On Sleep

How have you been sleeping lately? There is plenty going on to keep anyone up at night what with China flexing its muscles unchecked both in Hong Kong and on the Indian border, all with an eye on Taiwan, aggression that has been met by the rest of the world (and, tellingly, by the United States) with impotence. Perhaps the anger, fear and anxiety of the continued racial unrest—feelings that many African Americans have taken to bed with them nearly every night of their adult lives—is making it hard to get shut eye, combined with the cascade of images of police brutality and the mixed emotions of seeing beautifully non-violent protests gain steam even while a deadly virus threatens to spike again. For those of us in central Iowa, perhaps loud, overnight storms, with their seizure-inducing lightning strikes have roused you earlier (like hours earlier) than you're used to. Or perhaps, like Liz and I, you were recently visited by a fucking bat that decided to make its presence known at 4am last week. It is illegal to kill a bat in Iowa so I will only say that animal is out of the house but I will also say that it is difficult to go back to sleep once an encounter is over.

But how much sleep do we really need? I was given a book years ago by Katie Patterson called Damn Good Advice (for People With Talent) by a legendary ad man named George Lois. It's full of witty axioms about coming up with "The Big Idea" couched in his tales of creating much of what we think of as post-war advertising. He came up with the name "Lean Cuisine," for example, directed Muhammed Ali's legendary Saint Sebastian Esquire cover on top of a couple dozen other iconic campaigns and ideas. I turn to the book for inspiration pretty frequently but there's one piece of advice I've never forgotten, not because I've taken it but because its crazed audacity has stuck with me. "Don't sleep your life away," Lois writes. "So if you sleep eight hours a day, train yourself to sleep seven! If you sleep seven hours a day, train yourself to sleep six! If you sleep six hours a day...well, you get the point. And if you're like me, sleep only three hours a day. (I've been awake more hours than any human being alive.)"

It's that last thrown in aside that always gets me because if someone said it to you at a party—"By the way, no one one this planet has been awake longer than I have."—you'd cover your drink and make for the exit. But Lois, who will turn 89 later this month if his body doesn't simply quit on him in protest, may be right. Can anyone beat being awake 21 hours a day for the last 60 years or so?

Surely, however, George Lois hasn't been awake longer than anyone in history. According to the Bible, Methuselah lived to be 969, even if he slept a koala's 22 hours a day, he'd still far outpace Lois. So would Methuselah's grandfather Jared, no slouch at 962. If helps to be from a line of long lifers. Adam, yes that Adam, lived to be 930 and each of his descendants until the great flood pulled down at least 777 years. Enoch, Methuselah's father, takes the cake, living some 5,000 years—and counting. At the ripe age of 365 he was taken by God directly, skipping the unpleasantness of dying, which even Jesus Christ had to go through. "By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death," writes Paul, a little enviously, I bet. Descartes firmly believed that these ages were possible and that something about the flood made us forget the secret to a thousand year life. He was convinced that he just about had it figured out, then he died at 54. 

Damn Good Advice was released in March of 2012 when Lois was but 80. In February 2012, Florence Green, the last veteran of the World War I, died two weeks before her 111th birthday. I elicit a small giggle thinking of the Phaidon company, the publishers that produced Lois' book, scanning the obits every day waiting for Green to die so they could release the book with a reasonable expectation of it being accurate. When asked what it felt like to turn 110, Green said "It's not much different from being 109." Jeanne Calment, the oldest person ever recorded, said on her 120th birthday: "I only have one wrinkle and I'm sitting on it." There are several people now living at 110 or older and one would think that they've been awake longer than Lois but who knows?

Then again, Lois may outpace all of them simply by not sleeping. We are told we need eight hours a night but there are studies that show that people who get that much die younger than people with about six or seven. It's as if Lois' theory is an extension of Newton's first law of motion: an object at rest stays at rest—permanently. The aforementioned koalas sleep for nearly the entire day but only live for about ten years. Elephants, who have lifespans similar to ours, sleep for about two hours. Ants get only a few minutes a day, the envy of George Lois. This isn't to say that sleepers are less industrious. Einstein and Leonardo, hardly famed for their laziness, slept about twelve hours a day, taken in rolling naps like a cat. 

The most curious thing of all is that we don't know why we need sleep in the first place. We know that we do need it, go too long without it and you will die, but we don't know why. What could be the evolutionary benefit of lying prone and defenseless for a large percentage of the day? (on the topic of evolution, can one of you scientists on this list tell me the evolutionary benefit of brain freeze? That question has been on my anguished mind lately as the temperature rises and the lure of ice cream increases) Sleeping doesn't really save much energy, about 120 calories per night, especially considering even normal sleepers wake up somewhere between 15 and 30 times a night.

Then there are pregnant sleepers, who wake up significantly more than that. Liz and I have been taking turns waking each other up lately. At nine months pregnant, Liz isn't sleeping particularly well and for whatever reason, my capacity to nod off has similarly suffered, let's call it sympathy insomnia. The Alpine salamander can be pregnant for more than three years or, as Liz calls, "half as long as this pregnancy." Of course, we are sleeping loads better than we will a month from now when the baby is actually here but that reminds me of something else. Since I started this newsletter with Katie Patterson, I'll finish it with her as well. She told me once that when she was deeply pregnant with her first son, she complained to her mother that she couldn't wait to have the baby so she could get some sleep. Her mother, delicately, nodded and said "uh-huh."