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| Bronze head of Hypnos, the god of sleep |
There are so many cool things to do these days. Places to go, things to experience, shows to watch
(apparently). Perhaps not as cool but we
have to work to make money to sustain our quest for being entertained. Just not enough time. Sleep becomes an impediment: we are losing a
third of the day to sack time. At least
with the eight-hours-of-sleep-a-night model.
Scrimping on sleep gains a few hours back each day but doing that can
make us irritable and put a damper on those cool things we have to go out and
experience.
I don’t like to marginalize sleep, however. For better or for worse sleep is a component
of who we are. While I also don’t like
to go back and valorize our evolution and use it to justify present graces and
deficits, I think sleep falls into a benign range. I’m not justifying war based on evolutionary
evidence that war and strife were omnipresent.
But I will look at the evolved need for a certain amount of sleep to
serve as an operational baseline for everything.
So, it is easy to consider sleep an impediment to doing
stuff while awake. But what if we look
at the awake world as an impediment to sleep?
One recent news article made me consider the latter. This article sites a
(yes) sleep historian:
"The
dominant pattern of sleep, arguably since time immemorial, was biphasic,"
Roger Ekirch, a sleep historian at Virginia Tech University and author of
"At Day's Close: Night in Times Past" (Norton 2005), told Life's
Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. "Humans slept in two
four-hour blocks, which were separated by a period of wakefulness in the middle
of the night lasting an hour or more. During this time some might stay in bed,
pray, think about their dreams, or talk with their spouses. Others might get up
and do tasks or even visit neighbors before going back to sleep."
References
to "first sleep" or "deep sleep" and "second
sleep" or "morning sleep" abound in legal depositions,
literature and other archival documents from pre-Industrial European times.
Gradually, though, during the 19th century, "language changed and
references to segmented sleep fell away," said Ekirch. "Now people
call it insomnia."
I think there is perhaps a reason that this pattern of sleep
has developed. I think there is some
utility in accepting it if for no other reason to than to avoid introducing the
concept of insomnia. The same article
mentioned that one third of Americans do regularly wake during the night. How some of us adapted? Are we seeing evolution at work and the final
one third will figure it out or come around or die out?
But the big question is this: How much does society force us
to conform even in cases where the demands of society run counter to our deep
instincts? We have our (roughly) eight
hours of allotted time for sleep but if you are to still get your eight plus an
hour or two of awake time you are looking at nine to ten hour period allotted to
rest.
Have we as an industrialized world turned our backs on not
only a sleep pattern but a way of life that has suited us historically?
Of course an individual doesn’t have to submit to these
societal demands. One might still be
part of the workaday world but just give oneself that 10 hour rest period. Or one might opt out of society. But still I like to imagine a world with
something like a 3 or 4 day workweek, working maybe six hours a day. A world where health and relaxation are
emphasized.
Some folks are perhaps smarter and have this now, which
makes you have to ask about each individual’s priorities and also make you (unfortunately)
ask about how much government should play a part in regulating some modes of
life.
Sometimes, “It’s just the way it is” isn’t really the way it
is.
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| "That's just the way it is Some things will never change That's just the way it is Ah, but don't you believe them" |
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