Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams. Paul Martin

Reasons for not sleeping

      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