On sleep

An old school friend of mine posted online that he needs to sleep more.  When I say old school friend, I don’t mean that we’re by any means old, but my immediate thought of ‘mmmm… sleep’ made me think about just how old we are.

I was reading about sleep just recently because I find myself these days in a permanent state of needing a nap.  When I have that nap, no matter what alarms I might set to make sure it is just a nap, I wake up several hours later uttering either a torrent of expletives or a disbelieving groan that I’ve done it again.

So am I, are we, getting old?  Well yes and no.  I’m resigned enough to admit I’m getting too old to burn the candle at both ends more than once a twice a week.  I simply don’t have the energy I had even five years ago.  But I and my friends are not old.  We’re just older.  It’s that age that’s past the vast resources of energy but with still enough to somehow shoehorn into our time that an early night is a once in a blue moon thing.  It’s not yet the age where we need less sleep than we did.  That will come at the time when we have less to do with our day.  The result is feeling much aggrieved that enough sleep is a tricky thing to accomplish.

It seems like a design flaw to me that needing less sleep comes to us as we grow old and are past our prime.  Our most productive years are long gone before we can get by on a few short hours a night and forty winks in the afternoon.  Why design us that way?  I suppose it comes down to the restorative nature of sleep.  The older we get, the less demand there is for restoration.

So yes, I was reading about sleep and trying to work out how to get mine back on track.  It turns out that our natural sleep pattern is in our DNA.  We’re either owls, or larks.  I’m an owl.  Loosely translated, that means if you want a reasonable response from me leave it till after 11am.  Owls have the most flexible pattern.  It’s easy for us to stay up all night.  Ask a morning person, a lark, to do that and you’ll soon see the bags under the eyes.  Ask an owl and we’ll manage to get through a full 24 hours with relative ease.

Finally I understood why this distraction and that involvement, in my case usually one or more creative projects at once, so quickly lead me into a nocturnal lifestyle.  Because my owlish DNA lets me disregard bedtime and disrespect the alarm clock, it’s not a massive leap to completely reverse polarity and not see the light of day for weeks at a time.  The problem is that sooner or later I need 7.5 to 9 hours of sleep just like everyone else and by that point I’m in deficit so I still wake up tired.

The experts say to get on track, choose a set bedtime then sleep until you wake naturally.  After a few days of waking earlier and earlier, you should be back on track with a consistent pattern.  So far I’m anywhere from 9 to 11 hours.  That’s a big chunk gone from 24.  When I get back to full time work, to be sure I wake up in time, I’ll be getting home from the office, eating and going to bed.  To be up for 6.30 if I settle to 11 hour sleep patterns, it will be bed by 7.30 and sometimes, when traffic is heavy, I don’t get home until 6.30.  Where does my life fit in to all that?  When do I run the house, see my friends, wash my hair?!

The experts, it would seem, recommend discovering a natural sleep pattern that can in no way fit in with the every day life of someone my age.  Yet I feel a pang of loss at the thought that until I retire or win the lottery, whichever comes first, I can never have enough sleep.  No wonder manufacturers of eye creams and energy drinks are so smugly comfortable that their business is assured.  I bet they sleep just fine!