Article: Invest in your sleep

My friend and I had slept out on a grassy spur overlooking a beautiful valley. Apart from a few midges it had been a wonderful night; lots of fine nosh, many brews and much celebrating over the previous day’s climbing. There was quite definitely a spring in our step as we headed up the drive to the youth hostel in which the rest of our party had elected to overnight. That there was no such spring in the steps of our milling about chums was evident from several hundred metres. If they had been engaged in a game of military charades I would immediately have guessed General Rancour and Private Grumbling. My friend and I became appallingly smug as, over time and separated from the Cause of their unhappiness, individuals told us their tale. Apparently, “snoring” didn’t really do justice to the prolonged seismic disturbance they had endured since retiring to their dormitory the previous evening. Very little sleep had been achieved and their only consolation was that they had all resisted the temptation to engage in manslaughter.

Effect of sleep deprivation. Going without sleep is bad for us. It’s usually bad for other people too. Sound research into the effects of minor sleep deprivation on a large sample of people (loss of one hour’s sleep following adjustment to daylight saving time in North America) shows this. A 15% reduction in sleep coincided with a 6% increase in fatal road accidents in the four days following the time shift¹.

Without good sleep our energy levels decline, so does our creativity, motivation, patience, happiness and ability to concentrate. Sleep deprivation is a much used aid to torture. So why do we go without sleep? Sometimes we can’t help it: I read of a man who was woken by a man driving a lorry through his front room. He had difficulty getting back to sleep. Other externals such as children, noisy neighbours and warfare might prevent us from getting the sleep we need. There are some enemies of our sleep that we can do little about but many more that are entirely within our power. Chief amongst them is our attitude towards sleep.

Debt based thinking about sleep. Advice articles on sleep often start something like, “How much sleep do you need?” or “How to find out how much sleep you need:”. As if sleep is a necessary evil, something like dentistry or parents-in-law – a diversion from our main usefulness however dutifully respected. Or, because we connect sleep with laziness it becomes a guilty pleasure that we deny ourselves or feel ashamed of when we sleep longer than we’d planned. Because we treat sleep as indulgent or as a necessary evil we disconnect our time asleep from our waking hours and ask, how much time can I take / borrow from sleep to extend my fruitful wakefulness? Because this involves denial, sleep deprivation becomes a badge of manliness, We get by on as little sleep as possible; “Four hours for a man, five for a woman and six for an idiot” (Napoleon Bonaparte) and so on.

Sleep becomes simply a way of treating tiredness. We carry on doing whatever we are doing until we notice that our productivity has ceased, we’re fed up or we’ve just bounced off the central reservation armco. This is debt based thinking. It is focussing on tiredness and ensures we’re either tired or just dodging tiredness. It is asking, how much debt can I survive?

Sleep and consciousness. An alternative way of thinking about sleep? First we should appreciate sleep’s role in our consciousness. First aiders are taught to assess casualties according to the AVPU scale of consciousness: A = Alert, V = responding to voice, P = responding to pain, U = unresponsive. A finer scale might separate the A, alert people category, into a DURRR subscale, where D = dynamically creative, resourceful, patient & sociable; U = Underperforming; R = Really underperforming; R = Really, really underperforming; and R= Really, really, really underperforming. Assuming you’re alert as you read this, where would you put yourself on the DURRR scale?

The better the quality and quantity of our sleep the more conscious we are during our waking hours. Sleep recreates.

Sleep experts seem to concur that the value of sleep to our consciousness is a long-term relationship – a bit like exercise’s effect on cardiac fitness. A mile run won’t do much to improve your cardiac fitness: A mile run every day for 2 years will. A good night’s sleep will doubtless benefit me but the real benefits of sleep on my consciousness may start to tell only after several month’s of good nights’ sleep.

Many sleep researchers believe that significant numbers of people have never known enough sleep. They have never experienced full consciousness. They have got used to living on the minimum of sleep they need to function and achieve alertness by stimulants foreign (e.g. caffeine) and native (e.g. adrenaline).

“Catching up on sleep”? An occasional long sleep is apparently of limited value, especially if it involves a lie-in. Sleeping later than usual affects our body-clock and although it might feel nice at the time actually disturbs our sleep rhythm for up to four subsequent nights². A weekly lie-in might well be exacerbating not addressing our sleep deprivation.

Measuring our consciousness. What markers can we use to assess our consciousness / sleep deprivation? Whilst at university, biochemistry lectures were a good indicator for me. If I counted the number of lines of notes I’d taken before my biro first skidded off the page this would give me a good idea of how long I was managing to stay awake and therefore how sleep deprived I was. I once managed 7½ lines. Motorway driving – how many miles before we are fighting to maintain concentration? Meetings – how many agenda items before people begin to sound distant? Sermons - how many minutes before we have to manually open our eye lids after each blink? All good experiments should include a control. To establish really reliable control measurements for our chosen indicators we first need to regain full consciousness. To do so we may need to radically change our sleep habits and to do this we may have to change to an investment based way of thinking about sleep.

Investment based thinking about sleep. Instead of asking, how much sleep do I need? A better question when it comes to choosing how much and how often we should sleep is, how can I best invest in my consciousness? How can I best invest in my sleep?

Not enough room here to fully explore these questions but these might be useful aids for research:

Finally, here are various pieces of sleep advice I’ve come across. I think some are better than others.

• Sleep with the window open.
• Sleep with the window closed.
• Lie with your pancreas pointing towards the equator.
• Late to bed, early to rise makes a man knackered.
• Wind down – engage in relaxing activities for at least an hour before you dive into bed.
• Don’t eat cheese just before you go to bed.
• Manage your imagination – chew over hopes not fears.
• Count sheep or better still, remove them from your bedroom before going to bed.
• Enjoy physical exercise – but not within a couple of hours of bed time.
• You can’t make a normal duvet an electric blanket simply by wiring it to the mains.
• Manage your hydration. A drink before bed? The complaints of even the most serviceable bladder will disturb if not interrupt sleep.
• Not every chicken has a silver lining.