We’re Obsessed with Sleep. Why Are We So Bad at It?

People are obsessed with sleep.

Too little. Too much. Not the right kind. Are you dreaming enough? Is snoring a thing? Is your mattress, too soft or not soft enough? Do you need a weighted blanket, a white noise machine, blackout curtains?

Maybe it’s your bedroom. Should you have a window open? Maybe it’s the loud obnoxious city. Perhaps you should move away to some place quiet, where it’s dark, still and silent. Have you considered death as an option?

This seemingly simple thing — as natural as breathing — has spawned a wealth of new technologies all dedicated to making certain that we humans have the best sleep possible.

Increasingly, the device that is prescribed for the sleep-deprived is a CPAP machine, the acronym standing for continuous positive airway pressure.

A number of folks I know, myself included, have been diagnosed with sleep apnea. Typically, the muscles in your throat or mouth relax and partially block your airway, cutting down on oxygen. Your body staggers along for a while until the oxygen shortage becomes too dire, and then it wakes you up in order to take a breath. The consequence is that you never get a good night’s sleep because you never enter a period of deep sleep, where your body repairs itself. Or at least that’s how it was explained to me.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether you are old, young, skinny, chubby, sleep apnea is something of a universal plague at the moment. Even famous folks suffer. Type the condition into any search engine and up pops a list of celebrities and sports stars who have it. Comedians Wanda Sykes and Jo Koy have made it the butt of their routines.

The cure is almost as awful as the condition. You have to wear a CPAP mask over your face or a tube in your nose that forces a stream of air in to keep your breathing passages open. The sensation is a little like being strangled by a fire hose. Not exactly conducive to peaceful slumber.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it,” said the woman at the sleep clinic. “Some people start to really love their CPAP machine.”

Her smile sagged a little on this last statement.

To be frank, I do not love it, but I also hate being dead tired, especially the dead part. Occasionally sleep apnea will kill you. And what doesn’t kill you just makes you miserable.

Just ask any parents of a newborn baby. When my son was born, I remember greeting the sunrise at 4 a.m. with a huge sense of great relief, as it meant that another night was over. Now that he’s older, I wait for the sound of his key in the door at 2 a.m. signalling that he’s home safely and not out somewhere in the city streets getting jumped for bus money. At that point, I can turn over and finally go sleep. Whatever age they are, children will keep you awake.

But children also are not getting enough sleep. Cellphones, computers, the blue light emitted by devices is wreaking havoc. A British Medical Journal paper concluded that adequate sleep is the biggest contributor to the well-being of children and teenagers.

The deleterious effects of too little sleep on humans of all ages are well-noted. Study after study has declared the terrible things that happen when humans are deprived of shuteye.

But the modern world works against any efforts to get enough sleep. Sleep cycles changed dramatically with the invention of the electric light bulb, so you can blame Thomas Edison.

But between light, noise pollution, other pollution and the never-ending anxiety of a 24-hours news cycle, there’s a lot of things to keep you awake of late.

Human contrariness is also an issue. We are the only species that willfully goes without sleep, maintaining that, unlike other animals, we don’t need it.

But this hidden health crisis has reached such a zenith that governments are now stepping up, spanking the public and sending them to bed.

The Guardian recently reported on a leaked draft of a sleep hygiene report due to be published by the U.K.’s health secretary.

“Failure to sleep between seven and nine hours a night is associated with physical and mental health problems, including an increased risk of obesity, strokes, heart attacks, depression and anxiety,” the draft said. “As a first step, the government will review the evidence on sleep and health.”

“Clear national guidance” is needed, it added!

Of course, this is the same government soon to be headed by Boris Johnson, who looks like he rolled out of bed and fell directly on his head.

Government itself is often cause for sleepless nights. Who can sleep when Donald Trump releases a twitter storm at 2 a.m. and it’s broadcast across the media like a bad dream? The U.S. president has proudly proclaimed his need for only a few hours of sleep per night, and White House staff have dubbed his late-night tweeting time “the witching hour.”

As the Guardian article indicated, even losing one hour of sleep can have disastrous effects on one’s mental and physical health, as well as undermining the stability of Western democracy.

World leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who both boasted that they needed only a few hours of sleep every night, went on to develop dementia, and Trump may not be far behind. If he’s not there already.

A full uninterrupted eight hours used to be the turf of the terminally lazy. Go-getter types rose with the sun and didn’t crash until the wee small hours. But things have changed, and ample sleep has become the province of the privileged. Anyone wishing to function at the top of their respective fields, whether an athlete or a surgeon, benefits enormously from eight to 10 hours of quality sleep.

Even sleep during the daytime is a happening thing, with napping touted as another cure-all, adding years to your life, sharpening your mental faculties and making you infinitely more pleasant to be around. You need only look at animals to realize that sleeping all day is what most creatures like to do, so why are humans so different?

With the aid of our wondrous technologies, we can flout the rules of the universe for a time, but it makes us so tired. A number of sleep experts have stated the human ability to ignore the dictates of evolution has serious consequences. You can only overdraw from the sleep bank for so long before severe penalties must be paid.

There are few things more agonizing than trying to stay awake when you are exhausted, as any first-year medical resident will tell you. But the long-term effects of getting less than seven hours per night are actually terrifying. From Alzheimer’s to cancer to diabetes, the less you sleep, the greater your chances of developing some terrible condition. Depression, suicidal thoughts and anxiety all skyrocket with less sleep.

And then there is the emotional aspect of sleep deprivation. Ask anyone who’s in pain or grief, and the only thing they want to do is sleep, to let oblivion blot out the reality, if only for a few hours. Sleep is escape.

The times I’ve been the most stressed in my life, a strange urge to go to sleep stole over me. In boardrooms, in the middle of especially tense work meetings, I had to resist the urge to put my head down on the table and just go to sleep. The experience was so weird that it stayed with me.

When you don’t get enough of the stuff, you start to crave it like a drug, an escape hatch from life, a chance to turn off your spinning frantic consciousness and check out for a bit. It’s little wonder that sleep deprivation is often used as a form of torture. One of the cruellest things about the horror of the migrant camps on the U.S. southern border is the fact that people — including children — can’t sleep properly as lights blaze around the clock.

The older you get, the less sleep you may need, theoretically. Along with all the other things ebbing away — vision, hearing, teeth, hair, the ability to understand Instagram — the need for sleep also changes. I often wake up on the dot at 2:58 a.m. and lie there, dividing my life into 10-year chunks, and realizing that there’s only a couple of chunks left to go. After that, sleep doesn’t come all that easily.

With mortality lurking in the darkest corner of the room, what else is there to do but hurl a bunch of gadgets at it? But the effect is a little like throwing confetti at a charging rhino. All the poofy mattresses and sleep apnea machines in the world don’t change the fact that the big sleep is coming.

It actually sounds kind of peaceful.