We Forgot How to Sleep

It's not just our phones.

So, I had this friend from work. Let’s call her the sleep martyr.

She had a job with a big salary and a chunky title. She loved her job. She went around humble bragging about how little sleep she got. She kept a change of clothes in her office. If you actually went home to sleep at night, she quietly judged you. Unfortunately, she wasn’t that productive. She often had to rewrite reports. She forgot things. She missed meetings. It was hard to keep her focused on one topic for very long. You could almost see her thoughts pacing.

Everyone forgave her, because she put in so many hours.

This was the culture at my job. Eventually, everyone above a certain rank thrived on frothed insomnia, but they never got anything done. They drove us bonkers with their disorganized, unreadable memos and their constant emails trying to set up Zoom calls at 8 am, often the night before.

They lived in frenzy.

According to the CDC, staying awake for 17 hours feels like having a blood alcohol concentration of .05. It only gets worse from there. So it’s a little funny, but mostly sad, that my bosses thought they were superhuman when they were actually sleepworking their way through self-inflicted impairment.

The world spends $400 billion trying to get better sleep.

The sleep economy sells us hundreds of sleep aid products, ranging from supplements to special mats and pillows. Meanwhile, the internet advice world has been telling us to wake up at 5 am for nearly a decade. Listicle after listicle tells us to stop looking at our phones and go to bed earlier.

For all this advice, for all these products, we’re getting less sleep than ever. So, you probably don’t need yet another pile of words explaining what you’re doing wrong and why you have trouble sleeping.

So, what exactly is going on with us?

In short, we forgot how to sleep.

I’m no expert, but I am someone who got fed up with all the bad advice and decided to do a little of my own digging into the problem. There’s a few reasons why we’re struggling to sleep well.

Here’s the first reason:

Up to 30 percent of humans are hardwired night owls. That’s not just a stereotype or an excuse. It’s backed by science.

Humans have sleep chronotypes that determine when they feel tired and when their body decides it’s time to go to bed.

For night owls, melatonin doesn’t accumulate in our brains until much later, sometimes as late as 2 or 3 am. There’s an evolutionary reason for it. Back in the Paleolithic era, humanity needed certain members of their groups to stay up at night and guard everyone who was sleeping.

Sleep chronotypes have ensured that some of us were always awake and alert. Even now, our 24/7 economy necessitates that some of us work at night. Some of us have gravitated into these jobs, following intuition.

If you’re a night owl, you shouldn’t feel ashamed. You’re built to fall asleep later than everyone else, and that’s an asset. The answer to your problem isn’t a bunch of sleep aids or better sleep hygiene. It’s finding a job and building a life that accommodates your sleep, not the other way around. It’s also standing up to anyone in your life who thinks your sleep habits make you lazy.

They don’t.

Here’s the second reason:

Most of us have learned to consider afternoon naps a sign of laziness. Once again, that’s a myth based on a certain set of beliefs.

We’re supposed to take naps.

A substance called adenosine governs our sleep routines. It’s a biochemical alarm clock inside your brain. When enough adenosine accumulates, your brain tells you to go to sleep. You know that feeling when you literally can’t keep your eyes open? That’s not just melatonin. It’s the adenosine shuting you off. When you sleep, your brain washes out the adenosine. When it’s low enough, you wake up.

By 3 pm, your body reaches a natural adenosine high. You’re supposed to sleep for a couple of hours in the middle of the afternoon.

It’s not because you’re lazy.

It’s in your DNA.

On a related note, caffeine works by blocking your brain’s adenosine receptors. It also tells your brain to produce adrenaline and dopamine. That’s why coffee seems to keep you awake sometimes, and other times it doesn’t.

Caffeine only blocks adenosine from binding to the receptors. If you’re already feeling tired, it can’t help much. If you’re drinking coffee later in the day, some sleep experts recommend a short nap to unbind the adenosine.

They call it a coffee nap.

Here’s the third reason:

Most of us have learned that we need a certain amount of sleep every night, whether it’s eight hours or ten, only it’s not that simple.

Biologists have uncovered more than 100 areas of the human genome associated with sleep. These genes determine when we feel tired and how much sleep we need. If you’ve ever wondered why that one friend seems to get by on five or six hours of sleep, it’s because they’re wired differently.

Our sleep genes explain why no single sleep recipe or routine is going to work for everyone. That’s just not how we’re made.

We’re all different.

Here’s the fourth reason:

Most sleep psychologists agree that we sleep best at temperatures between 60 and 70 degrees. After all, we’re ice age creatures.

If you have trouble keeping your bedroom cool, then that’s probably a considerable source of your sleep problems. You might have limited options here, but it’s better to know than to keep judging yourself.

Here’s the fifth reason:

For thousands of years, most humans slept in shifts. We didn’t sleep in one big block. We broke it up into parts.

Humanity forgot about our sleep shifts until historian Roger Ekirch started stumbling across the phrase “first sleep” in old court documents. From there he found references to it in literature, diaries, and letters going all the way back to the 8th century B.C. We used to go to bed around 8 or 9 pm. We woke up around 11 pm. We did chores. We read. Then we went back to bed. Ekirch also uncovered experiments from the 1960s that found something interesting. When you remove stimulus and stress, humans went right back to sleeping in shifts.

Technology and shifting work cultures upended that natural cycle. Now everyone thinks they’re supposed to sleep in one solid block.

It’s not true.

Here’s the sixth reason:

Sometimes, your thoughts keep you up.

You’re thinking about the world’s problems. You’re thinking about your own problems. You’re dreading something you have to deal with tomorrow. There’s something eating at you. We’ve all been there.

In my experience, there’s no simple little cognitive shuffle to help with this. My own amateur solution is pretty simple. I turn out the lights, or turn them down. I put on some white noise or some ambient music. I sit and let my mind breathe. I don’t judge myself for being awake. I don’t give myself a bedtime. I remind myself that these quiet hours in the middle of the night are mine.

I can do whatever I want with them.

They belong to me.

That helps.

The truth about sleep

If you’re having trouble with sleep, it’s probably not because you have poor sleep hygiene. Our phones play one role here. It’s true that turning off your phone earlier can help in that one area, but it’s just one solution. We’ve got at least five other things going on, making it harder to rest.

We face limited options here. One thing we can all do is start respecting each other’s sleep habits. We can stop spreading sleep myths and quit reinforcing bad advice that we found on a website. We can stop acting like it’s some badge of honor that we never sleep. We can stop celebrating sleep martyrs.

Can we at least do that?