A Sense of Doubt blog post #3074 - SLEEP - The Importance of Sleep

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3074 - SLEEP - The Importance of Sleep

I like these "The Morning" editions from The New York Times. Though I am unable to read even half of the output from the Times, I often read these.

This one on SLEEP caught my attention. I related to what I read.

I have a book on my to-read book shelf that I may move up in the queue on the importance of sleep:

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

The line "bedtime is sacred" struck me the most.

I tend to go to bed very early, and I am tired, so even though I may be in bed before 8 p.m. most of the year and occasionally after 8 p.m. in the summer, I cannot read for too long before I am ready to turn out the light. Even if I delay taking my melatonin (and magnesium that helps with sleep), I am unlikely to read for more than 90 minutes before I turn out the light and often much less than 90 minutes.

As Melissa Kirsch shares in this article with her risk and reward Power Point deck analogy, I also perform complicated analysis on the benefits of something that keeps me up past my bed time. 

I signed up for summer Ultimate but have not attended due to heat, work, and a weird summer sinus infection. But the normal game times of 6 p.m. and 7 p.m. will keep me up past my normal bed time by the time I get home and shower, I am in bed at 9 p.m. or later, the time by which I am almost always lights out and asleep or falling asleep.

Concerts or other night-time activities that I used to adore are out of the question unless they are truly exceptional or if out of town, I get a hotel room.

Occasionally I stay up late on the weekend watching a movie, but this is also rare behavior.

Since I sleep with a white noise video that I turn on from the start of bed time until I get up, I have an accurate daily measurement of total bed time and a rough idea of sleep hours.

9:55:15 last night.

This video: Star Trek TNG HD Ambient Engine Noise (Idling for 12 hours 1080p)

I rarely manage to get through a night without waking up to pee, though it happens occasionally. It's a good night when I only get up once. It's a bad night when I get up more than twice. It's a really bad night when I get up a lot and do fall back to sleep soon after or never feel I really get back to sleep.

Also, I may have sleep apnea.

I have had a test kit since December, and I really need to do the test. Maybe tonight...

I guess getting up often to pee is a symptom.

Thanks for tuning in.

July 8, 2023

By Melissa Kirsch

Good morning. As we age, our needs for sleep change. Nights when we’re asleep more than we’re up can become as precious as they are elusive.

María Jesús Contreras

Turning in

How did you sleep last night? Did you slumber lavishly, temperature and temperament aligned, waking with the sun? Or was it one of those stormy-seas nights, dreams indistinguishable from waking-life worries, tangled covers, eyes on the clock?

Sleep is mysterious, although we try mightily to make it less so. We use metaphors to describe it, diaries to track it, pharmaceuticals to manipulate it. I have spent a good decade trying to find the perfect pillow.

As we age, our needs for sleep change. The forces working against our undisturbed seven to nine hours multiply. In my 20s, I decided that if I was to lead a full and exciting life, I was going to have to be comfortable going to work exhausted. This seemed, at the time, like a workable model. I didn’t think that much about sleep. I thought about waking life, about how to get as much out of it as possible, with only brief pit stops to refuel. I would stay out late, barely sleep, vault awake with the alarm a few hours later.

“By definition, if you’re using an alarm clock to wake up, then you are chronically sleep-deprived,” Dr. Indira Gurubhagavatula, a sleep specialist at Penn Medicine, told The Times’s Dani Blum. If you’re getting enough sleep, you’ll wake naturally when you’re rested.

Now, in middle age, I’m determined to rely on an alarm only when I’m catching an early flight. Bedtime is sacred, and violating it requires a PowerPoint deck describing risks and rewards and return on investment. I’m always making calculations now, talking about sleep as if it were currency, feeling always a scarcity, greedy for more. “The sleep debt collectors are coming,” Oliver Whang wrote in The Times last year. “They want you to know that there is no such thing as forgiveness, only a shifting expectation of how and when you’re going to pay them back.”

I’ve been asking people lately about how well they sleep. Their responses are complicated. Even though we know we need to practice good sleep hygiene in order to be healthy and effective, I still detect a perverse hint of pride when people tell me they don’t sleep well, as if they’re society’s noble sentinels, up all night scanning the darkness for predators. Those who say they sleep well are a little bashful, as if their easy rest bespeaks a too-cosseted mind, a too-simple life. One person said of sleep in adulthood, “I just love sleep more now than I ever have. Does that make sense?”

I knew exactly what they meant. The older I become, the more grateful I am for whatever sleep I can get. I crave the overnight mop-up, the “taking out the trash” that occurs in the brain while the body’s out. A quick nap functions like rebooting a computer; my system is haywire, so I pass out and then chime awake a short spell later, flushed of unnecessary data. I crave what Walt Whitman called “free flight into the wordless, / Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done.”

For more

Your sleep may be more messed up in summer. Here’s why. Why do women have more sleep issues than men? One potential remedy for insomnia: segmented sleep. How to use melatonin. Have you tried sticking your head in the freezer?

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2307.19 - 10:10

- Days ago = 2938 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.