Power Sleeping
The world talks about sleeping as much as any bodily function. It is clearly one of the basic necessities of life and yet few other functions enjoy such a broad range of discretion, habit and variability.
The swaddling of babies is a subject that has been much studied by child development specialists. It turns out that people from northern climes swaddle their babies very tightly and those from southern climes swaddle them very loosely. You can debate the whys and wherefores of this having to do with temperature and tradition, but the psychosocial explanation is that people in harsh climates believe that babies need to be taught from the very beginning that the world is a tough place and they need to tighten their grip on it and fly straight in order to succeed. People from southern, more temperate comates feel that loving a child and coddling the infant is the best way to make the child a good and loving person at heart and that the path to success lies along those lines. What is clear is that swaddling and the sense of security and/or comfort that it embodies has a profound effect on a child’s psychology and probably its life course.
When we are babies it’s all about length of sleep periods and how our sleep patterns affect the lives of our parents. The imagery is all about a mother or father walking and rocking us in an attempt to get us soothed and to sleep, so they can function with less sleep deprivation. One of the great old jokes is when the guy says he sleeps like a baby, he gets up and cries every two hours. That may be normal for a baby, but a sign of serious issues in an adult. I wonder what kind of studies have been done in psychology around the dreams of infancy and the dreams of adulthood. If our lives can be fully interpreted by our dreams as Freud suggests, it must matter somewhat as to what we dream about as an infant.
Given the obvious lack of accumulated life experiences (let’s assume for a moment that reincarnation is not a part of the program), infant dreams must be about one of three things. Perhaps they are dreaming about their time in the womb as the one significant experience they have had. Perhaps they are dreaming about basic needs like nourishment, comfort (hot/cold, wet/dry), recent accomplishments (diaper filling), observations of the world around them or perhaps even the sleep they are or are not getting. The last thing I can think of is that they dream about primordial things that have been imprinted on their brains through their DNA. It seems that those might relate most to expectations. All of these might be stifled or enabled by the manner in which they are swaddled at the moment.
When we turn from infancy into children, we fall under the iron fist of parental authority of bedtime discipline. The primary game in life is about getting what you want against the backdrop of parents that decidedly do not want you to get everything you want for fear of spoiling you. This is not unlike the swaddling issue. Parents are either pre-disposed to giving kids most of what they want on the theory that kindness breeds children that are kind rather than spoiled rotten. Abstinence and deprivation breed different feeling in a child and some of them may be good or bad. We used to say on the Derivatives Desk on Wall Street that you couldn’t be a good derivatives person unless your mother didn’t love you. You get the point and you undoubtedly have a perspective of where the balance between love and training comes in.
When we are in our adolescent and young adult stage of life, sleep is a major inconvenience. We are full of energy and hormones and the day is simply not long enough to accomplish all the things we need to do. Just when the body’s growth spurts are kicking in and one theoretically needs more sleep to accommodate the growth, we are pulling all-nighters to finish that paper and/or partying all night and sneaking in late and pretending to have slept peacefully like the little angel our parents want to imagine us to be. Burning the candle at both ends is almost a rite of passage and I imagine that sometimes it leads to fruitful outcomes in terms of grades, inventions, relationships or whatnot, but sometimes the best outcome is the lesson learned and the practices avoided in the future. Usually they all come at the expense of sleep.
We have already mentioned that adulthood is riddles with sleep deprivation of one sort or another. It often comes as a part of the work/life balance and whether its kids or business project deadlines that keep us up, we are reaching the realization that we need sleep more than we had realized and wish we could get more of it. Sleeping in on a weekend becomes a priority if the kids will allow it. I once stayed with a family in the Hamptons where the parents were my colleagues but were 10-15 years my seniors and their young adult kids were there as well. It was interesting because I would rise with the oldsters and chat while the youngsters slept in. Then in the afternoon when the youngsters would be rising, I would chat with them while the oldsters were napping. I felt that I was getting a glimpse of the reality of the cycle of life.
We all convince ourselves at one time or another that we are morning people or nighttime people. These imply our tendency to like rising early or going to bed late. That probably sets the pace for our lives more than anything else. The early birds are out getting the worms while the late sleepers snooze and lose. The nighttime folks always seem to have more fun and develop the best relationships but may not accomplish as much for better or worse (some who are not early risers will surely debate this).
Now as I am older, I have a very different perspective on sleep. I have slept with a CPAP machine for twenty-five years. It is a breathing machine that I believe has lengthened the lives of up to 40% of the male population that either snores or has apnea or both. Sleep clinics flourish like they never have before. I used to think this was mostly for people like me who snored, but I am told that the reasons for going are far broader than I suspected. Many people just do not sleep well for one reason or another. My wife has her bouts with being up and down. I know my mental state impacts my sleep (the “too much going on” and the “overthinking” issues being my biggest contributors). I joke all the time that I sleep soundly because I always have a clear conscience. I have no idea if there is truth to that connection, but I’ll bet it helps.
I think in these days of power brokering, the ability to help people sleep well has to be one of the greatest gifts you can bestow. Michael Jackson understood this with his adventures in Propofol. As good as that stuff is (Thank you colonoscopy anesthesiologist), it’s cheating. The power of sleep is the power to manage life optimally, and there is no greater power than that. I can only imagine if you could control dreams as well as sleep. That would be the perfecta of power tools.