My favorite local coffee shop sells merchandise brandished with their amusing slogan: "Sleep is for the weak." After petroleum, coffee is the world's most traded commodity. My spouse tells me of one of his students who sleeps with headphones on that repeat all night long the terms she is trying to memorize. From Red Bull to 5 Hour Energy, products claiming to boost one's energy proliferate. It comes as little surprise that one-third of Americans report getting insufficient sleep -- that is, fewer than seven hours a night. The CDC calls this pervasive lack of sleep a "public health epidemic."
In war zones, sleep is a casualty due to the unrelenting anxiety and vigilance required for survival. When we who live in relative safety consistently forgo sleep, we turn our everyday lives into battle scenarios that require our hypervigilance. Depriving someone of sleep is used as a torture tactic. How strangely sadistic that we inflict this violence on our own bodies by denying ourselves sufficient sleep.
On the one hand, we need sleep to survive; on the other, we often lament and resist our need for it. We feel we must "earn" a nap and may feel guilty if we "sneak" one in. We act as if adequate sleep were tantamount to indulging in a luxury. We know that good sleep, like good nutrition, is an essential component of good health, yet we don't feel we must "earn" a salad, nor do we deem a healthy meal a rare indulgence.
This curiously strained relationship with our body's need for sleep prompts me to reflect on what within us fuels this scorn for sleep, what spiritual dynamics might lurk beneath this epidemic.
Let me first say a word about my intended audience. I'm not talking to those who are in seasons of life where sleep, by necessity, comes at a premium -- those first weeks for parents after a birth, for example. I'm not talking to those who must persistently assume the exhausting task of caregiving for a sick child or parent or partner, or those whose own illnesses disturb their sleep. I'm not talking to those who must work double shifts at low wage jobs in order to meet basic needs; this brand of exhaustion is a burden foisted upon their backs. Rather, I am talking to the segment of society with a measure of privilege (which includes me) that has a choice -- whether we admit it -- between adequate and inadequate sleep.
Our fatigue is worn with the same sort of duty-bound pride as battle fatigues -- our tiredness, a badge of honor. Exhaustion is lamented in the same way that "being so busy" is -- as a sort of faux complaint. While we genuinely may be tired or busy, such remarks, however unintentionally, often serve to signal our own importance. It is decidedly uncool to admit you consistently get a good amount of sleep, which may shoot up the red flag of laziness. How valuable our time must be if sleep is sacrificed in order for the world to have a bit more of us. The world is simply too much without us.
The need for sleep challenges our obsession with control. Sleep forces us to let go. So much is beyond our control while we sleep. We can't check our e-mail or Facebook; we can't make transactions; we can't make connections or plans; we can't even think about doing anything. Sleep is one of the only human activities that requires our undivided self. As much as some may try, we literally can't do something else while we sleep but sleep. Sure, we lock our windows and doors and have smoke detectors, but we are little more than sitting (lying) ducks while we sleep. Sleep reminds us that we are all, as e.e. cummings penned, "human merely being."
The psalmist writes: "He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is your keeper" (121:4-5a). The writer envisions the Holy One as the ever-vigilant source of the people's care, making clear that the role of "keeper of your life" does not fall squarely on human shoulders. Unceasing vigilance is the Creator's domain; our striving to "neither slumber nor sleep" is to grasp for a station that is not ours. Our need for sleep means we aren't little godlike keepers of every aspect of our lives.
Sleep confronts us with our limitations. Instead of acknowledging our needs and limitations simply as part of life on this planet, we recoil at the slightest whiffs of vulnerability. Part of our disdain of our own and others' aging bodies, with our growing need for recovery time and rest, is a failure to come to terms more broadly with human finitude and dependency. We pump our bodies full of stimulants, shirk off sleep, bow to the merciless gods of productivity and fancy ourselves invincible.
Sleep is not for the weak; it is for the mortal. When we seek to defy our human finitude by overriding sleep, we harm not only our own bodies but also the broader community. Our constant striving, our unrelenting production and consumption, gives no one else room for rest either -- not the land and not its laborers.
In the natural rhythms of the earth, dormancy is part of the cycle of life. We all need rest. In order to thrive, fields must lie fallow; animals hibernate; day recedes into night. The seventh day in the Genesis account of creation speaks to this truth, as Sabbath rest is deemed a holy part of the whole creation. In Genesis, even God rests. When we scorn sleep, we get out of tune with the rest of creation, playing a dissident and foreign countermelody.
Learning to honor the body's needs as a sacred part of our design constitutes soul work. It requires moving toward an acceptance of our mortality and away from an adversarial stance against our bodies. "Great work is done while we're asleep," writes Wendell Berry. The world continues to spin -- thrive even -- without our ongoing input. We who were made a little lower than angels need not be our own slumberless keepers.
www.currentlychicago.com
Unless people don't sleep in Heaven, it seems sleep doesn't affect our spirits at all. Now our bodies are another story completely...
Sleep is more important than eating since people can fast for a month and not consume anything except pure water. Also another study showed the longer people slept, the more excess weith they lost. People need to reduce their stress so they can sleep better and longer. http://bit.ly/z0RZrm Also rooibos tea from South Africa can help people to get to sleep.
I did everything right, didn't overdo, worked out a reasonable amount, ate well, didn't take any medication.
Too little sleep for an extended time gave me Rheumatoid Arthritis, one of the nastiest and most painful chronic illnesses you can get. Then you usually get more diseases from the original one, and the meds. I got 3 more autoimmune illnesses after that, and some meds illness, such as GERD, cataracts, crumbling teeth and osteoporosis. No family history of autoimmune. Even a health food diet had little effect, just toxic meds.
You want to get depressed, try taking meds that run over $45,000 a year, just to walk to a handicapped spot. The meds cause huge weight gain and hair loss, and many of us are unable to work out. But not to worry, many of us will die younger as it goes into our lungs, etc.
Get your sleep, you won't regret it. But you may regret not getting enough.
Lisa Douglas, Raleigh North Carolina
During the day some of us are kings of all they survey; people do what they command, jump when they say jump. But in sleep they are just like the rest of us brought down to earth and equalized, their dreams no more beautiful and their nightmares no less terrifying than the man sleeping on the street.
Don’t tell me that; we are exceptional creatures, proud of the things made with our hands, proud of our ingenuity and ability to use nature to our ends. Proud of the way we have conquered nature and bent her to our will, we are almost gods aren’t we, there is no way this could back fire on us is there?
And yes, I think we have as a species over stepped our bounds to a degree, gotten too big for our britches. Lost our perspective in the warm wave of technology that flows from the mind of man and weaves a somnambulism of delusive grandeur around reality.
Which is perplexing in that, here we are, in their lord's image...but yet their creator is free the burden and limitations imposed upon us.
Also...there's too many people that pass in their sleep to put any sort of stock what-so-ever in the notion that we're being looked out for while we rest.
Finally...sleep is mental health, and yes, human spirit health as well. But no where is it a thing that can be applied to religious faith. An individual is going to believe what they're going to believe, no matter how much rest or lack there of that they get.
The word does not impy an exact copy in every respect.
As to dying in your sleep being proof that we are not "being looked out for" while we rest. The opposite, may in fact, be true.
Even as an Agnositc, I can see the logic in a loving God choosing to protect us from the horror we impose upon ourselves at the thought of our own passing, by having that passing occur while we are sleeping and will suffer no fear as we feel ourselves slipping away.