Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day. Ten times a day you must overcome yourself: that makes you good and tired and is opium for the soul. Ten times you must reconcile yourself again with yourself: for, overcoming is bitterness, and the unreconciled sleep badly. Ten times a day you must laugh and be cheerful; else you will disturbed at night by your stomach, the father of gloom.
Few know it, but one must have all the virtues to sleep well…
- the sage, “On the teachers of virtue” from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Googling “sleep” on Google News brought up 28,245 articles. Given that we spend probably anywhere from one sixth to one third of our lives sleeping, this is really not all that big of a deal, right? I mean, there is probably no other single activity that every single one of us will invest such a large portion of our lives into. And so why should we not all be obsessed, or at least interested in, how to sleep well?
I suppose the more pressing question is why so many of us sleep badly. I hope that I am not making a grand assumption about the world here but it seems as though, jet lag aside, people do have trouble with sleep. I definitely do…
OK. So what is sleep? Sleeping might seem to be the easiest activity that we can partake in—nonwithstanding the difficulties of getting there and staying there—but it is in actuality really, really complicated. Look it up on wikipedia—simply put as being the basic restful state of mammals, it actually involves really complicated physiological mechanisms that include the secretion of specific hormones, changes in the nervous system, and lots of other things that I just don’t understand. There are different phases of sleep. And furthermore there are lots and lots of theories of sleep as well. But as you can get all that information on the web, lets just think of sleep as that state in which all things go away for a couple of hours and we get a little vacation from being awake.
There seem to be two basic approaches from which people attack the sleep issue. One approach is the body as biological machine approach. It’s all about inputs and outputs and the regulation of the mechanisms that regulate the body. So, to sleep well you need to develop a routine, exercise, see the sun, drink less coffee, stop smoking, etc etc… This makes a lot of sense. And, to a certain level, it works really well.
The other approach is more psychological. Any insomniac will tell you about at least one experience where he or she was really tired before getting into bed, but somehow, turning off all the lights and actually going to bed brings up thousands and thousands of thoughts that just won’t go away. People who have this type of experience will also tell you about vivid dreams or nightmares or waking up a thousand times a night? This approach says that ability to sleep well is all about the mind—if it won’t shut up, you aren’t going to be rested. And so you know what, bring back the sage—to sleep well, you basically have to be a good person and deal with all your issues during the day so that they won’t bother you at night.
What I find most interesting about the whole conversation on sleep though is that through the lens of sleep, we really look at every part of life. Although we are talking about sleeping, as sleep is the opposite of being awake, and as being awake is when we are really living out our lives, when talking about sleep, we are actually talking about life. Every problem that arises in sleep can in some ways be seen as a symptom of a problem that we are facing in life. And so by thinking about how to sleep, we actually must think about how to live. Here’s the crazy thing though—if we look at sleep as a function of living and if we obsess over sleep, are we sleeping to live, or are we living to sleep?
OK so that’s a silly question I hope—of course we sleep to live, but what’s quite cool is that in looking at sleep and non-sleep, we see that its really a cycle. We wake up and go to bed, wake up and go to bed, wake up and go to bed—every single day.
My point is this—sleeping and living are symbiotic. While we do rest to live in theory, you can’t live without sleep and you can’t sleep without living. And even though each night, when it gets hard to turn off your brain and get it sleep it seems like a new problem, its really the exact same thing that was dealt with the night before, and the exact same thing that will be dealt with again probably in approximately sixteen to eighteen hours.
People tend to look at life linearly. Time progresses in one direction and, apart from when we fly west, we can’t go back. So we tend to think of life as moving in one direction. But, in reality, life is both a cycle and a progression. While its never the same moment twice, we are constantly brought back to moments and places that we seen and been before—holidays, birthdays, reading the morning papers or watching the evening news—even if each time these events occur the circumstances are different.
This discussion could go on forever, which would be fun, but that really isn’t the point. Rather I think the that what I am trying to say is that more just that in general, we tend to think about things as subject and object, or act and effect. Apart from sleep (and obesity), we as a society or as individuals are obsessed with doing things and getting places. I need my sleep so that I can function during the day so that I can go to work, have a career, build a life etc, etc… But what is more often than not the case is that the degree of control we have over the entire process is not as high as we think—after each action the reaction or the effect of the action quickly becomes the cause of something else. I might have gotten to sleep last night but who knew that my phone would ring in the middle of the night waking me up? Or, who knew that I would take a nap in the car and this would inhibit my ability to sleep at night? The real world is a messy place, you know?
Not being able to sleep well at night is the worst thing ever not simply because without a good nights sleep the next day is painful but really just because it seems so ridiculous to not be able to do the one natural function that a body is most inclined to do (rest, I mean). But perhaps, if we stopped worrying about how to sleep or even how to get up and just saw everything in its larger context, it would be easier. Food for thought—that’s all.
This sage with his forty thoughts is a fool, but I believe that he knows well how to sleep… His wisdom is: to wake in order to sleep well. And verily, if life had sno sense and I had to choose nonsense, then I too should consider this the most sensible nonsense.
- Zarathustra, “On the teachers of Virtue” from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra
