As I see it, sleep is not an optional part of our existence. It is as important to our daily functioning as food. And I don’t just mean the quality of the food we eat – I mean food at all. Not sleeping is comparable to starving. It may be worse. Which is why it’s hard for me to imagine an affliction more miserable than insomnia. Here’s Tony Schwartz:
In the head of the interrogated prisoner a haze begins to form. His spirit is wearied to death, his legs are unsteady, and he has one sole desire: to sleep ... Anyone who has experienced this desire knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.
I thank my lucky constellations that, so far, I have been a pretty good sleeper. For the most part, I can sleep almost anywhere, I fall asleep fast, I sleep deeply, and I sleep for a long time. My only weakness, if you can call it that, is that I have trouble waking up.
I worry about not being able to sleep, and I worry about my worrying because I am afraid it might cause the affliction that I fear. But so far, thank Buddha, I’ve been a solid sleeper.
I am only half-joking when I say that one of the things that attracted me to my former girlfriend was her sleeping prowess. Sitting next to her in a statistics class, she would on occasion pull her hood up and just nap, snap-of-the-finger-like, barely even losing her posture except for a conspicuously tilted neck. It wasn’t that she was sleep deprived or even bored. One moment, she could be alertly engaging in a class discussion and laughing heartily at the teacher’s jokes, and the next moment she could decide that it was time for a snooze. In a weird way, this was hot. Maybe in some Darwinian way I wanted to pass good sleeping genes onto my tots. Or maybe I just liked her _fuck it, I’m napping_ attitude.
After much effort, I eventually won her favor with a combination of eccentricity and Magnum P.I., and we were together for nearly three and a half wonderful, sleepy years. We were a power sleeping couple if there ever was one. Our only weakness, again, was getting our asses out of bed.
Then I got dumped, and things changed. Of course it was a big life adjustment in general, but my sleep, surprisingly, was not affected much. At least not at first.
Here’s my sleeping history for the past yearish. The faint yellow line in the middle is the time of dumpage.
As it currently stands, I am typically heading to el sack between 3am and 4am, and waking up around 8am. I am complementing that with nightly naps from about 6pm to 9pm. I feel a bit more tired during the day than I used to, yawning and stretching more than previously, but I don’t think my colleagues would tell you that I look like I’m sleep-walking. I’m able to hold it together pretty well.
However, when I get home after work, I’m in a bit of a stupor. It’d be amusing to observe myself. What typically happens is that I let Khan out, pace around the backyard zombie-like popping some peanuts and raisins, thinking about nothing in particular, staring into space and perhaps softly chuckling about whatever’s on my mind. I probably bump into things. Eventually I round up the dog, stumble into the bedroom, and proceed to commence monster nappage. We’re talking naps that exceed 3 hours on the regular. And these are the type of naps where I wake up thinking who am I and where am I and what day is it and what am I doing with my life and why doesn’t LeBron James have a championship yet.
I developed this routine by no means intentionally. As you can see from the first chart, it slowly morphed into this, and the trend may not have ended yet. Maybe, before long, I will be taking two 4ish hour naps a day.
I have grown to really like the routine. Although the days are a little sloggier, I feel incredibly full of energy at night. My nights are awesomely productive (unless there’s a Miami Heat game on), and I feel like I’m writing (= thinking) better than I ever have been.
Being single and relatively free of nightly obligations means that I have the luxury to take monster evening naps. There’s not usually anything that I need to be awake for. Maybe my relative freedom means that my body has been allowed to find the sleeping routine it was designed for, but I wouldn’t make any such speculations. I can only say that it seems to be working for me. That’s not a recommendation, just an observation.
I’m curious to know if others who have had long stretches of sleeping freedom have had similar experiences, or if you developed a very different sleeping routine. Only if I hear about others’ experiences would I be prepared to speculate about what sleeping routine is "natural."
