People spend roughly a third of their lives sleeping—about 26 years, based on the average life expectancy. So why are we so tired? And as we reach for coffee, energy drinks and pills to counter our restlessness and insomnia, how much do we really know about those eightish hours between night and day?
Matthew Wolf-Meyer, a professor of anthropology at UCSC, has been fascinated by the way Americans sleep for most of his life, and over the past 10 years has collected his findings for his new book, The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and the Modern American Life. His conclusion? We should be talking a lot more about why we sleep the way we do.
Wolf-Meyer’s interest in the subject started as an undergrad while working the third shift at Kinko’s.
“I was always okay with third shift,” he says. “I would go to work and go to sleep at 8am, and wake up at 5pm and get on with the rest of my day. But the rest of the people around me were doing it for the meager financial benefit, and struggled physically. I stopped because I started teaching at an elementary school and I had a total reversal. I had to wake up at 6:30 in the morning, and it was excruciating to me.”
While working on his dissertation, he happened to read about a sleep clinic right around the corner from his New York apartment. A visit to the facility made it clear that what was originally supposed to be a single chapter on sleep needed to be a book.
“The clinicians were talking about cases, and what they had seen and case literature. Like a lot of people, I think, I was blind to the variation of sleep,” he says. “I have intermittent insomnia. I have slept in weird ways all my life. I’ve had sleeping schedules that destroyed relationships. But I heard clinicians talking about even more extremes in the spectrum, between normal sleep that everyone’s fine with to behavior disorders like sleep apnea and narcolepsy. I just wasn’t aware of it.”
Wolf-Meyer spent five years at the clinic interviewing patients and attending support groups for people with restless leg syndrome, sleep apnea and narcolepsy. He then went to Chicago to do archival work while continuing to do interviews and visit support groups.
Market Driven
In his new book, he lays out how, over the past 200 years, our economy has dictated when and how we sleep. Working from 9 o’clock in the morning to 5 o’clock in the evening has generated an “11 to 7” sleep cycle, where individuals experience uninterrupted sleep through the night and don’t sleep during the day. Most clinicians would consider this “normal,” and most Americans strive to adhere to this system. And yet, says Wolf-Meyer, there is evidence all around us to suggest that this is not the ideal sleeping pattern for millions of people.
“When you start to talk to people or read one of the many surveys that have been published in the last decade about how people sleep, you see that Americans sleep anywhere between 4 and 12 hours in a 24-hour period. Some people are sleeping bi-phasically, meaning they sleep a few hours at night and a few hours in the middle of the day. Some people sleep in a very erratic fashion, like doctors and truck drivers, where they’ll be awake for 36 hours and sleep for 12 hours,” explains Wolf-Meyer.
A child’s sleep needs are different than an adolescent, and both are unique from the needs of adults. Ultimately, the model we think of as “normal sleep” doesn’t match up with our own experiences very often.
Drug Culture
But it’s Americans that are adapting, not the schedule, and the cure often has an Rx on the label.
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“Chemical substances have become kind of innocuous in our daily age,” Wolf-Meyer notes. Our search for relief from a variety of sleep disorders has catapulted the sleep aid industry in the last 20 years from obscurity to the commonplace. Millions of Americans are prescribed Ambien or Lunestra to help them fall asleep and stay asleep, and then continue to medicate themselves throughout the day to stay awake.
Wolf-Meyer is careful to draw a line here. He explains that there are many people who suffer from material disorders like obstructive sleep apnea and narcolepsy for which drugs and therapies are greatly beneficial. There are also individuals who use pharmaceuticals to alleviate their disorderly sleep when an adjustment to their social obligations, like waking and sleeping outside of the “11 to 7” model, would be just as helpful.
Most of these drugs have only been around for 20 years or less, and scientists don’t know what the long-term effects will be.
“Ambien shouldn’t be prescribed for more than two weeks, but people end up using it forever. It’s referred to as ‘habit forming’ not ‘addictive.’ People end up taking higher and higher doses of these drugs for years, and no one knows what the long-term effects of these drugs are,” Wolf-Meyer says.
Coffee Fix
Of course, prescription drugs aren’t the most common way Americans cope with a lack of sleep. Wolf-Meyer cites most American’s mechanical grab for a cup of coffee in the morning and asks: Why are we that tired after we wake up? Why do we need to be that alert first thing in the morning?
“Our social obligations dictate our biological desires,” he says. “My need for coffee is not just my taste for coffee, it’s because my son requires me to be awake so we can watch Sesame Street together at 7 in the morning.”
In the afternoon, when we’re tempted to pour another, he believes we should just as easily be able to stroll to the nearest napping center as we do the nearest coffee shop. He tells of a sleep doctor he used to know who joked that humans have a nervous system that works optimally with one cup of coffee.
“Everyone believed it, but of course it’s a joke. Our ancestors were not drinking cups of coffee in the cave. There’s nothing natural about our caffeine consumption,” he says.
Napping in Shame
Wolf-Meyer discusses a pervasive feeling in society he describes as “the shame of napping.” Historically, this connection between sleep and laziness can be traced back to the Protestant work ethic of our forefathers. Benjamin Franklin was “early to bed and early to rise,” and religious writings warn against being awake too late and sleeping past dawn because, in short, what sort of mischief were you trying to get up to during the night?
There is historical evidence to suggest humans used to sleep bi-phasically. We’d go to bed earlier, wake up for a period of time in the middle of the night and sleep a little later. The traditional siesta in Spanish cultures arose out of a need to rest in the afternoon to counter a later bedtime. But in the last 20 years Spain has realized that there’s no way it can remain a world economic power if no one holds meetings between noon and 4pm every day.
A Simple Solution
The modern demands of our society make this kind of rest nearly impossible. So what can the sleepless masses do?
Wolf-Meyer offers a simple prescription: “People should sleep when they’re sleepy and not sleep when they aren’t.”
Our biggest problem, he says, is that we think we need to be in bed at a certain time, and awake at a certain time.
“If you’re not sleepy at 10 o’clock, just don’t go to bed. Even if it means you’ll get less sleep than you think you should, you’re better off staying out of bed than laying in bed and staring at the clock,” he says. “Part of that is behavioral: the more time you spend in bed not sleeping, the more sleep becomes this problem in your life. If it means you need to take a nap the next day or go to bed at 8 o’clock the next night, that’s fine.”
Most importantly, he suggests that we avoid using drugs, in whatever form, as a crutch: “Medicine draws the line between alternative orders and disorders. If you can live unproblematically with your sleep schedule, whatever that is, and you’re doing no harm to yourself or those around you, then it’s not very disorderly.”
But sleep disorders, of course, are very real.
“If in order to maintain your sleep schedule, you’re consuming 12 cans of Mountain Dew a day, or taking trucker speed, and then you have to take Ambien to go to sleep at night, there’s clearly something wrong there,” he says.
Science still isn’t sure why humans—or any organisms, in fact—need sleep. But a more conscious understanding of why we sleep the way we do might make our periods of unconsciousness more restful.
