The Magic Of Sleep
Like many members of my extended family and my spouse, I am a night owl. Left to my own devices without a schedule, my natural rhythm is to go to sleep around 1 am and to wake up around 9 am.
Nothing has been able to budge my native circadian rhythm. Not thirty years of a work schedule starting as early as 5 am. Not the design and judgement of a morning-biased society. Not the weird but pervasive attitude that sleep is laziness (“we’ll sleep when we’re dead!!!”). This societal bias creates, as studies show, a constant state of sleep deprivation for us night people, because it’s hard to impossible for us to go to sleep at 9 pm, and while we somehow manage to do so by midnight, we still have to get up six hours later.
To get a taste of what it would be like for morning people to exist in circadian mismatch, imagine if normal business hours for all of society were from noon to 9 pm and that not infrequently meetings could be scheduled until 10 pm. Imagine if our idioms were about evening productivity and we had more than a tinge of judgement about the lack of stamina, or possibly laziness, of people who faded in the evening.
Anyway, whether it’s from circadian mismatch or not, I have always loved sleep. Like actively love all things associated with and getting ready for sleep. The yummy feeling of “sleep pressure,” taking out the dogs for last call, the feeling of freshly laundered sheets and my head on a cool pillow. For most of my life, falling asleep has been not dissimilar from putting a computer on sleep mode. Head down, eyes closed, and out.
Feeling sheepish that my ability and enjoyment of sleep might actually be a personal flaw, I used to cover for it by joking that it was a talent that should go on my CV. Then suddenly one day last year (it was the day we found out about my mom’s diagnosis) it all changed. I had trouble falling asleep, even when experiencing an overwhelming urge to sleep. My mind was not racing or pre-occupied, it was just blankly awake. I had trouble staying asleep. Having insomnia made me completely understand people who experience it, because up until then, being able to sleep hadn’t felt like anything special. I talked to my therapist. I tried all kinds of supplements, Chinese medicine, and acupuncture (which helped quite a bit).
Putting on my healthcare provider hat, it made me think about why our bodies require sleep to function. Why would we evolve to need sleep when it puts us in a terribly vulnerable position? Why would we “waste” one-third of our existence with an “unproductive” activity when instead we could be foraging, hunting and improving our shelters 24/7? Of course, we now know that sleep isn’t an indulgence. It’s as vital a part of health as what we eat and breathe. Yes we can adapt to sleep deprivation to some degree, just like it’s possible to eat a poor diet. But eventually and sometimes immediately, the bill comes due.
As an intern, there was a particular morning when I hadn’t slept for 36 hours on top of a period of very little sleep. I went to turn left down a familiar hall. The problem was, a wall had been put up overnight. Strangely, the wall seemed to have been there for years, with scuff marks and chipped paint. After at least a full minute, it dawned on me that I was hallucinating. A left turn down the hall was possible at my medical school, and that’s where, and when, I believed myself to be. An even scarier thing happened that same year while driving, when I proudly came up with a genius idea that by keeping my eyes on the taillights of the car ahead of me on the highway, I could take short naps in between. The next memory I have is waking up the next morning at home. Many people could share way scarier stories of their experiences.
Putting on my coach hat, it made me wonder why so many of us wish that we could sleep less so we could get more done. Though most creatures sleep, we humans seem to be the only ones who intentionally deprive ourselves of it and who unintentionally experience sleep malfunction. Insomnia can be rooted in trauma or other situations that benefit from therapy or medical treatment. But in other situations, I have a hunch that it can be connected to a kind of modern fear. Many thousands of years ago we slept more in groups, and the evolution of differing circadian rhythms kept the period of vulnerability, where everybody was asleep at the same time, to a minimum. Today, most people might not actually have to fear bear attacks. Instead, fear might look like fear of missing out, fear of not getting ahead, fear of being judged. Basically, a fear of some kind of inadequacy that many people have the ability to intentionally shift to a new and healthier energy.
Nowadays, my relationship with sleep is such that the insomnia is only occasional. And I’m working on a shift, thanks to my own coach, to a different energy about early morning wake-ups. Once I’m Refreshed later this summer, my circadian rhythm will be free to cycle organically, but it’s important to me to be able make the shift by intent, not by circumstance. There are just a handful of days left of “extreme early” wake-ups left, so no time like the present, and I’m curious to see what happens.
