Sleep

Image by Christoph Sengstschmid from Pixabay

Today I felt about 10-20 IQ points smarter. I suspect there is a strong correlation to me getting a full ten hours of sleep with my boys. They had been on a vacation over at the grandparents, and on Friday I went to pick them up and stayed over the weekend. It is quite rare to get that amount of sleep as a parent and dog owner, so I made sure not to miss the occasion. Now, a funny thought has stuck on repeat: I probably did not get smarter by sleeping. I have simply got a glimpse of my normal self in contrast to the regular sleep deprived guy.

The importance of sleep is as big a no-brainer as eating or breathing. You can try to do without any of the three and see what happens. But it is maybe a bit easier to deprave yourself on sleep than on air or food. On the other hand, an interesting comparison with food is that many eat way too much ultra-processed food or other crap that is bad for you and over time I believe that will have significant effects on your health. That is a slow and silent killer, because the onset is so slow that you might not notice it. Air is also a slow killer in a similar way. Sleep, on the other hand, is something that you get instant feedback if you don’t do it. If you ever have stayed awake a whole 48 hours, you know exactly what I mean. So, most of us will find the clock hours to sleep. But what perhaps is missing is the quality of the sleep. Quantity is not equal to Quality. This weekend I was sleeping in a pitch black, dead silent room, with my two boys that I love more than anything. I said to myself that I am truly the luckiest man alive right now, going to sleep next to the little guys. I cannot think of any better-quality sleep even if I tried. So, maybe it is not just me sleeping too little on a normal basis, but rather rings on the water from a unique opportunity to recharge your batteries.

On a normal weekday I rarely get more than five to six hours. And that is probably not enough. I did some serious experimenting on myself a couple of years ago and found that the limit for me to function over time was 5 hours and 45 minutes. Any less sleep than that, and my mind started to break down. But at 5h and 45 min, albeit tired, I could function over long stretches of time. The past months I have been lower than 5,45 but I have grabbed a bit more during the weekends and overcompensated. I don’t like it though. I’d much rather sleep the same number of hours regardless of whether it’s a workday or not. Pick a sleep time that works and stick to it every single day, is what I believe works best for the body and soul.

Another problem with the sleep cycle is that we are now in the darkest month and period of the year. The sun takes a sneak peek over the horizon for a short while around noon, and then it is back to pitch black again. This makes me ungodly tired. It is dark when you wake up and it is dark when you get back home. The only sun I get is on the dog walks by lunch time and that’s it. The rest is just darkness and more darkness. Oh, how I long for the shift when the days start to get longer again. So, shouldn’t the darkness and increased tiredness make me sleep more and not less? It might be correlated to tiredness in such a way that being constantly tired reduces your productivity and that means you must work longer hours to compensate. And longer work hours equates to less sleep. It is a dark spiral, that seems to repeat every winter. The only solution I know is to take longer dog walks during lunch time, so that you get as much sunlight as you possibly can.

Anyway, I must end this blog now because my head is nodding…