Nearly every night of our lives, we undergo a startling metamorphosis. Our brain profoundly
alters its behavior and purpose, dimming our consciousness. For a while, we become almost entirely paralyzed. We can’t even shiver. Our eyes, however, periodically dart about behind closed lids as if seeing, and the tiny muscles in our middle ear, even in silence, move as though hearing. We sometimes believe we can fly. We approach the frontiers of death. We fight wars.
But what we’re all doing is simply sleeping.
Everything we’ve learned about sleep has emphasized its importance to our mental and physical health. Our sleep-wake pattern is a central feature of human biology—an adaptation to life on a spinning planet, with its endless wheel of day and night. The imbalance between lifestyle and sun cycle has become epidemic. “It seems as if we are now living in a worldwide test of the negative consequences of sleep deprivation,” says Robert Stickgold, director of the Center for Sleep and Cognition at Harvard Medical School. The average American today sleeps less than seven hours a night, about two hours less than a century ago. This is chiefly due to the proliferation of electric lights, followed by televisions, computers, and smartphones. In our restless, floodlit society, we often think of sleep as an adversary, a state depriving us of productivity and play. Thomas Edison, who gave us light bulbs, said that “sleep is an absurdity, a bad habit.” Somehow, an 8 hour sleep schedule is requested for a normal human being to go throughout a day without any problems.
Teenagers tend to spend their nights playing video games or chatting with friends and losing more and more hours of sleep. Mornings are every parent’s nightmares. Angry teenagers that are only able to think about how awful their lives seem because they have to wake up every single day at 6 o’clock just to go to school. We may not realise how sleeping around 4 hours a night is really damaging but with all the homework we have to do and all the friends we want to hang out with, sleep can become a compromise.
A full night’s sleep now feels as rare and old-fashioned as a handwritten letter. We all seem to cut corners, guzzling coffee to slap away yawns, ignoring the intricate journey we’re designed to take each evening…it feels so normal now, almost like a reflex.
Bibliography:
Comments