Sleep

I like to think of sleep as the ability to fast forward or accelerate through time.  The reason being that you generally are not aware of time passing when you sleep and when you first wake up you need to use a clock or some other method of measuring time to determine how long you were asleep.  The amount of time that passes isn't something we can reliably gauge, how restful or restless our sleep was seems inconsistent with the amount of time that passes and is more consistent with the quality of sleep and whether it was disturbed in the process.

The problem with thinking of sleep as the ability to move forward through time at pace is that it becomes a crutch or an escape route in effect when life becomes boring, repetitive, or when you just don't want to actually live through events.  This is something I have been aware of ever since I was a teenager.  My relationship with sleep is complicated, I have gone through periods of insomnia where I have slept as little as an hour a night, and periods of hypersomnia where I have slept 18 hours at a time, in both cases still feeling exhausted when I am awake.  I have gone through periods where I am physically exhausted and mentally wired, and periods where the reverse is true, physically restless and mentally exhausted.

Periods of depression too often increase the desire to sleep your life away, although for me personally it is usually the case that when I want to sleep I can't and when I don't want to then I sleep in excess but that is neither here nor there for now.  The point of this post is that whilst this complicated relationship with sleep was once something other people in my life found hard to understand, the pandemic, lockdown, quarantine, and the severe disruption to peoples' lives and their routines has thrown people into a mindset that is complex and for many people they are now experiencing this same complication relationship with sleep emerging.  There is the desire to stick to your normal routine but without the impetus to do so and no consequence of failing to do so, the end result is an erratic sleep pattern that emerges.

I have wondered why this happens and I have been contemplating the idea that what we know and understand about sleep might be flawed.  There is the often quoted wisdom that you should sleep 8 hours a night, and that your waking day should be 16 hours.  This idea however is based more around the need to be awake to accommodate a working day, not a physiological need.  When you look at wild animals and their sleep patterns the idea of impetus emerges more and more, those animals wake and sleep when they do because they have to in order to survive.  When you take away that need to be awake to survive and provide the food and water and anything else that they would normally wake in order to pursue, what happens?

As far as humanity is concerned, this experiment has actually been carried out before, one of the first examples came in the 1960s when two cavers Antoine Senni and Josie Laures both spent several months living inside caves in the French Alps in isolation with no point of reference from their environment to determine the passage of time.  They maintained contact with researchers throughout the experience but were not given any reference to the time on the surface.  What the experiment concluded was that absent from the Earth's natural day and night cycle, individuals body clock reverts to a sleep cycle that is elongated.  Further research that built on these conclusions went on to show that it appears that the natural sleep and wake cycle when environment is excluded as a factor is closer to a 48 hour cycle.

If you take a 48 hour "day" as the basis of a new paradigm then using the same 1:3 ratio we use for 24 hour days, then you should really sleep for 16 hours at a time and be awake for 32 hours.  This idea is something I want to explore in coming days given this is perhaps one of the few opportunities I will get to put this in practice.