For as long as I can remember, sleep has been culturally deprecated. A real man, a man on the go, an upwardly mobile man, doesn’t sleep much at all. As little as possible. Go to bed late, be the first one up, and get to it.
I absorbed this ethos and so did everyone else I knew. I practiced it for years, bedtime at midnight and up at 5 a.m. Off on a run. No naps, ever. Ok, maybe a “power nap” which is a 15-minute snooze, like in the military.
Never had it occurred to me that I might be massively sleep-deprived. I gradually came to figure out that sleep was the best way to shake off a cold or flu. That should have been enough of a clue that I was going about things the wrong way. If sleep heals you when you are sick, that should tell you something about its capacity to keep you well.
Time went on but it was too long before I discovered the whole key. Eight hours or more. Not for some but for everyone. That’s the key to mental clarity, physical health, a happy outlook, good judgment, and staying well. It could be more than eight hours. Could be nine or ten.
That’s not lazy. That’s smart. Your waking hours are then packed with energy, excitement, and productivity. No more struggle, no more exhausted evenings, no more spacing out in meetings.
It’s odd because I know so many people who use pharmaceuticals to get to sleep. This is due to a troubled life, an offbeat sleep schedule, or just disorientation. It might stem from ill health ironically due to sleeplessness. This creates other problems like sleepiness in the day calling forth another pharmaceutical fix.
A friend lived this way for years: a full pharma cocktail for sleeping, waking, working, and sleeping again. A pill for everything. What a picture of modern pathology!
How did we come up with this new view that sleep is for losers? In my own memory, it traces to ‘90s-era hustle culture in which future tech titans worked insane hours at low pay in order to become billionaires and high-achievers later. Sleep is for day jobs whereas the internet allows us to do the thing 24/7.
It’s true that never-ending communication with smartphones has not helped. How many people are getting up at night to check their notifications or have their sleep interrupted by lights and buzzes? It’s all so crazy and makes no sense. Just turn it off, for goodness sake!
In other words, this strange deprecation of sleep as a loser habit dates back decades. It’s long past time to shake it off and go to bed.
To be sure, looking up the history here, the ubiquity of artificial light in general threw off many natural patterns. We came to believe that we could construct our own circadian rhythms, making it light and dark whenever we wanted. We could abandon the habits of our ancestors as if they merely reflected technological limitations.
Not so but we did it anyway. We obtained new clocks in every household. The factory had times to clock-in and clock-out. We complied regardless of the sun. Then we even changed the clocks to fit industry needs. By the 1890s, real time, which was local time by the sun, was replaced with railroad time, such that what we called time was really just a construct of our own and not a deference to nature.
Then it got worse. We even pretended to build in new hours in the day with “Daylight Savings Time,” which was always a hoax.
Then came screen time and blue light to the point that our bodies no longer know what time it is, imparting a constant feeling of jet lag.
After all this manipulation and technology, the sleep problem has become a giant mess. Chronic sleep deprivation is extremely common these days.
It’s time to return to basics.
In preindustrial times, people did not sleep all in one clump of time. It was more common to speak of first and second sleep, what’s now called segmented sleep.
The first sleep came after nightfall and lasted until midnight, about 4 hours. For the next hour, people would rebuild the fire, visit by candlelight, chop wood by moonlight, grab a snack, contemplate or pray, and do things around the house as the light made possible.
Then they would go back to bed and wake again just before sunlight, another four hours for a total of eight.
Sometimes I wonder if this would be better overall. I’ve never tried it but our ancestors certainly found that this was the best way.
When St. Benedict mapped out his rule for monastic prayer in the 6th century, he was not punishing the monks. He was codifying what was common among the people in the centuries following the fall of Rome.
They divided the full day and night into eight times for sung prayer. Let’s look at how it worked.
At midnight, they had Matutinum (or Vigiliae / Vigils), the major nocturnal prayer at midlight. Then followed four hours of sleep. Next came Laudes (Lauds) at dawn or daybreak as light appeared.
Next came Prima (Prime) at the first hour, Tertia (Terce) at the third hour (9:00 a.m.), and Sexta (Sext) at the sixth hour or noon. Nona (None) came at the ninth hour (3:00 p.m.) followed by Vesperae (Vespers) at sunset (6:00 p.m.). Completorium (Compline) ended the day, following dinner and cleanup and just before retiring (7:00–9:00 p.m.) for bedtime.
A few hours later, it would start all over again.
That’s a lot of singing and praying.
This sounds crazy to us today, a life of penance. Maybe not so much. In any case, it worked for them, and they did not need pharmaceuticals nor make up fake theories that people don’t need sleep.
Sometimes I wonder if this view that we don’t need sleep comes from the movies. Long sleeping times rarely appear in cinema because it is boring. Action movies have been going for days without sleep and doing just fine.
Oh sure. It’s fantasy. We need to let go of this valorization of sleep deprivation, same as we don’t celebrate anorexia.
We thought we could outsmart nature but look at us! More miserable than ever.
Turn in early. Get up at a reasonable time. Let’s shake off the silliness and start living the right way, which means good sleep as well as alert days in which you feel genuinely rested.
