Miscellaneous

Sleep

By jeremyblachman

I hate to bump my Spitzer post down on the page, but I suppose I would have to eventually.  Anyway -- there's an article in the Washington Post about sleep, and how Americans may not be as sleep deprived as initially thought.  It says we get an average of 8.5 hours a night.  Which, I expect, is significantly more than most people think the average person gets.  And the article points out that unemployed people skew the number higher, because they have more time to sleep, and the elderly too, and that there's a whole lot of people getting six hours of sleep or less....

I like sleep.  A lot.  I think I'm still making up for a sleep debt incurred in high school, when I had to get up at a quarter to six and ride on a bus for two hours to get to school.  I'd sleep a little more on the bus, but not terribly restful sleep, and I'd be tired in class, and I'd be tired on the way home, and then on the weekends my body was so used to getting up early that I couldn't really sleep past 7 or 7:30... it was pretty terrible.  I think I tried to get to sleep by 10:30 or so, but even that only gave me 7 hours.  I appreciate -- now -- the education I got in high school, but at the time it sucked to have to commute so much, and even though it all worked out super well with getting into a good college and feeling well prepared for it and all of that, if I had a child in the same situation, I'd try to find a better solution.  I was really happy when I got to college and realized that even for an "early" class, I could wake up almost three hours later than I was waking up for high school.  And that the "commute" shrunk from two hours on a bus to a ten minute walk.

It wasn't really until college, and being able to better control how many hours I'd sleep, that I realized I absolutely feel so much better with more sleep.  My mood is different, I'm happier, I notice I'm much more patient... I'm actually not sure I'm more productive, but it may just be that when I need to be productive, I end up getting less sleep, so the variables are interacting with each other.  When I summered for the law firm, I lived at home and had about a 90 minute commute each way.  And with some of the summer associate events, I wouldn't get home until late and there were days I would be going on 6 and a half or 7 hours of sleep.  I could absolutely feel the difference.

At this point I'm definitely spoiled because of my schedule, and probably average about 9 hours of sleep, which is awesome.  I'm sort of worried that when I do find myself in a more structured existence (and hopefully I will before too long), it'll be harder to get those 9 hours.  But I feel like at this point my body has grown to like and appreciate sleep so much that I'll fight for those 9 hours even if it means sacrificing some TV or reading or whatever relatively pointless things I'd otherwise be doing with myself.  I think my body is starting to think I'm training for the sleep olympics or something, because it's building up a tolerance.  9 hours feels like 8 hours used to, and to really feel awesome, I sometimes feel like I need to push it to 9 and a half or ten.  On Saturday I went to bed at 9:45 and got eleven hours of sleep.  And wrote fourteen pages of script on Sunday.  So maybe there really is a correlation.  OK, I should go to sleep so I can write fourteen more pages tomorrow.  Eleven hours would put me awake at... way later than I'm going to wake up...

It's totally bizarre to me how some people can get by on five hours of sleep or something like that.  I've never, ever been able to do that, not even for one night.  I think I would just fall asleep doing whatever it was I was doing, I guess.  I mean, I'm tired with 8 hours, so 5 would just make me cry. 

Full post as published by Jeremy Blachman's Brand New Weblog on March 12, 2008 (boomark / email).