Sleep and Me — it’s complicated
When I was in my 20s, I often framed it as “convenient” that I could “stay up for more than 24 hours” at a time. Actually, the truth was closer to this — the effort it would take me to get to sleep was so significant, that I often didn’t bother trying. Add to this tendency, it seems that going with little (or no) sleep is some kind of weird superpower in America.
I don’t sleep as much as normal people do. — Virgil Abloh
For the majority of my life I have not slept in one solid stretch per night. In my 20s and 30s, I slept on average for 4–5 hours per night total. In my 40s sleep deprivation started catching up with me and I worked hard to learn how to sleep more. I was frustrated and embarrassed to share my sleep struggles at this point in my life. When I did share these challenges, other people would often say, “Just relax” or “You need to just chill out.” The most unhelpful ‘advice’ was “what’s the problem, it’s just sleeping, isn’t it?”
I am now in my 50’s and I’ve finally made peace with sleep. It it typical for me, now to sleep in two or more sleep chunks for a total of around 8–9 hours per night. What follows is a bit about my journey towards good sleep.
Sleep and Health
Given the increasing evidence that appropriate sleep plays in both physical and mental health, it surprising to me how few people talk meaningfully about sleep struggles and potential solutions. In addition, one study concludes that in addition to health effects, “lack of adequate sleep over time has been associated with a shortened lifespan.”
Given the significance of sleep I’ve learned that focusing on it and learning about it can be impactful, but also these activities lacked a key element. The most important aspect of improving my sleep has been to learn how to define what ‘good sleep’ means for me.
The turning point was when I came across information about how primitive peoples slept. The idea is that sleep comes in chunks, rather than contiguous stretches, and this defines exactly how I sleep. This study, called ‘Segmented Sleep in Preindustrial Societies’ describes a nightly sleeping pattern that consists of a ‘first’ and then a ‘second’ sleep chunk as normal across many cultures and parts of the world. Finally — I found a definition for the way I sleep.
I sleep in two parts, or more, every night.
After reading the study, I felt like I could finally feel ok about saying this, sharing it and learning how to make this kind of sleep work for me.
Overmedication
Everyone in my immediate family starts taking sleeping pills, usually in their late 30s, and then takes them for the rest of their lives — every night. They’ve been convinced that ‘sleeping through the night’ is the only normal way to sleep.
When I was in my 30s, I was advised to “just take sleeping pills, because that’s what we do”. Because I try to avoid any life-long medication, I looked for research on the long-term effects of taking sleeping pills. At that time, I couldn’t find much. Now, however, study after study discusses potential side effects of long-term sleeping pill usage.
Did I try sleeping pills? Yes and I hated the results. I felt groggy and thick-headed. I did sleep through the night, but it wasn’t worth it.
Relationships
This is the one nobody talks about. For traditional sleepers, it’s really difficult to sleep with someone who sleeps like me. The reality is that because I sleep so lightly, when I sleep with a heavy sleeper (unless he doesn’t move at all when he sleeps), my ‘distributed, partitioned’ sleeping will become much more partitioned.
As much as I enjoy napping next to a warm, handsome man — because that’s what it will be for me, I enjoy my distributed, partitioned sleep even more. For that reason, I’ve found that sleeping alone is best for me. Does this mean that I can’t have a relationship? No, it just means I need to have an understanding partner if we both are going to sleep.
Acceptance
When I learned about segmented nightly sleep, it was a revelation for me, because I learned to accept how I sleep. In addition to accepting my nightly waking up, I have learned, via trial and error, that some activities will improve my sleep. These include the following:
- Set the room temperature to be slightly cold
- Sleeping on the best quality mattress that I can afford
- Refraining from using screens for 30 minutes before sleeping
- Generating white noise via a fan
- Waking to natural light, rather than an alarm clock
I decided to write this short article because I wish I would’ve known about this type of sleep as a normal pattern earlier. Understanding and accepting that I will wake up, mostly every night, for a short period of time, and then will go back to sleep has allowed me to rest and relax in a way that is wonderful.
What about you? How do you sleep? I am looking forward to continuing to learn and to continuing this conversation.
