The power of sleep
I make no apology for beginning this post with three quotations:
“Life is a sexually-transmitted disease and the mortality rate 100%” [R.D. Laing]; “I love sleep. My life has a tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?” [Ernest Hemingway]; and “Early to bed and early to rise probably indicates unskilled labor [sic. American spelling]” [John Ciardi].
Today’s topic is that of sleep.
Something that I have always partaken of somewhat fitfully, being a lifelong habitual ‘early to bed and early to riser’. It’s just the way I am – no psychological mumbo-jumbo about childhood traumas, parent issues, gender-identification problems or bed-wetting drama here please – and there’s nothing I could have done, or would have wanted to do, about it. Just as I’m left-handed and there’s nothing I could have done about that either.
The things is, in my day you just got on with it. A stark contrast, one might admit, with our now mandatory modern day politically-correct “I’m a victim and therefore require state-paid-for compensation or dispensation” culture.
If I was only able to write in longhand slightly slower than my right-handed classmates, I just had to learn to write quicker.
If I wanted to play hockey with my peers, I had to learn to play right-handed or not at all – rather than (as would happen in the 21st Century) be set up with my own team and indeed league of left-handed players, paid for by someone else of course, simply because otherwise I’d be left out … or alternatively, be left to choose the path of organising endless sinister-specialised people campaigns, in which me and my mates wore “I’m left handed and proud” T-shirts and marched up and down in Whitehall demanding special privileged status.
But to return to my topic de jour.
A book entitled Why We Sleep – The New Science Of Sleep And Dreams by Matthew Walker (Allen Lane £20 pp 360) has just been published in the UK and has been heavily reviewed over the past week.
I should have liked at this point give my readers a ‘heads up’ by linking them to the reviews contained in The Sunday Times and/or the Sunday Telegraph, but sadly neither Mr Murdoch’s media empire, nor that of the Barclay Brothers (who I believe own the Telegraph), will allow me to do so without registering with them and then paying a subscription, which I refuse to do on principle.
Please allow me therefore to offer you a link to a review of Professor Walker’s tome that I managed to find when googling the internet just now that appears on the website of – THE GUARDIAN
It at least gives you the flavour of the project at hand.
As someone who has blogged repeatedly about my sleep pattern – I basically (probably) do get a total of between five and seven hours slumber per day, but never in one go like most people.
Mostly it’s one four-hour slot and then dribs and drabs when I feel tired and can snatch them.
My habit is to wake, and get up, somewhere between midnight and 3.00am every day and then spend three to five hours on my computer before going back to bed. Or not doing so, and then instead sleeping for an hour or so in the late morning – or, alternatively, just after lunch.
I think the bottom line is that I listen to my body clock – and, if left to my own devices, sleep when I feel sleepy and stay awake when I feel awake – the consequence being, of course, that – irrespective of whether I’ve been to bed at either 7.00pm … or indeed 1.00am after an alcoholic night on the tiles … I know that I’ll be up again roughly three to four hours later without fail.
Which is one reason that, by choice, I tend to go to bed closer to 7.00pm than midnight.
At my age (66 this month) one cause of me – drunk or the opposite – having to rise in the middle of the night may, of course, be bladder or prostate issues. My father and I had lunch recently with a lively 94 year old gentleman who cheerfully admitted that he reckoned he rose for a pee between four and seven times a night, never mind popping seven pills every morning before getting out of bed in the morning.
What struck home from the reviews of Mr Walker’s book (he’s a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Berkeley, California) that I’ve seen are the scientific revelations he cites, such as:
Adults of 45 and over who sleep less than six hours per night are 200% more likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke than those who manage at least six.
On average short-sleepers also eat 300 more calories a day and add between 10 and 15 pounds of weight per annum than their full-sleeping counterparts.
Or how about this? A single night of only four hours sleep destroys 70% of all ‘natural killer cells’ in the human body’s immune system.
Professor Walker apparently states that over 800 million people in the developed world – and two in five adults in the UK – are not getting the seven to nine hours per day they actually need in bed.
He also offers the fact that budgets for anti-drowsy driving campaigns amount to just 1% of those applied to drink-driving in the UK and yet drowsiness causes more road accidents every year than alcohol and drugs combined.
All heady stuff that gets you thinking.
Mind you, the ‘money shot’ that made me sit up was Professor Walker’s assertion that males who short-sleep end up having smaller testicles.
Please excuse me – I have just felt an urgent need to get back to bed …
