(239353868) How Did Sleep Become So Nightmarish_ - NYTimes

3/23/2014 How Did Sleep Become So Nightmarish? - NYTimes.com

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MAGAZINE

How Did Sleep Become So Nightmarish?MARCH 21, 2014

RiffBy EVE FAIRBANKS

My experience with insomnia began when I was 6 or 7, though I didn’t recognize it as such. In those days, I thought of it as a gift. I had a window that faced east, and in the mornings, a sweet, clear light would pour over my bed, rousing me from the middle of my dreams. I went to bed late and woke up early, and when I did sleep, I slept lightly, waking many times in the night to register the clocklike clicking of a raccoon’s claws on the roof, an especially noisy frog or the breathing and muttering of the house as it rolled and shifted position with the temperature, my fellow restless sleeper.

This time I spent lying half-awake made up the most precious moments of my existence. All the ideas of the day moved in like soft clouds, then broke apart into fantasies; I felt both a gathering and an exhilarating dissolving of my identity. But my pleasure wouldn’t last long. After a few years of working life, all my perceptions of sleep and rest changed, and I began to hate and fear my insomnia. Desperate, I lined up at the pharmacy to fill one of the 60 million prescriptions written every year for chemical sleep aids in America; I became part of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have declared a full-blown “public-health epidemic.” It was amazing: What had been my life’s strangest blessing became its greatest curse.



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In the last year or two, an obsessive fixation on getting sleep — not just any sleep, but good sleep — has crept into our public consciousness. In the early 2000s, the small number of New York Times articles that referred to sleep mostly instructed new mothers on how to get their babies to nod off. Not so in 2013 and early ’14, when there were articles on how insomnia makes you fat, sleep seminars, exercising for better sleep, napping for success, sleep as depression cure and an array of new, supposedly soporific devices and products, including dozens of sleep-monitoring smartphone apps, alarm clocks that won’t wake you during REM stages, sleep-inducing chocolates, candles that crackle like fireplaces, technologically enhanced sleep masks that “switchoff your mind,” fitness bracelets that give you a sleep score (“I really want to do well in terms of sleep, I want to maintain my streak!” one user wrote) and a $12,000 sleep-enhancing mattress containing soothing seaweed and coconut husks.

There were also books, like “Effortless Sleep” and “Prime Your Mind for Sleep” and “The Secret World of Sleep”; radio specials; a Harper’s symposium; and major surveys of sleep science in The Atlantic and The New Yorker. And in keeping with the times, there are endless listicles: 10 Foods to Avoid for Better Sleep, 10 Signs You May Be Sleep Deprived, 12 Simple Steps to Improve Your Sleep, the purposes of five-, 20-, 45-, versus 60-minute naps. There’s even a website called Sleepyti.me, which helps users calculate an optimal bedtime or wake-up time, to avoid interrupting their 90-minute sleep cycles.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as a byproduct of aging baby boomers’ collective obsession with health news and the media’s willingness to indulge them, were it not for the fact that sleep in the U.S. has become a $32 billion business, according to the health-marketing analytics firm IMS Health; this includes the hugely lucrative Ambien-type drugs, sleep clinics and those candles that crackle like fireplaces (available from DayNa Decker for up to $75 apiece).



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If this onslaught of coverage has an underlying ideology, it is this: First, that sleep is absolutely critical for high performance; and second, that you can improve your sleep — but only with intense effort.

I t was actu ally an uptick in effort and microscheduling that brought on a darker insomnia for me. I had quit my staff- writing job at a magazine and decided to write freelance for a while. When you’re a freelancer, though, productivity becomes everything. It became my obsession. The longer hours I worked, the more it meant I loved my writing. I looked down on sleep as an indulgence for the indolent. Any time off from pitching articles or researching was time spent not growing my little business. I was ashamed of my tiny income, which subsequently made me ashamed of taking any rest — even an evening. I stayed up late to work, woke up early to work, got up in the middle of the night to work.

Soon enough, though, I found I couldn’t fall asleep even when I was willing. All my projects and how to prioritize them circled endlessly in my mind, giving me no rest. Some nights I didn’t sleep at all. This went on for months. Everything started to suffer. One night, after rolling over and over in bed until 4:30 without a wink of slumber, I burst into howling tears, waking my



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boyfriend, a deep sleeper who once nearly slept through a robbery in our bedroom. He begged me to relax, to prioritize rest for a change.

And I did — but not before I found the scientific studies showing that good sleep and rest would actually boost myproductivity. I was captivated by the writings of a mindfulness guru named Tony Schwartz, author of “Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys to Transforming the Way We Work and Live.” Schwartz specializes in peddling the idea that sleep and rest, paradoxically, don’t diminish our capacity for activity but actually make us better worker bees. As the chief executive of the Energy Project, he “helps companies fuel sustainable high-performance by better meeting the needs of their employees.” And mostly that means sleep.

“In a world of rising demand, rest should no longer be demonized but celebrated for its intimate connection to sustainable high performance,” he wrote in The Times last November. Full of excitement, I showed my boyfriend a Schwartz article titled, “Relax! You’ll Be More Productive.” I told him we could now take a vacation because Schwartz had shown that “for each additional 10 hours of vacation employees took, their year-end performance ratings . . . improved by 8 percent.”

My boyfriend, a South African, was completely disgusted. “You Americans don’t know how to rest,” he said. “You rest only to work better.”

I t’s tru e. An d it underpins our current obsession with sleep: We want to sleep more now not because we value sleep more on its own terms, but because we are so fixated on productivity. In a fascinating short book “24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep,” which came out last June, the culture critic Jonathan Crary writes that capitalism continually corrodes the value of sleep, positing “continuous functioning” as the ideal and pushing us to pursue “mastery” over the need to stop and rest.



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Sleep, he argues, is perhaps the only area of human existence yet to be conquered by the productivity-maximizing logic of capitalism. Twentieth-century capitalism already squeezed our sleep into an artificially compact period of eight hours. Scientific, historical and even literary evidence (pulled from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”) suggest that two separate chunks of nighttime sleep, plus daytime naps, are the more natural pattern for human beings. Electric lighting has irrevocably altered ourcircadian rhythms, and newer technologies and modes of production have done more damage. Siestas are incompatible with the assembly line or the all-night box store. (Just ask Spain, which is considering doing away with the tradition.)

The Pentagon has even been funding studies of the physiology of migratory birds to figure out how soldiers can go up to seven days sans sleep without experiencing a decline in cognitive functioning. Pills or genetic modifications that allow us to go days without sleep might sound far-fetched now, but Crary notes how many innovations by the military — microwaves, satellites, the Internet — have been widely adopted in civilian life.

But in the last year or so, we’ve actually conquered sleep in a more insidious way. We’ve shown that sleep is an element of continuous functioning. Instead of being a strange, wild, mysterious Land of Nod whose purpose we don’t fully understand, sleep has been colonized by our ambition, becoming just another zone of the day to be farmed for productivity, generating new components necessary for performance like serotonin and healthy glial cells. Crary suggests that we despise sleep because “the stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it,” but with our new science and the interventions of folks like Tony Schwartz, that no longer appears to be true. We can now sleep in order to maximize our economic value.

And thus sleep becomes just another burden. A review of one of the new sleep books says it’s “for sleep strivers,” which is,



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when you step back from it, one of the most insane phrases ever written. But I was striving for sleep for a while there. In myquest to improve my sleep, I tried restrictive diets (gluten-free, dairy-free, ayurvedic), special (and expensive) teas and drugs and meditation. I applied great concentration to this meditation, separating every thought into restful or nonrestful and volleying the nonrestful ones away, as if I were in a game of mental badminton. Needless to say, this was not actually very relaxing. But atleast I felt as if I were doing something.

There is another side to life. The side in which we don’t do, but just be. Sleep best represents this side of life. We cannot control our dreams; so often we appear in them other than we wish to be, or fear we are. It’s what I loved most about drifting in and out of sleep as a child: the sense that I was falling apart, my acting and willing self collapsing under a curious influx of thoughts and fantasies whose provenance I couldn’t figure out. By day, my life had to be purpose-driven; by night, it was reigned by mystery. The night life seemed all the more wondrous for its ungovernability.

I’m not too sure about all these studies that promise to unlock the physiological purpose of sleep. They ultimately seek to make it activity’s dutiful handmaiden. I’d rather leave sleep shrouded in its aura of mystery. After all, I got a measure of peace only when I finally stopped caring so much — when I stopped trying to discern how my sleep affected my work and let it be a wholly separate realm of experience. I said to myself: Maybe I can lie awake and still do my work fine in the morning; maybe my journey in the nighttime has nothing to do with my day’s work at all. There was a certain abandonment of ego in there, too.

The premise of all this research is that we all have greatness locked inside of us, and if only we could release our true



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potential, we could all be Richard Branson. In decades past, the secret was said to lie with those who worked harder. Now it’s with those who rest more effectively. But it’s all the same thing.A version of this article appears in print on March 23, 2014, on page MM42 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Leave Sleep Alone!.

© 2014 The New York Times Company

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