SLEEP: How Understanding Your Body's Clock Can Revolutionize Your Health

I did not sleep very well last night. I woke up around three-thirty in the morning, tried to reinsert myself in my dream — without success. I finally got out of bed, contemplated my big toe for a while, and drank a CBD drink while thinking drowsy thoughts. Then I got back in bed. No luck. So I resorted to a glass of wine. Still wide awake.

This was made all the worse by my newly expanded knowledge of the consequences of inadequate sleep, courtesy of an extraordinary new book by Oxford neuroscientist Russell Foster called Life Time: Your Body Clock and Its Essential Roles in Good Health and Sleep.?

People who have slept for four hours have a higher rate of car accidents than if they were legally drunk. If you are sleep deprived, you are quite literally walking around intoxicated. But it’s not just about the cognitive impairment. When we don’t get enough sleep, we are cranky, less empathetic. We remember a higher proportion of negative experiences. Our immune systems are compromised. And as if the news couldn’t get any worse, repeated over many years, sleep deprivation appears to be carcinogenic. It gives you cancer.?

All these thoughts caromed across my skull as I failed to get to sleep, making it even harder for me to doze off. Sadly, this anxious feedback loop keeps many of us tossing and turning night after night, further raising the stakes. Russell calls this our modern sleep anxiety disorder.

American culture has a troubled relationship with sleep. Thomas Jefferson slept sitting up so he could leap out of bed after just a few hours. Edgar Allan Poe complained: “Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.” And Thomas Edison reportedly dismissed sleep as “a criminal waste of time, and a heritage from our cave days.” And of course he helped us push back that pesky sleep problem with his invention of the electric light bulb.

It seems that sleep and our American obsession with hyper-productivity are at odds. That’s certainly how I felt growing up. In my late teens and early twenties, the statement “I will sleep when I am dead” was something repeated now and then by my friends. It was a rallying cry for young “men of action” as we thought of ourselves. What I didn’t know back then was that the quote came from the musician Warren Zevon, who died of cancer at the age of 56.

Now, I don’t know anything about Warren’s sleep habits and whether they contributed to his early death. But I do know that our commitment to to working all day and playing all night, our mistaken belief that we can choose to be nocturnal animals — it flies in the face of the 24-hour biological clock that was designed, over billions of years of evolution, to dictate when we wake, sleep, eat, and do all sorts of other things.

Russell Foster has spent his career studying that clock, and he says that, like it or not, we are programmed to be active during the day and dormant at night. Yet many of us have a hard time accepting that reality. We go to bed too late and wake up too early. We rely on stimulants like caffeine and sedatives like alcohol (indeed, I made that mistake at four o’clock this morning).?

I am happy to report that I did, finally, get back to sleep. Thank god. I feel so much better. My synapses feel snappier. I can feel the extraordinary restorative power of sleep that Russell describes. It’s no wonder then that he wants us all to get more sleep, because if we do that, he says, we can live happier, healthier, funnier, and sexier lives.

Listen to the episode above, on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify . Then join us in the comments below. How you are sleeping? What sleep strategies are working for you?

Episode Notes

?? Russell Foster's?5 key insights ?from?Life Time

?? Get?your copy ?of?Life Time

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