Sleep

A human being has very few basic functions. Some, like breathing and circulating blood, take place unconsciously. The main conscious ones are eating and drinking, urinating and defecating, having sex, giving birth and nurturing young, and sleeping. The one of these that we understand least well, yet have changed the most, is sleeping.

We can impact on our basic functions on a micro level and a macro level. The micro level concerns our personal choices, while the macro level concerns the combined impact of all those personal choices on the environment. Increasingly, we understand the macro level quite well, and, albeit with stumbles and perhaps too slowly, start to act to address the imbalances. That is the root of environmental policy.

For eating and drinking, there is also much research at micro level. Scarcely a day goes by without new findings about diet, often contradictory. The generic advice of “eat, not too much, mainly plants” may still be the best science available. Diets have changed, and while lives have become more sedentary and indulgent, most of us have reasonable information and choices available to us in order to forge our own path to health or ill health.

Sleep is different. There has been less research into it, so that science still struggles to even understand its basic purpose. And there is less focus on sleep in teems of advice and products available. The obvious reason for that is money. Few firms get richer by encouraging us to sleep more or more effectively. Behind every diet are firms trying to make money from us. If we sleep more, most firms will earn less, because we won’t be consuming their products while we are not conscious.

That is one good reason to tune into sleep more than diet. It also stands to reason. Evolution has led us to devote a third of our lives to being unconscious. It has done the same to most other creatures. There must be a reason for this. Sleep must be important to our health.

And wow, have we been cavalier about sleep. We are reminded of this every time we view a historical series such us Wolf Hall or Poldark. Many scenes are shot in partial light, supported only by candles. That is because candles were the only light form available. People got up when it got light and they could see to work in the fields, and when it got dark they went to sleep, because doing anything else was quite difficult.

That changed less than two hundred years ago with the invention of electricity. We have electrified the night, and now we use more and more of the night to do things other than sleeping. First, we undertook more activities within the home, then we changed our work patterns, devoting more of our day to travel and leisure, all at the expense of sleep. Nowadays, leisure often involves looking at screens, which inhibits sleep even after we stop viewing.

This is the background for an excellent article about sleep in the Guardian Weekly of October 13^th, profiling a global sleep expert called Matthew Walker. Walker makes a series of great points, adding up to a plea to take sleep as seriously as anything else in our lives.

Most convincingly, there is mounting evidence linking adequate sleep to longevity and to the absence of diseases like various cancers and Alzheimer’s. It stands to reason: evolution must have given us sleep for a purpose, even if we aren’t fully clear what that is yet or exactly how it works.

But Walker and others are making progress even on these conundrums. There is an emerging consensus that sleep comes in packets lasting about an hour and a half, and that the final few minutes of each packet is the time that the brain resets internal functions, much like maintaining a building. These maintenance periods ensure flawless operation while awake, and inhibit diseases and ailments from taking hold. A good night’s sleep of eight hours will include four or even five such maintenance periods, and we need all of those to stay fully healthy and protected.

So what have we done? We’ve reduced total sleep hours. We’ve pushed sleep later into the night so that we are more easily disturbed by morning light, just when we need that last maintenance cycle. We have set earlier and earlier alarms to the same effect, pretending that snoozing is as good as deep sleep. Walker predicts impending doom, and I give that thought some credibility, because the problems will build up slowly before revealing themselves at a point when it is too late, much like environmental damage.

The article made me consider my own sleep, despite the fact that I have always had the facility to get to sleep quickly. I love and value my sleep and am blessed with a lifestyle that gets enough. I read 37 tips to sleep better online. Most were consistent with Walker. A few were slightly surprising. Seemingly, each night matters and we can’t catch up for short weeknights by lying in at the weekend. And naps, which I love, are good, but cannot replace night sleep at all. In the 37 tips sex was not mentioned, so I looked that up separately and found that indeed, sex induces sleep in a very healthy way, for both men and women.

Walker believes that encouraging sleep should be a top priority of health policy, and that finding ways to improve sleep patterns would be much more cost effective than promoting diet and exercise or various pharmaceuticals. I believe him. I know that the only two times in my life that I was seriously unhealthy corresponded to times when I was sleep deprived. I always thought the causality was the other way around, and indeed it probably is a reinforcing cycle. I also note that when I get sick these days it is nearly always after plane travel. I had concluded that this was because of bugs on planes, but it is probably more because plane travel nearly always implies sleep deprivation. Think about it. How much does a lack of quality sleep impact your life?

I would love to see more research into this topic. When living close to the arctic circle, I found myself sleeping eleven hours per night during the winter and six during the summer – what long term effects would that have? Are there health differences between nations with different sleeping cultures? What about places misplaced in time zones, like Spain? Are Californians more healthy than New Yorkers because we sit up half the night watching prime time sports? There must be a wealth of available evidence, and I would be interested in reading it.

Meanwhile, I’m grateful to the Guardian Weekly and Walker, and even to the staffer who compiled the 37 tips. Sleep matters, and it is great to be reminded of that and incentivised to do something about getting more good quality sleep. And now, once I’ve posted this, I’ll head off for a well-deserved nap.