Sleep, beautiful sleep

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, sleep

What a way to start the year! with a book about sleep. Michael McGirr, a former Jesuit priest, and a victim of sleep apnea, writes about sleep and sleeplessness from a few unique perspectives in his book Snooze: The Lost Art of Sleep. I read the book hoping to re-connect with this lost art, but found instead a travelogue, a book of "what" but not "how".

There is no table of contents and I didn't count as I went, but I reckon there are upwards of a dozen chapters. Each is titled by a time and a year (or a few related years), thusly:

10:45pm

[2004]

in which chapter he writes of his diagnosis of sleep apnea and the invention of the CPAP machine, and about his marriage to Jenny who loved him anyway (this after he left the Jesuit order), or

2:15am

[2007BC]

riffing on Jacob son of Isaac, one of history's celebrated sleepers, he of the dream of angels on a ladder, but one who nonetheless complained to his father-in-law,

… by day the heat consumed me, and the cold by night, and my sleep fled from my eyes.

He writes of Edison, who was too busy inventing to sleep; of Florence Nightingale, who slept little but spent some 3/4 of her life directing matters worldwide from her bed; and of coffee and its use to ward off sleep, so much so that Balzac, who fueled his amazing literary output with sixty cups of coffee daily, died of caffeine poisoning at age 51. Balzac might have lived a lot longer on half the coffee, and while writing less daily, his total production might have been even greater.

I am reminded of Alfréd Rényi, who said, "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems," a quote usually attributed to Paul Erdős, and tangentially of Leonardo da Vinci, who is said to have kept to a regimen of three hours and 40 minutes of work followed by a 20-minute nap, day in and day out (that comes to two hours in each 24-hour period). I read about one man who tried working on this schedule and did so for a few years, but then gave it up because he ran out of things to keep him busy. I guess to keep Leonardo's schedule you have to have Leonardo's creativity. I wish McGirr had included these also in his travelogue of sleep and its variations, but he did not.

Regardless, his own studies of sleep, restful or not, led him in many directions, including into those antonyms of caffeine, the various sleep-inducing drugs, from Benadryl^® to Ambien^® and beyond. During a hospital stay, a nurse gave me two Benadryl^®, which worked well. My father used a prescription sleep aid that turned out to be a double dose of diphenhydramine in one pill; the exact equivalent of taking two Benadryl^®, but a lot more costly. But the more recent drugs induce sleep by messing with the normal sleep cycle, which can put you into a deep sleep without the total sleep paralysis needed to keep you from acting out your dreams. Lots of sleepwalking (and sleep driving, etc.) incidents are known, some with fatal results.

In the last chapter, he writes that reading in bed can help us drowse, but only if we are reading off of printed paper. The reflected light from a page with dark ink does not inhibit melatonin production. The light from a computer of phone screen has a different quality, and does so interfere.

Overstress is a primary enemy of sleep. We need a certain amount of stress to keep life interesting, but overwhelming, chronic stress just burns us out. Some folks respond with depression and may take to their beds, sleeping much or most of the day. Most of us have trouble getting to sleep, wake too early, and feel tired much of the time. While a few chapters of Snooze address chronic insomnia, a broader affliction is that many of us get some sleep each night, but never seem to get enough. Many, many of us have an experience like mine.

During the last ten or so years of employment at DuPont, I seldom slept more than four hours nightly. For some of that time, I was also on one or another medication to address my bipolarity, but they didn't do much so I learned to cope with it unmedicated. During those medicated periods, I usually napped up to two hours daily, so you could say I had six hours of sleep, but not in one installment. However, without medication with a sleep-promoting side effect, four hours was it. No naps. I had work I enjoyed a lot, a congenial boss (the last 8 of the 10 years), and even told my boss I might work until I was 75. But when the company declared a retirement incentive, I retired at age 66.

After retirement, two important things happened. Within a few weeks, I was sleeping 6-7 hours nightly, and over about half that first year I lost 15 pounds. I remember looking back one day, and saying to myself, "I didn't realize the level of stress I was under!" I had also been using a lot of "cold caffeine" (Pepsi Max), up to a liter daily.

Now that four more years have passed and I am over 70, I get 5-7 hours of sleep, and if I wake early I simply get up, read my Bible a while, have breakfast, then have a morning nap for another hour or two. There aren't a lot of conclusions to draw from that. I am thankful that, though I snore some nights (not all), I don't have apnea; I have part time work that keeps some structure in my life, but is incredibly less stressful than any job I had before; I practically eliminated caffeine, using caffeinated cola only for driving alertness on road trips.

You'll have to look elsewhere for advice and information on how to sleep longer and better. For an enjoyable survey of how humans have been sleeping, or not, Snooze is the book for you.