Sleep Specialists?

For the life of me, I can’t understand why Sleep Specialists seem so hellbent on preventing me from sleeping soundly. Anytime I read an article about the latest scientific discoveries on the sleep front, I can’t sleep for a week! Instead I stare at my ceiling worrying that if I can’t get a full 8 hours I’ll be dead by morning. For conceivably the most well-rested group of people on the planet, they sure don’t have a very upbeat and positive outlook on life. Would it kill them to do some sort of study that says that taking forever to fall asleep every now and again is normal and healthy? It would certainly help me sleep better at night.

I first encountered the world of Sleep Specialists a year or two into my professional career when I heard one on the radio talking about Sleep Debt. The basic gist of her argument was that not sleeping enough causes you to have Sleep Debt, which was very bad and had seriously deleterious effects on both your morbidity and your mortality. I thought this seemed redundant since bad morbidity seemed to be directly linked to bad mortality, but apparently I was in the throes of Sleep Debt at the time, so I’m sure I just wasn’t able to grasp how you could have good morbidity, but still bad mortality.

As the Sleep Specialist went on about all the insidious ways we were accruing Sleep Debt, I began to fantasize about taking a light coma for a day or two, which would surely erase a good chunk of my Sleep Debt and perhaps even lead to a Sleep Surplus. However, the bubble of my dream Sleep Economy was burst when this Sleep Specialist went on to say that sleeping in on the weekends (one of my all-time favorite pastimes and a more logical approach to erasing Sleep Debt than voluntarily entering a coma) does not help erase Sleep Debt. It only makes things worse by disrupting your normal sleep schedule, which will in turn add to your existing Sleep Debt. By the end of the interview, the Sleep Specialist seemed to be saying that there was no way to pay off Sleep Debt at all.

That night (and several after) I stared at my ceiling counting every minute I was incurring into my Sleep Debt and contemplating my mortality, not to mention my morbidity. However, I was also dealing with a thousand other questions that kept my brain from powering down for the evening. Why do they call it “Sleep Debt” if you can’t pay it off? Even the alternate term she used of “Sleep Deficit” implied there’s some way to stay in the good graces of your Sleep Creditors. Was there no one in the Sleep Specialist community who has some background in Marketing and could come up with a better term? Or are well-rested people less creative? Also, who is lending this sleep out anyway? Who do I owe my Sleep Debt to? What are the terms? Are the interest rates set by the Federal Reserve? All of these ideas and questions kept me awake for a great many hours racking up a Sleep Debt that I could never hope to repay.

Now, I’ve always been pretty good about adhering to bedtimes (on school nights at least) and getting at the very least seven hours of sleep. So, while Sleep Specialists were roaring their terrible roars and telling people that six hours of sleep was basically worthless, I was–in varying degrees of success–able to convince myself that I was probably on the whole getting enough sleep to ignore their latest calamitous study and rest fitfully.

That is until I had kids. Now, getting eight hours of uninterrupted sleep is an unheard of luxury. And on top of my own sleep worries, I now have to worry whether or not my kids are getting enough sleep. And in my time of need, when even the smallest amount of solace would help me fall back to sleep at 3am, Sleep Specialists basically shrug and connect my and my children’s poor sleep to an eventual cognitive decline in our later years. Then they had the gall to suggest that my only recourse was to go to bed early! During the Golden Age of Television no less!

Look, I understand that Sleep Specialists are scientists and they need to report on the data, but wouldn’t it be better for the overall mission of promoting sleep to give us some comforting and soothing sleep facts that we could peacefully think about before we fall asleep? I mean imagine if they cooked up some sort of study saying that people coming out of certain medically induced comas felt incredibly well-rested and refreshed. Think of all the stressful thoughts tossing around your head as you toss around your bed at night. Now imagine you could believe that a medically induced two day coma might improve your overall morbidity and mortality, increase your cognitive functions, and solve all of your problems. Think of how easy you would sleep every night picturing yourself entering a blissful coma. Why I don’t think you’d remember what your bedroom ceiling even looks like after a while because you’d be falling asleep so fast!

If Sleep Specialists really cared about sleep, this is the sort of thing they should be working on, not a bunch of doom and gloom debates about whether hitting the snooze button every morning is killing you. I think with a more positive spin, we could erase the world’s Sleep Debt, end Sleep Austerity, and look to the future of a more robust Sleep Economy that works for everyone!