In Defense of Those Suffering with Sleep 'Problems'

I recently underwent a sleep study. This was one of the more fascinating nights I’ve spent in my lifetime. The Alhambra sleep clinic was in an unassuming corporate tower across from the Costco I visit monthly with my girlfriend. For some reason, the upper-floor suite in a corporate building was not what I’d envisioned. Finding the correct apartment, I entered expecting to hear beeping tones and to see panels of flashing lights, monitors, and a team of technicians conferring over results or charts. Instead, I found a more or less disheveled work desk with too many file folders crowding a single computer. An open supply closet revealed sheets, blankets, cleaning supplies, and plastic tubs filled with indiscernible equipment. A single technician was visible down a hallway attending to another client in one of the study rooms and I was instructed to take a seat until the tech was ready to get me prepped for the study.

My relationship with sleep has been dynamic and has shifted throughout my life as my personality developed and my daily schedule changed. I’m sure this is true for many people. Throughout my life, however, I’ve retained an absolute love of staying awake late into the night. While I wouldn’t call myself a morning person, at all, I certainly love and appreciate witnessing the sunrise or getting an early jump on the day. I taught History and English for eight years, thus proving that I can rise before the sun. While camping or backpacking, I often find myself awake before dawn. However, as a writer, a lover of cinema, and a creative, I cannot overemphasize the value of the dark and quiet of the night in my experience.

Part of my recent journey has been to explore feelings I’ve internalized around sleep and being a “night owl” rather than a “morning lark.” I’ve often believed that something was wrong with me, that I was perhaps irresponsible for staying awake much too late, or was at least reckless with my health. I’ve told myself at times that I’m someone who is lazy or unmotivated due to my finding it difficult to rise early. A heavy shame has come with these thoughts. There is something personal about sleep patterns, and often we might find ourselves at odds with what society says is acceptable when it comes to wakefulness and rest. Yet, who doesn’t love to occasionally find themselves enjoying a moment at night when seemingly all others are absent and dreaming; when the light of the moon transforms the familiar; when only you have discovered the beauty of an empty street or of an abandoned nighttime landscape?

That I was causing harm in ascribing myself these labels is something I’m coming to understand. Along that line, I was thrilled to discover a 2017 book written by Emory University Professor of English Benjamin Reiss entitled, Wild Nights: How Taming Sleep Created Our Restless World. Reiss has appeared as a radio guest discussing his research, as well, and it was listening to one of these on-air interviews when I first became aware of Reiss’ studies. His approach to the subject of sleep through a historical perspective spoke to me in new ways that a medical or health perspective was never able to communicate. The messages from history that Reiss has unearthed and offers now, to all of us, are worth sharing and spreading.

Underlying the particular stories and histories that Reiss shares, there is a distinct message about correcting sleep problems and that is to make it personal. Find your own truths about how you sleep. Become familiar with your specific sleep patterns. Better yet, develop your own rituals, meditations, and self-care practices around sleep and rest. The messages that Reiss provides are not only deeply personal and encouraging but also vital to the moment we find ourselves in as a planet willing to explore long-dominant norms. After all, Reiss explains, the concept that humans are supposed to sleep for eight uninterrupted hours is a relatively modern invention and one that is rooted in both positive and negative realities of human history.

Part of the modern concept of the eight-hour sleep cycle is a direct result of industrialization and is strictly a “factory-based” model. We are to rise according to a punch clock or factory whistle rather than according to nature or to “inner genius,” as Henry David Thoreau called it. Reiss describes how throughout much of history and in many cultures, there is a wider range of sleep patterns than what American society deems to be normal. In fact, many cultures and people have chosen to sleep in two shifts with a break of an hour or two or more between them. This sleep break was often used for meditation, dream reflection, art creation, personal rituals, prayer, or even lovemaking. The quiet, dark hours beyond midnight have often been revered as a special time, and many cultures believe the power of midnight is to be experienced rather than slept through.

Reiss’ book explores the economic history of personal bedrooms compared with shared sleeping spaces, and how sleeping ‘privately’ is a concept that grew as humanity accumulated greater wealth, generally, and developed middle and upper classes. Reiss discusses how slave owners like Thomas Jefferson convinced themselves that black Africans were ‘less intellectual’ than whites because they would fall asleep immediately after finishing their day’s work, failing to acknowledge that exhaustion and overworking can result in loss of leisure time activities like intellectual pursuits. What is considered ‘normal sleep’ in America is very much a result of race and wealth and has a long history of bigotry and imperial delusion baked into it. We each have a lot of personal work to do if we hope to decolonize our relationship with sleep, it seems.

Reiss at times describes the American obsession with healthy sleep as “high-strung… frenetic… highly-caffeinated.” Our sleep ‘problems’ are enmeshed, for example, with the modern news cycle, with media addiction, information addiction, and urban noise pollution. Yes, our sleep even has to do with the history of trains, trollies, and transportation. Anyone who has ever lived along a busy street knows what it’s like to fall asleep to the lull of sporadically passing cars at night and then wake to the bustle and horns of the morning commuters. In Los Angeles (like other cities, no doubt), I often find myself awoken by the sound of leaf blowers, garbage trucks, fireworks, sirens, or helicopters. There is a sense that sleep should be strictly set, unwavering, part of a daily routine, and should be based on the workday. It turns out, however, that this places a lot of stress on all of us to ignore natural bodily responses to seasonal changes. There are historical and evolutionary caloric advantages, for example, in sleeping more during the winter and staying awake later during the summer. Such advantages still exist in us today as a part of our DNA even if our career or work schedule tells us otherwise. Such genetic information calls on each of us to express a certain degree of self-compassion when we experience what we consider to be a “problem” with the way we sleep. It might only be that our income is interfering with our biology instead of the other way around.

Reiss also reminds us that some of our modern, eight-hour sleep norms are based on more benevolent historical realities. For example, union activism in the 19th and 20th centuries addressed extreme dangers present for workers across industries who were being pushed harder and longer until they collectively demanded: “eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for what you will.” Similarly, eight hours of private, uninterrupted sleep certainly has some of its roots in public health concerns as urbanization faced increasing threats of disease outbreaks and other health concerns from overcrowded, shared sleeping conditions.

However, there is no “one way” to sleep, Reiss reminds us. It truly is up to each of us to discover how we sleep best to support the time when we are awake. If this means waking up each night at 3 am, then embrace it. Make tea. Set up a place to write in a dream journal or keep painting supplies ready and available. Take the time to stretch, write poetry, or craft. Make it personal, make it a ritual or keep it as a time to play or reflect quietly. When I was teaching, it was typical for me to come home from work, set my computer bag down, and collapse asleep on my bed for one to three hours. That was simply my reality of being exhausted and overworked as a teacher and needing to recharge immediately after I was “done” with my responsibilities. Granted, I would wake up, eat, and then do more teacher work for hours and often late into the night. I see now that that schedule was well-suited to my reality, and yet I recall giving myself steady grief about staying up late, not sleeping eight hours straight, and napping.

Among warnings about the commercialization of sleep, Reiss reminds us that some of the information we generate about our sleep habits are useful, interesting, or great on its own, but that concern about getting healthy sleep can easily become an unhealthy obsession. Smartwatches, smart beds, dental devices to correct and monitor sleep, and other sleep tech might be reinforcing negative, colonial norms about sleep that just don’t suit your natural health, according to your specific body and personal needs. Along another line, “to be poor is to be badly rested… [and have] limited control of your own time,” Reiss acknowledges. Some, in America, simply don’t have the luxury of attaining their ideal sleep pattern or even slightly modifying their overall sleep health. Some of us are scrambling after pay, after shifts, after jobs, and after security. Without a living wage in America, it seems there will remain a stressed class and also a comfortable and safe class. Sleep, in the end, is a product of culture and economy. What kind of culture do we want to foster as a nation? Are we comfortable knowing that a portion of our population must simply endure harsher, less forgiving, unhealthy relationships with sleep and with themselves?

Certainly, our individual sleep patterns are subject to change as we each progress through the phases of life. For much of my life, I was unable to explore my own sleep patterns, either because I worked multiple jobs or because I was inured to think that pain and suffering from lack of proper sleep were inherent to existence. After I was awoken at the end of my night visiting the sleep study clinic, I understood that I was in a new chapter of my life. I had to make peace with myself, with my relationship to sleep, and with my own place in history if anything for me was going to change. I moved the wires away from my arms as I carefully rose from the bed. I peeled off the adhesive sensors when the technician told me it was alright to do so, then I unbuckled the monitor straps around my torso. What about the wires and monitors and sensors that I can’t remove, I wondered? The ones that I’ve built on my own, the ones that only I can read and understand. How will I monitor those results?

I may be a night owl (for now), but that doesn’t mean that my relationship with sleep is unhealthy. I’m finally at a place of peaceful, non-judgemental honesty with myself, my life, and my sleep patterns where I can recognize what I like, what’s working for me, and what’s not. A stressful teaching schedule didn’t foster health in my sleeping patterns. An unstressed, reflective deep dive into my life history and my overall joyfulness is likely a better approach to solving my sleep concerns. Yes, a CPAP device will help; a better bed will help; knee support pillows and a white noise machine will help. But the work is deeper than these things. It’s about reprocessing names and labels I’ve called myself over time. It’s about reorienting my relationship with money and stress. It’s about honoring the disparate parts of me that love morning and also midnight. I’m responding now from a natural perspective where seasons and my own personal drives are bound to make my relationship with sleep change through the days of the calendar.

Through a cyclone of, at times, incredibly tense and largely angst-ridden hours and nights, the past 24 months have not only taken a toll on nearly everyone across the globe but have also spurred so many to deeper, newer reflections about their own lives. We have, in some collective fashion, finally allowed ourselves to lift the veil, to peek under the rug, and to begin to finally address some of what we are seeing there in the dark spaces of our lives. Now, more than ever, each of us has an opportunity to release some (or all) of our stress around healthy sleep. Instead, as Benjamin Reiss reminds us, let’s each listen to our own needs and adjust accordingly through well-informed and historically oriented understandings of our own place in the unfolding history of sleep itself. I can activate night shift on my computer, I can use blue block lamps to read at night, and I can induce a ‘rest and digest’ state in my body by laying back with pillows under my legs, but no change I make in my routine will match the changes I need to make in my own mentality and with my own history.

What makes me uniquely, authentically myself is wrapped up in my relationship with sleep, and exploring that history will take time and patience. More importantly, it involves allowing myself the compassion and the space to explore that relationship in whichever direction it may lead. I’ll keep a journal nearby, I’ll continue to stretch and meditate, and surely with time, I will discover what works best for me, for my restfulness, from one day into the next. Perhaps, in this way, I can make a dream of my own life. Turning again to Thoreau, “Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.”