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‘You might just as well say,’ added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, ‘that “I breathe when I sleep” is the same thing as “I sleep when I breathe”!’
‘It is the same thing with you,’ said the Hatter.
Dormice (which actually comprise 20 different species of nocturnal rodents) really do spend most of their time asleep, as do many other species of small mammals. The volcano mouse spends more than 17 hours a day asleep. Even the naked mole rat devotes 12 hours a day to sleep, despite the fact that it lives underground and has become so adapted to subterranean life that it has lost the power of sight.
The champion sleepers are two-toed sloths, which dedicate an average of 20 hours a day, or more than 80 per cent of their entire lives, to sleep. (Whereas three-toed sloths are much livelier, sleeping for a mere 17 hours a day.) Close behind come armadillos, opossums and some species of bats, which sleep for 18–19 hours a day. Many lizards spend more than 16 hours a day in sleep. Nearer to home, cats, rats, mice and hamsters sleep for 13–14 hours a day. Birds too can be great sleepers, although their sleep is less obvious to the casual observer because it is fragmented into short episodes. Starlings, which are fairly typical, spend a total of more than nine hours a day asleep, but this is split into many short bouts, each lasting on average only seven minutes. At the other end of the sleep spectrum lurk the wakeful grazers – cows, goats, elephants, donkeys, horses, sheep, deer and giraffes – all surviving on a meagre ration of three or four hours a day. But that is the minimum.
We humans occupy the low-to-middle ground of the zoological sleep spectrum, along with moles – or, at least, we do if we assign ourselves the proverbial eight hours a night. In reality, most people get substantially less than eight hours – a theme we shall be exploring in the next three chapters. On that same theme, it is notable that our closest biological relatives, the apes and monkeys, sleep more than us. Chimpanzees, rhesus monkeys, squirrel monkeys, vervets, patas monkeys and baboons sleep nine or ten hours a night, while the gorilla averages 12 hours. The sleepiest primate is the owl monkey, which clocks up 17 hours a day of sleep, accounting for more than 70 per cent of its life.
Do plants sleep? This is almost, but not quite, as stupid a question as it may seem. In one loose and misleading sense plants do display some behavioural characteristics of sleep. Many plants alter their shape each night, as though curling up to go to sleep. Some species furl their leaves like an umbrella, some allow their leaves to droop as if they need watering, while others, including lettuces and radishes, point their leaves vertically upwards. They all display a distinct 24-hour circadian rhythm.
Pliny the Elder noted this ‘sleep of plants’ in the first century AD. Eighteen centuries later, Charles Darwin investigated the ‘sleep of plants’ with a series of ingenious experiments in the garden of his home at Down House in Kent. Darwin was confident that the phenomenon was not true sleep. ‘Hardly any one,’ he wrote, ‘supposes that there is really any analogy between the sleep of animals and that of plants.’ As usual, Darwin was right. His experiments demonstrated that plants alter their shape at night to protect themselves from their physical environment. He found, for example, that if he left a plant outside at night, with its leaves tied up to prevent them from drooping, the result was a blackened, shrivelled and dead plant the next morning. Darwin also discovered that a plant will not ‘sleep’ if it is shaken violently.
Half asleep (#ulink_f6c0db3f-e53f-5b4f-8023-863d7fec0ad1)
And the small fowl are making melody
That sleep away the night with open eye
Geoffrey Chaucer, Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387)
Sleep is such an overriding biological imperative that evolution has found ingenious ways of enabling animals to do it in the face of formidable obstacles. Nature, it seems, will do almost anything to ensure that animals sleep.
Consider dolphins, for example. They are air-breathing mammals like us, so they must swim to the surface each time they want to take a breath. They would drown if they fell into deep sleep while deep underwater. One possible solution to this biological design conundrum would be to wake up each time a breath of air was required. However, evolution has produced a more elegant solution: only one half of the dolphin’s brain goes to sleep at a time.
Dolphins are capable of what is known as unihemispheric sleep, in which one hemisphere of the brain submerges into deep sleep while the other hemisphere remains awake. The two halves of the brain take it in turns to sleep, swapping at intervals of between one and three hours. This cerebral juggling trick enables dolphins to sleep underwater without drowning, which is just as well considering that they spend a good third of their lives asleep. Unihemispheric sleep has been recorded in several species of dolphins, porpoises and whales, including bottlenosed and Amazonian dolphins, Black Sea porpoises and white whales.
Despite the apparent convenience of being able to sleep and stay awake simultaneously, very few mammals are capable of unihemispheric sleep. The biological benefits of sleeping with only half of the brain at a time presumably outweigh the disadvantages only under unusual conditions, such as those encountered by air-breathing mammals living in the deep oceans.
Unihemispheric sleep is widespread in birds, however. They do it for a. different biological reason. Sleeping with half the brain awake and one eye open allows them to sleep while simultaneously remaining vigilant for predators. In birds, each eye exclusively feeds the visual processing areas in the opposite half of the brain: thus, all the nerve fibres coming from the right eye connect to the left hemisphere of the brain and vice versa. When a bird is in unihemispheric sleep its open eye is the one corresponding to the waking half of the brain, while the closed eye is connected to the sleeping half. If a bird feels relatively safe, it closes both eyes, and both sides of its brain go to sleep.
An experiment with mallard ducks demonstrated how unihemispheric sleep helps birds to stay safe from predators. Four ducks were placed in a row along a perch, the idea being that the ducks at either end of the row would feel more vulnerable to predators than the two in the middle. In the natural world it is generally a bad idea to be on the edge of a group if you might end up as some other animal’s dinner. As predicted, video recordings showed that the outer two birds were much more likely to sleep with one eye open than the two on the inside; their unihemispheric sleep increased by 150 per cent. The amount of unihemispheric sleep rose further when the ducks were shown frightening video images of an approaching predator.
The relationship between unihemispheric sleep and vigilance was finely controlled. The exposed birds on the ends of the row preferentially opened their outward-facing eye – the one directed towards potential danger. From time to time, a bird would turn round and switch eyes, so that the open eye was still the one facing out. Simultaneous recordings of brain activity confirmed that the brain hemisphere corresponding to the open eye was always awake, while the hemisphere corresponding to the closed eye was the one in deep sleep.
The one-eyed tactic was effective: when an attacking predator was simulated on a video screen, the birds sleeping with one eye open were able to react in a fraction of a second – far faster than if they had been in deep sleep with both eyes shut.
Humans are not capable of unihemispheric sleep, although at least one writer has played with the fantasy. Damon Runyon wrote of how he once played cards with a fading champion card player who now lacked the stamina to stay awake during marathon games of gin rummy lasting eight or ten hours. When the man lost a game after making a bad play, the punters betting on him to win clamoured to remove their bets from the next game, on the grounds that he was asleep. Then someone pointed out that the allegedly sleeping player’s eyes were open, so he must be awake. ‘The one on your side is’, retorted one of the backers, ‘but the one on the other side is closed. He is sleeping one-eye.’
Nice, not naughty (#ulink_f454c206-f464-5b51-a885-99cef8a7c075)
Like all other forms of pleasure, sleep may become a passion.
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste (1825)
Sleep is far more than just a biological necessity. It is also a neglected source of pleasure. Consider this. Activities that are biologically important for survival and reproduction tend to be enjoyable: think of sex, or eating, or drinking, or being successful. Pleasure is one of nature’s ways of ensuring that animals do enough of the right things. Whatever happened to sleep? It is clearly essential for survival, and yet for many people it is merely a maintenance activity that brings little positive enjoyment. They sleep because they have to rather than because they want to.
In some respects, sleep has acquired the dismal status that eating had in post-war Britain, where austerity and a cultural blind spot reduced the culinary arts to a joyless act of refuelling. Bland, fatty food was daily shovelled in to keep the boilers stoked, with scant attention paid to its preparation or enjoyment. Fortunately, Britain has since developed more enlightened (if not self-indulgent) attitudes to food, and recent decades have witnessed cooking and eating emerge as pleasurable activities in their own right. For some people in wealthy nations, cooking and eating have become more a form of entertainment than a biological function.
Meanwhile, sleep is mired in the cultural equivalent of a 1950s British canteen meal: an inadequate and faintly unhealthy affair, indifferently concocted and consumed with more haste than enjoyment. Too many people regard sleep as the brain’s equivalent of fast food or overboiled cabbage. If gastronomy is ‘the reasoned comprehension of everything connected with the nourishment of man’, as it was originally defined, then should we not start thinking about sleep in the same way? I hope that by the end of this book you will be pondering the gourmet delights of sleeping, napping and dreaming, and starting to savour more of their lost pleasures for yourself.
PART II Insufficiencies (#ulink_330b3f66-5320-565b-852f-411cb70abccd)
2 Sleepy People (#ulink_e05442f8-5755-5aba-af92-a246577561ed)
She looked a little worn out, a little tired, but, then again, didn’t everybody? We all look a bit tired, these days, some more than others.
William Boyd, Armadillo (1998)
Many of us in our everyday lives are getting sleep of inadequate quantity and quality, and this is bad for our mental and physical health. Lack of sleep makes us inefficient at work, dangerous behind the wheel of a car and unattractive to be with; it lowers the quality of our lives, causes accidents and makes us more vulnerable to illness. And it is unpleasant.
I am not referring here to the acute sleep deprivation that comes from occasionally staying up all night, although that is common enough in professions such as medicine, the military and politics. Rather, I am talking about the chronic sleep deprivation that accumulates as we continually stint ourselves of sleep, day in and day out, because of the conflicting demands of work and leisure, or because of a sleep disorder, or just because we do not think sleep is important. So, what are the reasons for believing that sleep deprivation is a real problem?
Are we sleep-deprived? (#ulink_d2dc7e05-d856-5dd1-a091-37a92322eef6)
Eight hours they give to sleep.
Sir Thomas More, Utopia (1551)
The evidence that chronic sleep deprivation is a common feature of contemporary life comes in several interlinked strands. We will start with perhaps the most obvious one of all: the observation that many people feel sleepy when they are awake.
Assessing the extent of daytime tiredness in society is tricky, not least because so many people have come to regard feeling tired as normal. Nonetheless, numerous scientific studies have unearthed evidence that the problem is real and widespread. For example, a 2001 poll of Americans’ sleeping habits found that 22 per cent of adults felt so sleepy during the day that it interfered with their activities. A 1994 survey found that 5 per cent of the British population were experiencing severe daytime sleepiness, while a further 15 per cent felt moderately sleepy during the day. It also found that the people suffering from daytime sleepiness were twice as likely to have a vehicle accident.
A similar picture has emerged from other countries. For instance, a recent study discovered that 10 per cent of middle-aged Finns were excessively tired and tended to fall asleep unintentionally during the day. Their sleepiness was statistically associated with an array of nasty things, including a heightened risk of traffic accidents, premature retirement, depression and anxiety. In Sweden, 9 per cent of adults were found to be suffering from daytime sleepiness, while a survey in Warsaw recorded that 21 per cent of adults felt moderately sleepy during the day. Australian researchers detected excessive daytime sleepiness in 11 per cent of adults. You get the picture. Not even the youngest and healthiest are immune. A French investigation of 58,000 army conscripts discovered that 5 per cent of these fit young men were affected by excessive daytime sleepiness and 14 per cent of them were sufficiently tired to sleep during the day.
Overall, it is safe to conclude that at least one in ten adults in the general population (you, me and the people next door) are currently affected by moderate or severe daytime sleepiness. Some scientists believe the situation is much worse, with up to one in three adults suffering from significant sleepiness. A major review undertaken by the US National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research estimated that as many as 70 million Americans – more than a quarter of the population – were suffering from sleep deprivation or some form of sleep problem, at a direct cost to the national health care bill of about 16 billion dollars a year. The Commission’s report concluded that:
A convincing body of scientific evidence and witness testimony indicates that many Americans are severely sleep-deprived and, therefore, dangerously sleepy during the day … By any measuring stick, the deaths, illness, and damage due to sleep deprivation and sleep disorders represents a substantial problem for American society.
The problem appears to have deepened over time. Objective evidence about historical changes in sleepiness is hard to find, but there is some. A standard psychological test of personality, which has been regularly administered to large numbers of Americans since the 1930s, revealed that the proportion of men who felt tired during the day was significantly higher in the 1980s than it had been in the 1930s. And the average amount of sleep American students get has fallen by more than one hour over the past three decades. We seem to be a generally wearier bunch than our forebears.
Tired people are certainly common enough in the doctor’s waiting room. Physicians frequently encounter patients complaining of feeling tired all the time. The condition even has its own acronym, TATT. Of course not everyone who feels tired all the time is suffering from a lack of sleep. Chronic fatigue can result from anaemia, diabetes, cancer, depression and a whole host of other medical disorders. The distressing condition known as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also referred to as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), is characterised by debilitating fatigue, pain in the muscles and joints, impairments in thinking and a general, horrible malaise. CFS is a distinct medical condition that cannot be attributed simply to lack of sleep. The origins of CFS remain controversial, but current theories focus on a combination of malfunctioning immune reactions and psychological factors.
CFS and other medical conditions undoubtedly account for some of the tiredness in society, but not much. The fact is that most people who feel tired during the day are just that – tired. They are tired because they have not been getting enough sleep. This explanation is so simple and so blindingly obvious that it is frequently overlooked.
Ordinary, everyday tiredness does not always require a medical explanation, but one is often sought nonetheless. ‘Exhaustion’ has become a voguish affliction of actors, pop stars and other celebrities. From time to time, a distraught and haggard celeb will flee to a clinic feeling, well, exhausted. The clinic duly subjects them to a battery of medical tests to establish whether they have diabetes, anaemia, ME or a thyroid disorder, while the media throb with stories about personal relationship problems, nervous breakdowns, exotic diets, exotic drugs, professional insecurities and emotional crises – just about everything, in fact, apart from plain tiredness. But given the long hours they are sometimes expected to work, plus the jet lag-inducing international travelling, it would be surprising if our stars of stage and screen did not occasionally feel very tired.
Another reason for believing that sleep deprivation is a common problem is that many of us get less sleep than we want or need, and considerably less than the proverbial eight hours we all supposedly aspire to. The evidence on this point is clear. For example, research found that in the 1990s young American adults were sleeping for an average of 7.3 hours a night. However, even this modest figure was inflated by weekend lie-ins: on weekday nights, Americans slept for an average of only 6.7 hours. A more recent study, which assessed the sleep patterns of middle-aged adults, found an average of only 6.2 hours. Similar conclusions have emerged from other countries. To give just a few illustrations, a survey in Poland found that adults there slept for 7.1 hours on workday nights, while Korean university students averaged 6.7 hours. When the Japanese Ministry of Health conducted a large survey they discovered that almost two thirds normally slept less than seven hours a night, and more than a quarter slept less than six hours. Worse still, half of Japanese high school students reported sleeping six hours or less on weekdays.
The research leaves little doubt that most adults in the USA, UK and other industrialised nations get substantially less than eight hours’ sleep most nights of the week, and many get less than seven. But does that matter? How much should we sleep?
The mythical inhabitants of Sir Thomas More’s idyllic island state of Utopia accorded sleep the priority it truly deserves. They slept for eight solid hours each night. Of the remaining 16 hours, work accounted for only six. (Sensible people.) The Utopians worked for three hours before noon then ate lunch; after lunch they rested for two hours, worked for another three hours then ate supper. They went to bed at about eight in the evening and slept for eight hours. The rest of each day they did as they pleased. Not quite the urban chic lifestyle, perhaps, but a refreshingly different perspective on life.
Conventional wisdom still holds that we need about eight hours of sleep a night. For most of us, however, the reality falls far short of the Utopian ideal, except perhaps at weekends and when we are on holiday. But is an average of, say, six or seven hours a night enough? Obviously, we cannot use Thomas More’s sixteenth-century fantasy as a scientific yardstick. So how do we judge the adequacy of sleep?
One approach is to ask people whether they think they are getting enough sleep. A recent study of more than twelve thousand adults did just that, and found that 20 per cent of them felt they were not getting sufficient sleep. Unsurprisingly, one of the factors most strongly associated with insufficient sleep was working long hours. Further evidence came from the Planet Project, said to be the largest opinion poll ever carried out. In 2000, an Internet-based survey was conducted with 1.26 million people in 251 countries. When asked how much sleep they needed in order to feel rested, 47 per cent of people replied eight hours or more. But when asked how much sleep they actually got, only 15 per cent reported sleeping eight hours or more, while 8 per cent said they got less than five hours a night. Many respondents reported having gone without sleep for long periods, whereas a mere 6 per cent said they had never missed a night’s sleep.
Six or seven hours of sleep a night is probably not enough for many people on a long-term basis. The experimental evidence suggests that the underlying sleep tendency for a typical healthy adult – that is, the amount of sleep they would take if completely liberated from work schedules and other constraints – is more like eight or eight and a half hours a night. This implies a shortfall of around an hour and a half each night. A shortfall of this size almost certainly matters. Restricting someone’s sleep by an hour and a half for just one night will measurably reduce their daytime alertness. The cumulative effects, when sleep is short-changed night after night, are far more pervasive. We shall be looking at the psychological and physical consequences of chronic sleep deprivation in the next two chapters.
A substantial nightly shortfall in sleep is difficult to sustain for more than five or six days in succession without sleepiness seriously impairing daytime alertness, mood and performance. This aspect of human biology might conceivably have contributed to the establishment of the seven-day week, comprising five or six days of work followed by one or two days of legitimised rest, as a standard unit of time. Most humans have been following the seven-day pattern for thousands of years. The seven-day week dates back to the pre-Biblical Sumerian and Babylonian civilisations. Right from the outset, one day of the week was deemed to be a day of rest and recreation. The Babylonians originally named their seven days after the five visible planets plus the Sun and the Moon, but the choice of seven otherwise has no objective basis in astronomy or any obvious feature of the physical environment. The Romans later adopted the seven-day week, dabbled with eight, then reverted to seven. The seven-day week appeared in the Bible, again with the inherent concept of a day of rest. According to the Biblical account of the Creation, God laboured for six days and rested on the seventh. Nowadays, people who work long hours and sleep for only six or seven hours a night really do need that extra time in bed at weekends to stave off sleep deprivation.
The thesis that many people are chronically sleep-deprived is not without its sceptics, however. Yvonne Harrison and Jim Horne at Loughborough University have argued that we all have the capacity to sleep more than we usually do, but only in the way that we can carry on eating after our physiological need for food has been satisfied. In support of their sceptical position, Harrison and Horne have cited, for example, an experiment in which healthy young adults slept for up to ten hours a night for two weeks, getting an extra hour or so of sleep each night. This additional sleep produced some improvements in their reaction times and a slight reduction in daytime sleepiness. However, there were no significant improvements in the volunteers’ subjective ratings of their own mood or sleepiness.
Scientists are paid to be sceptical, and counterblasts are an essential part of scientific debate. Nonetheless, such arguments must be set against all the other strands of evidence showing that chronic sleep deprivation is a real and widespread phenomenon. We have considered some of that evidence and there is more to come. First, though, what about you?
Are you sleep-deprived? (#ulink_5bc6e4af-67d9-577d-8861-8e93fe9ae0f7)
‘… Are you going to bed, Holmes?’
‘No: I am not tired. I have a curious constitution. I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.’
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four (1890)
There is no universal, one-size-fits-all figure for the right amount of sleep. Individuals differ considerably in their sleep requirements. The conventional standard of eight hours a night is somewhat arbitrary, though not far off the mark for most people. But the best yardstick for you is your own preferred sleep duration. You can measure this by conducting a simple, if time-consuming, experiment on yourself. You will need two weeks of complete freedom from the tyranny of work schedules and alarm clocks, which means you will probably have to wait until your next long holiday (and possibly much longer if you have small children).
What you do is this. Every night for about two weeks, go to bed at approximately the same time. Make a note of the exact time just before you turn off the light to go to sleep. Then sleep to your heart’s content until you wake spontaneously the next morning – not with the aid of an alarm clock. Note down the time when you woke up and, ideally, a more precise time for when you think you fell asleep the night before. (All being well, this should have been within 10–20 minutes of turning out the light.) Your time of waking should be when you first became fully conscious, not when you eventually stumbled out of bed. Then calculate how long you spent sleeping. The experiment will work much better if you do not roll over after waking and doze for a further hour or two before getting up.
Ignore the figures for the first few days, because you will probably be sleeping longer to compensate for your prior sleep deficit. We tend to feel sleepy on relaxing holidays and at weekends because reality has finally caught up with us; when the usual pressures and stimulation that keep us going through the working week are suddenly removed, we sleep more to catch up on the backlog. This extra sleeping is only transitory, however. Once you have caught up and reached equilibrium you should start to feel livelier and more energetic during the day. Unfortunately, by that time the holiday has usually ended and the normal regime of late nights and early mornings resumes.
After a few days, your nightly sleep duration should settle down to a stable figure. Take the average over the final few days: this represents your preferred sleep duration. It should be somewhere between seven and nine hours, although not everyone fits this pattern. Unless you are elderly or have an unusually relaxed lifestyle, your preferred sleep duration will probably be longer than the time you normally spend sleeping. If the difference is very large – say, two or three hours a night – you could be storing up serious trouble for yourself.
Reasons for not sleeping (#ulink_b0ddfa16-24ea-5a90-9bba-8db66077f2c0)
Why all this sleep? – seven, eight, nine, ten hours perhaps – with a living to make, work to be done, thoughts to be thought, obligations to keep, a soul to save, friends to refrain from losing, pleasure to seek, and that prodigious host of activities known as life?
Walter de la Mare, Behold, This Dreamer. (1939)
Another reason for believing that sleep deprivation is widespread is that we sleep less nowadays than our ancestors did. There has been a major shift in sleep patterns in industrialised nations over the past century, the net result of which is less sleep.
William Dement of Stanford University has argued that humanity is in the midst of a ‘pandemic of fatigue’. Dement estimates that people in industrialised countries now sleep on average an hour and a half less each night than they would have done a century ago, and that most of us consequently walk around with an accumulated sleep deficit of 25–30 hours. If true, this means we would have to sleep for an extra two hours a night for two weeks to clear the backlog and return to equilibrium. Some of us come close to doing just that when we take a two-week holiday.
Lifestyles in industrialised societies have altered radically over the past century in ways that have consistently eroded the status of sleep and dreaming, leaving many of us now probably sleeping less than at any other period in human history. We live in an era when many people work long hours, where we have vastly more opportunities for entertainment and leisure, and where sleep is widely regarded as the poor relation to other pursuits. Humanity has inadvertently created lots of reasons for not sleeping.
One reason for not sleeping is that there is always so much work to do. Many sectors of society now work longer hours, on more days, than ever before. In early nineteenth-century Britain there were some 40 days in the year when the Bank of England shut its doors to observe saints’ days and anniversaries. By 1830 the number of such holidays had dropped to 18 days a year, and nowadays there are fewer than ten. Not only do we spend longer at work, we also spend longer getting to and from work, as commutes have grown both in distance and duration. Time spent stuck in a car or public transport is time that cannot be spent in bed. Ironically, the technological revolution has failed to free us from the shackles of paid work. Quite the reverse, in fact – it has given us the wherewithal to work more productively all day, every day. James Gleick made the point beautifully in Faster, his glorious exposé of our no-time-to-lose society:
Marketers and technologists anticipate your desires with fast ovens, quick playback, quick freezing, and fast credit. We bank the extra minutes that flow from these innovations, yet we feel impoverished and we cut back – on breakfast, on lunch, on sleep, on daydreams.
Cheap mobile communications enable us to stay in touch wherever we are, 24 hours a day. Copious amounts of caffeine, the world’s most popular psychoactive drug, help to keep us awake as we squeeze ever more into the day. The puritan work ethic and the cult of time management nag us to do a little bit more at the beginning and end of each day. So we get less sleep. But that is stupid, because people who cut back on their sleep achieve less and feel bad into the bargain. They end up stumbling through the day, fatigued and underperforming, without even realising what they are doing to themselves. They become, to quote one scientific paper, borderline retarded.
The idea of being able to get by on little or no sleep might appeal to some driven souls who would rather use the extra time for other things. (Some people seem to find being at work easier than living a real life.) In J. G. Ballard’s short story ‘Manhole 69’, a scientist who has entirely expunged the need to sleep from three human volunteers sneeringly declares that:
For the first time Man will be living a full twenty-four hour day, not spending a third of it as an invalid, snoring his way through an eight-hour peepshow of infantile erotica.
(Ballard’s sleepless volunteers, needless to say, meet a grisly fate.) If the fantasy of doing with less sleep ever became a reality – which, mercifully, it cannot – those extra hours of wakefulness would just be absorbed by more work. If we could all survive working 20 hours a day then the 20-hour day would become the norm. And we would still feel there were not enough hours in the day.
Fortunately, not everyone aspires to a sleepless world. A few highly successful businessmen have come out of the closet in recent years and openly admitted to sleeping for eight hours or more a night (although some cynics have pointed out that these captains of industry can only afford to have all that sleep because they are amply supported by minions working ridiculously long hours).
Britain is rapidly following the USA in becoming a fully-fledged 24/7 society where the consumer is king and nothing ever closes. Consumers really do want the freedom and flexibility to shop, bank or be entertained at any hour of the day or night, and governments are having to respond to their demands for public services to be continuously on tap, providing 24/7 facilities to the taxpayers who fund them. In 2001 the British government published a report called ‘Open All Hours’, explaining how public services were raising their game to meet the requirements of the 24-hour society. The report highlighted examples of how public services had responded to demands for extended opening hours. In his foreword, the Prime Minister wrote that ‘people living busy working lives … should be able to access services how and when they want’. The idea of modernising services to suit the needs and convenience of the public is surely laudable and uncontroversial. But there is something crucial missing from the cost-benefit analysis: the impact the 24-hour society is having on the ability of the people who are providing and consuming those services to get enough sleep.
Whatever happened to the technology-enabled revolution in leisure, which the future-watchers so confidently predicted in the 1960s? The main concern in those days was that we would all have too much free time on our hands, not too little. Sebastian de Grazia, one of the more thoughtful advocates from that era, argued for a return to the inner peace that can only come from a capacity for true idleness, combined with an escape from the constant stimulation that prevents people from ever being alone with themselves:
Perhaps you can judge the inner health of a land by the capacity of its people to do nothing – to lie abed musing, to amble about aimlessly, to sit having coffee – because whoever can do nothing, letting his thoughts go where they may, must be at peace with himself.
If the work ethic does not keep us from our beds, then our insatiable lust for entertainment and amusement surely will. As the Irish poet Thomas Moore put it, we are inclined to steal a few hours from the night:
’Tis never too late for delight, my dear;
And the best of all ways
To lengthen our days
Is to steal a few hours from the night, my dear!
In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night the reprobates Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek have been up drinking all night. ‘I know to be up late is to be up late,’ contests Sir Andrew. ‘A false conclusion!’ avers Sir Toby: ‘To be up after midnight and to go to bed then, is early.’
The range of distractions and temptations to seduce us away from our beds has mushroomed since Shakespeare’s day. There is so much more to do in developed nations, and so much more wealth to do it with. The only quantity that has remained doggedly constant is the amount of time we have. There are still only 1,440 minutes in a day. So, we opt for the immediate fix of pleasure and stay up late. We know deep down that we will suffer the next day in mood, alertness and performance, but the lures are too appealing and their pleasures are instant.
Psychologists have a technical term – delayed gratification – to describe an individual’s ability to forgo an immediate reward in return for a bigger reward later on. It so happens that a capacity for delayed gratification is correlated with intelligence and attainment in life. Most of us, however, display a lamentable lack of delayed gratification when it comes to sleep. William Dement coined another term, ‘hedomasochism’, to describe the irrational belief that we can do it all, achieving ever more in our work, in our family lives and in our. leisure time, all at the expense of sleep. We cannot.
Ancient and modern (#ulink_f3cad88c-4ae4-5cd1-aa99-49261645811e)
We rise with the lark and go to bed with the lamb.
Nicholas Breton, The Court and Country (1618)
The current predilection for staying awake all hours is very recent in historical terms, let alone when measured against the span of biological evolution. It really took root following the invention of the electric filament light bulb by Thomas Edison in 1879, a negligible fraction of an instant ago in evolutionary terms. Of course, people did stay up after dark in the days before cheap electric lighting – just much less.
There have only ever been two ways for humans to deal with the night: to sleep and doze through it or to light it artificially. Until the nineteenth century the only practical source of artificial light was fire in one form or another. When humans depended on expensive candles or oil for artificial light they went to bed earlier and stayed there longer, unless they were in the wealthy minority. Few people did much work after dark. And when they did use artificial lighting, the fires and candles (and later, the gas mantles) generated light of insufficient intensity to reset their internal biological clocks in the way that much brighter electric lighting can. One electric light bulb produces as much light as a hundred candles and for only a tiny fraction of the cost. Unlike our ancestors, we no longer have to sleep, doze or stay in bed just because it is dark.
To appreciate how different life was for the majority of people living in temperate or northern climates, we need only wind the clock back to the eighteenth century. For most working folk, especially in winter, the sun provided the only serious illumination. The Natural History of Selborne, which was written by an English country clergyman called Gilbert White and published in 1788, describes life in a small village in rural England. White’s parochial history is said to be the fourth most published book in the English language. In one of his glimpses into the lives of Selborne’s human inhabitants, White reminds us that in the days before electric lighting, few people could afford the luxury of routinely staying awake for long during the hours of darkness. The villagers burned rushes to produce light, and even rushes cost money:
Working people burn no candle in the long days, because they rise and go to bed by daylight. Little farmers use rushes much in the short days, both morning and evening in the dairy and kitchen; but the very poor, who are always the worst economists, and therefore must continue very poor, buy an halfpenny candle every evening, which, in their blowing open rooms, does not burn much more than two hours. Thus have they only two hours’ light for their money instead of eleven.
In rural northern Europe of the Middle Ages it was pointless or impossible to work the fields during the dark days of winter, and too costly to heat and light the home all day. Whole families would therefore take to their beds for days at a time. You might not relish the prospect of spending days in bed with nothing to do. (Or perhaps you would?) Boredom would be the big enemy. Boredom, however, is a modern concept. Being alone with our thoughts and dreams is no longer enough for us.
Cold weather was another good reason for staying in bed, as Samuel Pepys recorded in this entry from his diary, written in December 1661:
All the morning at home, lying abed with my wife till 11 a-clock – such a habit we have got this winter, of lying long abed.
But even in warm, sunny climates, our ancestors probably spent more of their time in bed, especially in civilisations that practised the siesta.
In modern industrialised societies we are exposed to an artificial day that is extended by electric lighting and typically lasts for at least 16 hours, regardless of season. The marked seasonal fluctuations in the conception rate, which were once associated with the long winter nights, have almost disappeared now. Moreover, we now pack all of our sleep into a single block of time during the remaining seven or eight hours of darkness. This pattern of sleeping is biologically unusual: in most other species, sleep is split into two or more separate episodes in each 24-hour period. As we shall see, there are reasons for supposing that humans have not always slept in a single, compressed block.
Our daily cycle of sleep and wakefulness is largely determined for us by clocks rather than tiredness. Many of us go to bed when it is time to go to bed, not when we are tired, and wake when we have to wake, not when we choose to. Clocks with minute hands did not become available until the seventeenth century. Until quite recently in history, the majority of people relied on the sun for their timekeeping and lived in a world where the light intensity changed gradually at dawn and dusk, not instantaneously with the flick of a light switch. Moreover, they did not work in offices, factories or shops where they were required to be present at a certain time early every day.
How do humans sleep when left to their own devices in a world where it is dark for more than half the day – as would have been the case in pre-industrial northern countries during winter? To find out, Thomas Wehr at the National Institute of Mental Health in Maryland exposed volunteers to an experimental environment where it was dark for 14 hours a day and they could sleep freely. To begin with, the volunteers slept a lot (some more than 12 hours a day) as they caught up on their backlog. On average, they clocked up an additional 17 hours of sleep during the initial adjustment period. After their sleep deficits had been paid off, they settled down to an average sleep duration of eight and a quarter hours a day. Their mood and energy levels during the day improved consistently over the course of the experiment. When they were awake, they felt more awake and were more awake.
As well as sleeping longer, Wehr’s subjects also slept differently. Under these conditions of long, dark days and with nothing much to do, their sleep spontaneously divided into two distinct blocks. Typically, they would lie in a state of quiet rest each evening for about two hours before falling asleep. Then they would sleep for about four hours, usually waking at the end of an episode of dreaming. After another couple of hours of quiet rest they slept for a further four hours. On waking in the early morning they would lie in quiet rest for another couple of hours before rising.
