Sleep Cycles

Circadian rhythms -- our own internal biological "clock" -- govern our sleep-wake cycle and several other daily rhythms of the body. It's a complicated and finely-tuned system of hormonal and bio-chemical reactions that helps us live in rhythm with the 24-hour day.

There is substantial evidence that sleep deprivation is associated with increased risk for diabetes, obesity and other chronic illnesses. Considering that chronic diseases are the leading causes of death and disability in the U.S., we should stop treating sleep as a sacrificial luxury and instead insist on it as an essential part of a healthy lifestyle.

We don't rest enough. We don't move enough. Those are the seemingly contradictory conclusions from a series of studies that got a lot of media attention this week.

The rule of thumb to improve sleep, it seems to me, is much the same as other efforts to improve our lives: We cannot control the circumstances around us but we control how we respond to them.

So why does rest get so little respect? Why do people resist getting enough sleep? Is it because a Calvinist culture thinks rest is laziness? Or is it that we don't really know what rest does?