I’ve had it in my head that I am a poor sleeper. And all the facts appear to support my belief. I rarely have more than 7 hours sleep in a night. I like to nap in the middle of the day on weekends, and am late to rise on Saturday and Sunday mornings. During the week I go to bed after midnight because I suffer from revenge bedtime procrastination. And if my wife ever asks me how I’m feeling, the answer is inevitably, ‘tired’. And when I tell her I’m tired, she rolls her eyes.
She’ll be around shortly to wish me good night, and to advise me not to go to bed too late. She does this every night.
In fact, I am so troubled by my sleep, that I asked for an Oura ring for Christmas last year. This ring tells me how well rested I am, how prepared I am for my day ahead, a how active I should be each day and myriad other facts about myself I wasn’t aware of. At first I thought this ring would help me address my sleep issues, but it hasn’t. Instead it tells me that I’m well rested and that I should go to the gym, grab the bull by the horns, seize the day and fucking dominate.
And as I get out of bed with a mild daylight headache, my sleep eye-mask (another item I bought to improve my damaged sleep) keeping my forehead warm and an internal voice telling me that I could sleep for at least another 4 to 5 days, I struggle to understand what the fuck is wrong with this bloody ring.
Why we sleep – the book
Matthew Walker wrote a book called Why we Sleep. I haven’t read the book, but I heard so much about it that it is very possible that I’m the only human left on the planet who hasn’t. Instead, I’ve listened and watched almost everything Matt Walker has to say on the topic of sleep. Matt claims that we’re in a sleep deprivation epidemic. I wondered if this issue had ever been officially recognised as an epidemic. So, I did some research. And it does appear that the Centre for Disease Control has at one point declared sleep deprivation an epidemic in the US. That said, I’m not sure if they have subsequently un-declared lack of sleep an epidemic as the page on their website where they were they’d apparently made this declaration no longer seems to exist. Maybe, thanks to COVID, everyone’s enjoying more sleep – epidemic averted?
The reason I bring up Matt’s book and his talks is that they reinforced what I believed about my sleep – that I wasn’t doing it right. But not only that. He took it one step further. In all his interviews and talks he repeats what’s going to happen to me if I continue undermining my sleep requirements. In a nutshell, I will shorten my life, probably get cancer, possibly suffer from dementia, and end up with smaller testicles than a man who gets the requisite 8 hours sleep a night.
And the idea of dementia scares the crap out of me. Dementia runs in my family. I’ve seen first hand the pain and fear it causes the sufferers and the people who love them. It is a brutal and cruel disease. So, when the experts talk about sleep, I listen.
My sleep study
9 years ago I signed up to participate in a sleep study at the Woolcock Institute of Medical Research. I arrived after a stressful day at work. It was a Thursday night and my wife was at home with our 9 month old baby. I mention my daughter because, if I’d had half a brain, I probably could have worked out that a new baby isn’t the most effective sleep enhancer, and that could explain my tiredness. But I’m not that smart, and I’m stubborn and I knew I had a sleep problem. I just needed to prove it.
I get to the clinic. With me I have a small overnight bag holding my toothbrush, pyjamas, a change of clothes and a hairbrush; back then I still had hair. I fill in some forms after which I’m shown to my room. The room is windowless and austere, with sockets and jacks peppering the wall next to the single bed to welcome electrodes, wires and tubes. If Elon Musk ever started a monastery, I suspect the rooms would look like this. It has an en suite bathroom, and I remember a two-way mirror at one end, but can’t be sure.
Anyway, they tell me I can go and have something to eat, I just have to be back before 9pm. I walk down the road, have a really good pizza. I just went onto Google Maps to see if the pizza place is still there. Street view says ‘no’. It was a long time ago. I wonder what the average lifespan for a pizza joint is?
I get back to my room, wash up and slip into my pyjamas. A researcher comes into my room, informs me that he’s going to start wiring me up, and then does this to me:
I have probes all over my head. There are wires everywhere and I’m happy. With all this tech glued to my body, surely now we’ll get a result and I’ll finally know what’s wrong with my sleep. The researcher leaves. I open my laptop and do some work in my room, just to get a good dose of blue light, so that the broken-ness of my sleep is definitive and incontrovertible. And I finally go to bed at around 11 and enjoy one of the worst nights sleep of my life. The probes on my head feel like I’m sprouting horns and the wires that lead from me to what looks like a lie detector unit next to my bed stop me from rolling over at night. I dream that I’m caught in a gigantic spider web as I metamorphose into a goat.
The next morning I awakened (I’m being polite, I was already awake) by another researcher. She removes all the probes while I try not to breath, it’s only polite that I spare her my noxious morning-breath. I find myself wondering if the other test subjects do the same.
I leave the clinic an hour later and head to work.
4 weeks after that, the clinic lets me know I sleep really efficiently, and that my results show that there are no problems with my sleep at all. I know they’ve made a mistake.
The article I read this weekend
I came across this article by Alexey Guzey over the weekend. In the article Guzey is brave enough to question and debunk a lot of the beliefs we have about sleep as well as the claims made by sleep scientists. This article then led me to another Guzey article in which he critically analyses the claims made in the first chapter of Walker’s book. For the analysis Guzey spends an inordinate amount of time researching the claims Matt Walker makes. The result is a sobering exposé into a book that appears to have an agenda to mislead people into believing that we are all sleep deprived and are toying with our lives.
Okay, so what?
Before the advent of electric light there is compelling evidence that humans had two chunks of sleep each night. The first session would last 4 hours after which people would wake up and take some time to have a snack, pray, meet with neighbours or just chat with family. Anywhere between 1 to 3 hours later they would go back to bed and sleep for another 4 hours. This is called biphasic sleep, and there is research supporting the idea that this is our most natural sleep pattern when we don’t have the inconvenience of electric lights in our homes.
In the beginning of the the book, Chaos, author, James Glieck, describes a scientist who felt that 24 hours in a day wasn’t enough. If I recall correctly, the scientist experimented with a 28 hour day. Apparently he gave up the experiment after a few months. He found being out of sync with the rest of the world didn’t work for him. And going to work at the same time as your colleagues were leaving the office is bound to be depressing.
Then there are others who also have experimented with sleep, and who went on to change their sleep patterns. Dean Karnazes, an ultra marathon runner trained himself to only sleep 4 hours a night. He gets up 4 in the morning and then runs a half-marathon to get his blood flowing. Jocko Willink, and ex-navy seal is famous for posting the time he wakes up each morning on his Instagram – 04:30. Apparently he gets by on only 5-6 hours sleep a night, and he seems to get a lot done.
My point is that there is no normal and there is no ‘right’ way of sleeping. We are all different. And what was deemed normal 200 years ago no longer applies because the world has changed.
The problem with my sleep wasn’t my sleep. It was that I had convinced myself that my sleep wasn’t normal, that I was doing myself damage. All this despite my ring and the sleep study telling me everything was fine. I was convincing myself I was tired, because that is what I should be after the amount of sleep I’d had.
So now, instead of stressing about what I should be doing, I take the time to listen to my body. I like to go to sleep when I’m bone tired. And I’ve come to know the first hour after I wake up I don’t usually feel amazing. My body takes a while to get itself going. So, I now examine how I feel an hour into my day. If I feel good, I’ve had enough sleep, regardless of how many hours I’d been in bed. If I’m feeling rundown I assume I needed more sleep, and then calculate where I can slip a 20 minute nap into my day.
Which is a long way of saying, the experts can’t advise us with any accuracy what each individual one of us needs. When it comes to what someone says in a TED talk or writes in a book, the truth is that we won’t always fit the mould of the ‘ideal specimen’ an expert or a scientist is talking about. We all need different amounts of sleep, different foods in different quantities, different levels of human connection. The list is endless. We have lost sight of the fact that the real expert, when it comes to ourselves, is us.
If anything, we need experts to teach us how to listen and hear what our bodies and minds are trying to tell us.
I’m going to bed now.