For some reason the websites I’ve
visited for the past few days have been rife with ads for mattresses and
bedding. The AIs that watch us online in order to tailor ads for individual
users somehow decided I was a likely buyer. I’m not entirely sure what about my
activities convinced them of that. My best guess is that I recently clicked on
a science article about the world’s oldest discovered bed: 77,000 years old, it
was discovered in 2011 in Sibudu cave South Africa by an archeological team
from Witwatersrand University. Made of rushes, woven reeds, and leaves, it is 1
foot (30 cm) deep and a spacious 22 square feet (2 square meters) in area.
While this is interesting in its own way, the AIs are mistaken to have concluded
from it that I’m in the market for a new mattress of my own.
The mattress industry and the
organizations that front for it claim you should change your mattress every 7
or 8 years. By that standard I’m overdue by about 20 years. I have no plans to
change it though. It looks and feels the same as it always has: no frays,
lumps, or sags. Is it as firm or comfy as it once was? Maybe, maybe not. I
suppose so, because the question hasn’t really crossed my mind until just now.
I sleep on it just fine regardless. If the day comes when I don’t I’ll worry
about it. Not until.
It is not unreasonable to make the place
where we spend a third of our lives comfortable, of course. A nice bed (though
I’ve slept soundly on the occasional floor) and a distraction-free bedroom
certainly help achieve slumber. I’ve seen the claim made in articles about the
history of domestic architecture that individual private bedrooms are a modern
ideal dating back no further than the Enlightenment. This is simply untrue. It
is true that most people couldn’t afford individual bedrooms before then (or
after, for that matter). Many still can’t, especially for the kids, even in the
solid middle classes. The ideal, however, dates back to the beginning of
civilization – and wealthier folks achieved that ideal then as they do now.
Below is the floor plan of a Roman townhouse; the second floor (with a stairway
from the peristylium) contained additional bedrooms; the bedrooms were small,
basic, and usually contained just a bed (with a mattress stuffed with feathers
or hay depending on cost) and a dressing table, but they were private.
Modern bedrooms are rather different. The
average American house has increased in square footage by 50% in the last half
century while the number of occupants per house has dropped by 25%. (Since the
average includes older homes, the difference between old construction and new
is even more stark.) Master bedrooms (now often called primary bedrooms, though
I’m sure that term will be incorrect soon enough as well) have grown most of
all; in new homes they average more than 225 square feet (21 square meters). In
luxury homes the dimensions of this one room can be larger than the entire average
house in 1950. They are furnished accordingly. But while bedrooms and their accoutrements
get ever more elaborate, the amount of time we spend in them for their primary
purpose – sleep – gets smaller and smaller.
There are sleep specialists who claim
that the upswing in ailments commonly attributed to such things as processed
foods and sedentariness (not that these are harmless) are more attributable to
inadequate sleep. Neuroscientist Dr. Matthew Walker, for one, writes that sleep
deprivation weakens the immune system (including response to vaccines) while
increasing the risk of coronary disease, cancer, and stroke; further, it
increases the risk of Alzheimer’s, decreases general memory and mental
function, and is associated with higher rates of obesity and diabetes. The
correlations are not flimsy: they are robust. Some are definitely causal and
others probably are. These ill effects, both organic and mental, are just a few
on a much longer list. The effects set in quickly, too: “Inadequate sleep –
even moderate reductions for just one week – disrupts blood sugar levels so
profoundly [in an otherwise healthy person] that you would be classified as a
pre-diabetic.” Some of the effects are hard to quantify. What percentage of
road accidents is attributable to sleep deprivation? We don’t know because we
can’t readily test drivers for it the way we can test them for blood alcohol
levels, but controlled experiments show sleep deprived drivers to be every bit as
impaired as drivers who are legally drunk. They tend not so much to fall asleep
at the wheel as to zone out for split seconds (or longer) here and there, which
at 60 mph is more than enough time for tragedy to occur.
There are a handful of people (those
with a specific variant of the BHLHE41 gene) who can in fact get by on only 6
hours sleep without impairment. In effect, they sleep more efficiently, getting
all the benefits in less time. It is unlikely (to put it mildly) that you or I
are one of them: the trait is an extraordinarily rare one found in a small fraction
of 1% of the population. Even they are not immune to sleep deprivation; if they
don’t get their 6 hours they suffer too. Walker quotes his colleague Dr. Roth,
“The number of people who can survive on 5 hours of sleep or less without any
impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole
number, is zero.”
The rest of us (which is to say very
nearly all of us) to be at our best need the 7 to 9 hours the CDC recommends. Yet
ever increasing numbers of behave us as though we are the exceptions. Since the
1940s the average time dedicated to sleep in the US has dropped nearly two
hours and we are paying the consequences. We like to blame long work hours
(even though they are shorter than in the early 20th century when
people slept longer) and other exogenous reasons for this, but for the most
part our sleep reduction is voluntary. We deliberately stay up late even though
we have to get up early. Perhaps work schedules could be shifted to start later
in the morning to accommodate modern lifestyles, but that would help only if we
don’t adapt by staying up even later. Schools definitely benefit (the kids, if
not the teachers and parents) from later starts; schools that have tried
starting an hour later without making other changes have boosted student SAT
scores 20 points.
Is it possible actually to die from lack
of sleep? For obvious reasons we can’t ethically test this on humans, but
animal studies (some of which would not be permitted today) indicate yes. A
1983 experiment at the University of Chicago with rats that were kept awake resulted
in 100% mortality in 18 days. Cause of death could not be determined. There
were no identifiable organ failures. The rats just died. The Guinness World Records has stopped publishing new records for
human hours without sleep because of the danger posed to people trying to break
whatever the current one might be.
I get up between 7 and 8 a.m. pretty
much every day. I have no obligation (anymore) to arise then, but I simply don’t
sleep past that time even if I wish to do so. Accordingly, the only flexibility
in my sleep schedule is at night. I can doze off as easily at 11 p.m. as at 1
a.m. After reading Walker’s book I’m more inclined to choose the earlier hour. Despite
the AIs’ concerns, my mattress won’t pose a problem, though I suspect that the
mere use of that word in this blog will keep the mattress ads popping up.
We’ll give Shakespeare the penultimate
word on sleep:
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave
of care,
The death of each day's life, sore
labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's
second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.
– Macbeth
Last word we’ll give to Rita Rudner
because, why not?
“Sleep really is the best of both
worlds. You get to be alive and unconscious.”
Garbage -
Sleep
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