9 Hours of Sleep, or, The Law of Unintended Consequences

On NPR yesterday morning, driving to work before thesun was up, Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac casually mentioned ThomasEdison, his electric light bulb invention, and the impact it had on sleeprhythms (NPR Writer's Almanac). Humans usedto get 9 hours of sleep before electric light came to rule our nights; now weget an average of 7.5. I am neither extreme in the owl/lark or short-sleeper/sleep-drunkcategories. But I’m approaching my third month of again “only getting 6 or sohours of sleep a night” thanks to an SAP implementation at work and the related14-hour work days that drive that lack of sleep. A light bulb (pun) went onover my groggy head as I tried to ponder the impacts of this modern invention.

For how many years have I been sleep-deprived? Well, certainly for as long as I’ve worked, andmaybe longer, since I have been an “asleep between 11 p.m. and midnight” personmost of my life. A quick calculation based solely on work scheduleconstrictions means I’ve lost hundreds of hours of sleep! At a conservativeaverage of an hour a day for every work day, that’s 260 hours a year for almost30 years … that’s 7,800 hours -- 195 weeks! And I suspect adding children to myequation would make it even worse, because I usually can at least sleep until Inaturally wake up on the weekends; parents are often robbed of that. And someprofessions we actually sleep deprive onpurpose, like doctors and nurses, and given the slowdown in mentalclarity and reaction times for people dealing in life and death decisions, thatseems more than stupid; it seems homicidal.
 

Sleep lossdoesn’t quite work like that that epic deficit of “weeks of sleep lost” – sleepcan’t be truly banked or borrowed against – but you can certainly “catch up” onsleep in the sense that the body can eventually correct its overtired state ifgiven adequate sleep. The big question seems to be “what is adequate sleep?”For those who are not “short-sleepers” (who function quite well on 4-6 hours ofsleep), it’s actually more than the eight hours we keep hearing. It is ninewhole hours, or to put it comparatively -- the length of time the “typical”workday lasts (8 am -5 pm).

Forme fatigue is a root detail of my existence and has been since I began to earna paycheck. And fatigue drives all kinds of unhappy vectors like depression andobesity. (I’m too tired to dig up those stats, so just Google it yourself ifyou doubt those correlations.) We are a walking nation – planet? – of sleepdeprived, cranky, foggy zombies. This might help explain the many upticks inroad rage, in depression, in obesity, in specific cancers (breast and prostatecome to mind). Since nurses on night shifts are twice as likely to develop breastcancer (Night Shifts + Nurses) and men with sleep problems have double the risk ofprostate cancer (Sleep Problems + Men).

Could Edisonbe the father of modern malaise and morbidity?

Before you dismiss me, consider that only a littledigging on the interwebs yields a host of additional data on sleep and itsameliorative affects, from solidifying memories to extending lives. Gettingmore sleep – “adequate” sleep – is damned difficult in the modern age, whenstores are open 24 hours, work shifts stretch 13 hours and more, and lights areon everywhere, all the time. To test the impact of “non-natural light” on hislife, one blogger detailed his experience with experimentally removingartificial light from his life for a month at a time (Nothing But Natural Light). The results should shock you.

Unless youare too sleep-deprived to react, and maybe you are.

“One thing we both noticed was a huge boostin mood — moments of unexplained, unreasonable joy would strike us at randomtimes during the day.  I’m not talking about the calm sea of serenity —I’m talking about bursts of goofy delight — the kind that’s really obnoxious tothe moody people around you.”

Did someonesay “joy?” What’s this joy he speaks of? In my current nadir of sleep loss, andfacing another two months of this, I find I cannot even process the word “joy,”much less determine a definition. He’s describing what it must feel like to be “well-rested.”Even on the short bursts of vacation I’ve taken in the past – one week stolenhere or there – I’ve never had this kind of rest in my life.

Thepros of this experiment were stunning to me: more sleep, better sleep, improvedmood. Joy. The cons were frustration at ambulating in the dark, wax drips, andless productivity. Count me in the group of folks who find those prose outweighthose cons by a metric ton!

Another recent study of sleep (Sleep Cleans the Brain) revealssleep is a critical “brain-cleaning” time, and given my family history ofAlzheimer’s, “adequate sleep” could be incredibly important to my health as Iage. It could actually help me preserve my mind, which is the seat and root ofwho I am.

Ponder that.I sure am.

Severalyears ago, I created some demoralizing metrics during another sleep-deprivedchapter in my career, where I distilled 24 hour days down to “time spent” data.

There are 168 hours in a week. (Doesn’t sound like much does it, in an era whenmany work 80 and 100 hour weeks) but that’s 24 hours x 7 days.) Of that 168hours, most average Americans spend a minimum of 55 of those hours working andcommuting to work (9 hours of work + 2 hours to dress-for andcommute-to-and-back). For those who are not number savvy, that’s one third ofyour total possible time in life, in a week’s worth of life. We give 33% of ourtotal possible time every week directly to the job and getting to/from the job.(I include the lunch hour, because few actually leave their work or workenvirons, and many don’t take a lunch at all.) If you work more than 40 hours,you’re even worse off on Time Left For. Assuming you gave yourself 7 hours to sleepeach day (not including getting ready for bed and waiting to fall asleep)--  and that’s too little by an hour forthe “recommended” guidance of 8 hours -- you’ve given 49 hours to sleep; that’s29% of your total possible time. Between work and sleep, 62% of your life everyweek has been spoken for, and you’re sleep deprived to boot. That leaves you38% of your time to devote to living a life: beyond the chores, bill paying,and obligations, what percentage is left for fun stuff, things we really wantto do, things we’ll remember fondly – for joy? At the very least we clearlyhave a fallacious impression of giving equal thirds to the big chunks of “TimeSpent For X.”

Thatcalculation depressed me before, and it depresses me again -- final score,best-case:

Work 33%
Sleep 29%
Living 38%

Sleepought to receive its fair one-third (33%) but it usually does not; that wouldmean getting 7 extra hours of sleep a week! In addition, the view gets evenworse when the metrics are sliced by-the-day: work gets the vast majority of 5out of 7 days (71%) of a week, while life and sleep gets marginalized in theremaining 29%. We likely all know these quality-of-life-and-sleep indicators,but we ignore them -- at our peril.

I’ve been grinding out the overtime at work, makinggood impressions and producing necessary work – to the tune of almost 40% ofall possible hours in my week, but on my death-bed I’m not going to give onered shit about any of that, and I may well be hastening the arrival of saiddeath-bed by caring so much about something so utterly pointless in the longarc of my life. (This is my third SAP implementation, and I remember hardly anydetails of the previous two except for the misery and sleeplessness theycaused.) I am at my desk now at times when I used to still be in bed and when Iused to eat dinner; prior to this project I was a 9-6 worker, and happily so. Ihad time to exercise in the morning; I could eat breakfast in my kitchen (notat my desk along with the rest of my daily meals). I spent less time inrush-hour commutes. I shared my dinner with loved ones. I occasionally didsomething fun during the week. I miss that life. And it’s a life that has toomuch work time in it, too!

That less-out-of-balanceschedule cannot be reclaimed yet, but beginning this week, I’m going to getmore sleep. I’m going to quit working after 12 hours or less – in fact, maybeI’ll even try to be HOME by the time 12 hours rolls around – and I’m going totry to get in bed and turn out the lightsbefore 10. If I want to read before bed, I have to head that way well inadvance of Lights Out. Edison had his unintended consequences and so have I –working too much and sleeping too little has again started sucking the marrow from my life’s bones, and I am tooold for this. Life is literally too short -- I should be giving more of my 168hours to things that restore me.

Before timeruns out.

“Fordisappearing acts, it's hard to beat what happens to the eight hours supposedlyleft after eight of sleep and eight of work.” ~ Doug Larson (columnist)