, an hour or two less a night, make more mistakes, forget things, and have slower reaction times. Driving tired is every bit as bad as driving drunk. He analyzed fatal car accident data and found that after the spring time change, when our internal clocks are running an hour behind, car accidents go up by seven percent. In the fall, when the time changes again and everyone gets an extra hour of sleep car accidents DECREASE by 7%. That's just the difference in one hour. Now imagine missing two, three hours of sleep in a night. Your chance of dying in a car crash goes up 14, 21%!
And how much sleep do we really need, anyway? Coren says that the traditional 8 hours is an underestimate. People, when left to their own devices with no clock and no deadlines, will sleep between nine and eleven hours a night, not just eight. He thinks 8 is the minimum of what you need to remain functioning properly, like eating the bare number of calories you need to keep your heart pumping. The 9th and 10th hours are your extras - the extra calories you need to run a marathon or lift boxes or prepare for a long day with no lunch tomorrow. Without those you can run a deficit even on 8 hours of sleep.
But we aren't even getting the bare minimum any more. The average person now sleeps 7 1/2 hours a night, which is two and a half hours less than what we should get and half an hour less than the bare minimum. So basically, we are all driving slightly drunk.
He claims that a lot of behaviour and attention problems in children arise from sleep deprivation. Kids need 11 or 12 hours of sleep, not just 9 or 10 like adults, but polls of school children found that they were mostly sleeping the same as their parents - 7 or 8 hours a night. Apparently behaviour psychologists who have recommended stricter bed times or naps to children with behaviour problems have found that many of the problems disappear. The parents report a sunnier disposition, better focus and generally happier kids.
He includes a list of ways to get infants and toddlers to sleep, and talks about the relation between post-natal depression in mothers and sleep deprivation from the newborn's 90 minutes sleep cycle.
He says signs of sleep deprivation in children or adults are as follows:
- Difficulty waking up in the morning - if you need to shake your seven year old awake every morning, instead of just calling up to their room, they're sleep deprived. If you need a loud alarm clock to wake you up and you have difficulty dragging yourself out of bed, you're sleep deprived.
- A feeling of drowsiness during the day, particularly after lunch - The hours of 1-4 AM and 1-4 PM are natural "dips" in our diurnal clocks. People are more likely to have accidents during these time periods. People are more likely to die during these times. The Exxon Valdese crash, the explosion of Chernobyl, and many other famous accidents happened between 1 and 4 and were caused by sleepy workers. If you are sleep deprived, you feel drowsiest during these times and are much more likely to screw up something important, or at least doze off.
- A feeling of depression or apathy, especially on work days, which tends to disappear on the weekend after a good sleep.
- Lost sense of humour - stuff just doesn't seem as funny as it used to.
- Sleeping more on weekends - if you sleep more when given the opportunity, it means that you are trying to pay off a "sleep debt".
- Forgetfulness or distraction - you forget things people have said to you, or you don't make connections quickly enough.
- Clumsiness - you have more difficulty doing simple tasks, or knock things over by mistake.
- Reliance on caffiene to "perk up" during the day.
It doesn't help that I'm a night person - I've always known that and Dr. Coren says it's inborn and can't be changed. "Larks" wake up full of energy which depletes during the day, while "owls" wake up slowly and gather steam throughout the day. I work better on afternoon and evening shifts because I can't sleep until midnight, so a later shift gives me a chance to get a good sleep AND build up steam over the day. My current job doesn't allow for either of those things. In fact society doesn't allow for such things. Sleepiness is treated by our society with a "suck it up and don't be such a baby" attitude. Would we treat someone who was starving or dehydrated that way?
Even the medical profession, which SHOULD know better, doesn't see sleep as essential. Studies have found that patients who are left to sleep through the night instead of being woken regularly for tests heal faster and fight off infections better. But they keep waking patients anyway. Even though doctors should know better than anyone how vital sleep is to the anatomy, doctors and nurses are constantly overworked. Hospital interns (think "Grey's Anatomy") are worked for 24, even 36 hours shifts at a time. Several chiefs of staff, interviewed anonymously by Dr. Coren, say that the medical community views this as a "rite of passage" and "trial by fire" to "toughen up" new doctors. But a tired doctor makes mistakes, and these mistakes cost lives. Many malpractice lawsuits are aimed at doctors who screwed something up at the end of a 24 hour shift, usually between 1-4 AM or PM. We don't want to be treated by a doctor who hasn't eaten in two weeks, or a doctor who is suffering from 10% dehydartion. So why is okay for a doctor who is suffering from 10 hours of sleep debt to examine us? If just one hour of lost sleep results in 7% higher car accident fatalities, what is the effect of 10 hours of lost sleep on a heart surgeon?
Sleep deprived people do poorer work and use their time less wisely. They are more likely to accidentally kill other people and themselves through simple mistakes. They forget things, take longer to do things. An hour or two more sleep at night can double your efficiency through the rest of the day. So why is it seen as being such a "good work ethic" to skip a couple of hours? Making yourself worse at your job is NOT good work ethic. Losing sleep in the name of work is like getting drunk in the name of work - but less fun.
The world is fooling itself when it dismisses sleep. Apparently, someone stopping in to see Edison was told that Mr. Edison was sleeping. When the visitor said he understood that Mr. Edison hardly ever slept, he was told,
"Oh, he doesn't sleep much. But he sure naps a lot."
Da Vinci is famous for his two-hours a day sleep routine. But since a human would start hallucinating and die after a couple of weeks on such a schedule, that was probably only for short stints, when he was really absorbed by something. Records of his visit to the Italian palace include a request for a very nice bed chamber for Mr. Da Vinci, "since he enjoys his rest."
When will the world stop dismissing our need for sleep, and take sleepiness seriously? When will I take my own sleepiness seriously? When will I decide to make it a priority, the way I do food and drink?