I love sleep

I got Epstein-Barr (“mono”) my sophomore year in college and ever since then I’ve been addicted to sleep. Before then, I was a typical Stanford obsessive, working myself into pits of sleep debt that had me falling asleep in class, staring at blank problem sets for hours with complete incomprehension, and getting sick at the slightest viral provocation.

Mono stopped me in my tracks, reminded me of my fallibility, and forced me to choose the few things important enough to continue doing with my limited energies. It also scared me enough that ever since, I have kept sleep as one of my highest priorities, choosing to go to bed many times despite having “miles to go before I sleep…”

After struggling through simple tasks while sleep-deprived, it is truly a joy to approach each day with energy and concentration levels at their peak, able to put myself fully in the moment. Sometimes I find that my increased effectiveness easily overcomes any extra work that piled up when I went to sleep early; other times it doesn’t, and my resting has put me behind schedule. But my enjoyment of work has always been increased by doing it well-rested.

So it is with skepticism that I read a report about too much sleep being bad for you:

The study found people who sleep more than eight hours a night (long sleepers) and people who get less than seven hours of slumber both report more sleep complaints than people who get just the right amount of shuteye — between seven and eight hours per night.

That’s my sleep pattern, averaging over eight hours per night. Seven is definitely not enough, making getting up in the morning an unpleasant chore. After nine hours, I virtually leap out of bed, eager to start the day (which, of course, is half-over by then). But perhaps I am a unique case, filling the rest of my hours with hard cycling and commuting by skateboard. I certainly don’t have the problems the study linked to “long sleepers”:

…Compared with people who slept seven to eight hours a night, long sleepers reported more problems with falling asleep, waking up during the night, waking up too early, feeling unrefreshed when they wake up and feeling sleepy during the day.

This is probably a Culture of Fear moment, where hysteria about a minor problem hides the bigger problem–that we in the United States are piling up sleep debt faster than financial debt (no easy task), and that the cost of problems and accidents resulting from that is much greater than “waking up too early”.

If you have the symptoms above, especially trouble falling asleep (I have during times I don’t exercise but still sleep lots), then maybe try sleeping less. Everyone else, go to bed.