May 6, 2022 • 26 mins
Is insomnia really a problem of modern life... or is the struggle for sleep older than you think?
It's a common lament: this new world of smartphones and constant connectivity makes it nearly impossible to get enough sleep. But Shakespeare's characters were up all night, sleepwalking, and freaking out about their daily lives. Just how have our sleeping patterns really changed since the invention of the electric light?
Dessa dives deep into the science of sleep to find out what we need, what we're missing, and why it can be so hard to get a full night's rest.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
That is the sound of a fake fireplace. But I
sometimes play on my real iPhone when I really can't sleep.
As a slumberer, I would give my performance a sea.
I sometimes have trouble falling asleep, and I almost always
have trouble staying down in my apartment. I've hung blackout drapes,
stocked the pantry with melatonin, and have tried every variety
(00:28):
of self hypnosis trying to force quit consciousness. When I'm
on tour, I'll collect all of the hotel pillows and
build a pyramid of them on my face, trying to
block out whatever it is it is keeping me awake
at five am. This is deeply human. I'm Dessa, and
if you can hear the sound of my voice, then
(00:48):
you are awake. And I hope that's on purpose, that
you're not just whiling away some exasperated minutes in the darkness,
the dreaded morning bird song wooming every nearer, trying to
coax your rescue dog of a brain to do the
reasonable thing and come light down for a while. The
question of those angst written hours, and of this program
(01:09):
is why can't I sleep? We often hear that screens
and stress are to blame. But how much of our
insomnia is really a product of the modern lifestyle. How
much and how well to humans sleep? And why does
so many of us struggle with sleeplessness. Let's begin with
a little science. Let's talk body clocks. I work very
(01:31):
closely with blind veterans UK and these extraordinary individuals who
have lost their eyes as a result of combat or disease.
They're essentially time blind. Not only have they lost their
sense of sight, but they've also lost their sense of
time because the eye isn't able to detect the light
dark cycle and set the internal master clock within the brain.
(01:52):
That is Russell Foster, director of the Sleep and Circadian
Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford, and that term circadian.
It's the external light dark cycle, particularly at dawn and dusk,
that is detected by specialized receptors within the eye, which
then set the master clock within the brain, and that
(02:13):
allows us to be beautifully attuned and aligned to the
external world. Does our body know already that the day
is twenty four hours long or does it learn that
when we arrive on the planet. This is what's I
think so extraordinary, because the internal clock is a subcellular
molecular clock. So we could take almost any cell in
the body, put it in a dish and monitor its activity,
(02:35):
and it would show a near not exactly, but a
near twenty four oscillation. Russell is something of a sleep evangelist,
very pro sleep, and he's enthusiastic in describing the manifold
functions and benefits of getting a full night of it.
It's memory, consolidation, the processing of information. Some really important
data that's emerged recently has been the clearance of toxins
(02:58):
and particularly some misfolded proteins the plaques which have been
associated with the development of Alzheimer's. Sleep also plays a
role in keeping the immune system healthy. Studies have emerged
in the last few years showing that if you are
tired or sleep deprived prior to or immediately following an
inoculation for a vaccine, then your antibody response is actually
(03:23):
reduced if you're chronically tired. Russell thinks that sleep is
well slept on. Modern society doesn't value or prioritize it
as it should. We have become industrial creatures in the
past what two hundred years, and most rapidly since the
nineteen fifties, with a massive commercialization of cheap light at
night for electric light, we've invaded the night, and in
(03:46):
the process we've abandoned sleep. So we're fighting against millions
and certainly hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary biology,
which is embraced sleep. And it's really interesting to think
how sleep was considered in the medieval parade. Historical records
suggest that in many parts of the medieval world, a
(04:09):
segmented pattern of sleep was the norm. People essentially slept
in two shifts. The first would last for a couple
of hours, and then you'd get up and maybe do
some work, or eat, or drink or pray, have sex,
visit with the neighbors or whatever. And in English, this
period of the night was sometimes called the watch. Then
you'd go back to bed for a second longer sleep
(04:30):
till morning. Historically, sleep has been prized, says Russell. In
the Elizabethan era, people were practically writing love poems about it.
I just think of Shakespeare the honey heavy dew of slumber, Sleep, sleep,
nature's softness, Have thy forsaken thee We intuitively seemed to
(04:50):
embrace sleep. But wait a minute, Wait a minute, because
I mean Shakespeare, hold On, Macbeth is an insomniac, right,
his life is a sleepwalker. Falstaff has sleep apnea. The
guy with the best take on on sleep as Hamlet,
as he's comtemplating suicide like everybody wants it and nobody's
getting it. It seems like that was true even in
Shakespeare's time. Absolutely, but they realized that if they weren't
(05:14):
getting it, they were in trouble. And now we actively
fight against it. At least in Shakespeare's time, the insomniacs
had the sense to lament what they were missing, whereas
now we might wear a sleepless night is a badge
of honor, proof positive that we stay grinding, and everybody
from Martha Stewart to Loewayne brags about how a few
(05:36):
hours they spend asleep. Okay, but let's pause on the
historical and cultural analysis for a second. Let's turn to Moody,
our sheet, a real life insomniac. If I were to say, hey, Moody,
(05:56):
what's your sleep life? Like? What are you say to me?
I'd really just like burst into tears. I have a toddler,
I have anxiety, and we've just moved, and my sleep
pattern is a feeling afraid in my bed is definitely
something that is familiar to me these days. Is it
(06:16):
like essentially a thresholding thing that It's like all of
the ghosts of my errors, concerns, and fears haunt me
around the clock, but I'm distracted from them in the
daytime hours, whereas they have top billing. At night, when
everything is dark and quiet, there are no other stimuli.
There are no distractions, or no people to keep alive,
(06:36):
or dogs to feed or phone calls. You're really alone
with your thoughts, and for me, that kind of amplifies
anything that's going on in my head. I'd say at
night anxiety is worse, which exacerbates sleep issues for sure.
But Moody's perspective on insomnia is informed by a lot
more than just personal experience. I'm a historian of the
(06:57):
ancient Middle East, ancient Assyria and Babylonia and the other
civilizations that occupied what we call ancient Mesopotamia, the land
between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, which is now where
Iraq and Syria are. Did people suffer sleeplessness in the
same way, as near as you can tell, I think
it's hard to say for sure, but I do think
(07:18):
there are lots of common denominators in the kind of
contexts for sleeplessness, like feeling anxious or feeling depressed, or
experiencing other elements of mental distress. That link between anxiety
and sleep problems is worth underlining. The sleep Foundation in
the US notes the possibility of a vicious cycle. It's
hard to fall asleep if you're anxious, and then being
(07:41):
tired just increases the next day's anxiety. But how exactly
does Moody know about the complaints of people who did
their sleeping thousands of years ago? As it turns out,
she's got firsthand accounts ancient medical texts written in terra
cotta colored clay in a language called Acadian. Day to day,
I'm looking at someone's drawing of one of these objects.
(08:05):
But when I get to actually go to a museum
and look at one of these texts, it's a clay manuscript,
so it's a clay tablet. Some of them are sort
of the size of an iPhone, but the medical texts
are usually a little bit bigger, like a very geometric
looking writing system. Acadian is kind of like the great
great grand dad sort of grand aunt of Arabic, Hebrew,
(08:29):
Modern Assyrian, Aramaic, other Semitic language family groups. Can you
read Acadian? I can, and I love it. It's such
a beautiful language. An enormous number of these primary texts
have survived for thousands of years, so you've got a
real portal into the daily lives of people whose stories
otherwise might have been lost to history. The quite famous
(08:53):
library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh was set on fire in
the ancient world as part of a sacking of the city,
and that bizarrely perhaps preserved all the tablets perfectly. An
ancient Mesopotamia as now, people might suffer insomnia for a
variety of reasons. Somebody might complain of a bodily ailment
(09:16):
that's keeping them awaken night. Yeah, so there's a description
of the person. My spleen hurts and I can't sleep. Um,
where is my spleen? I don't know where. I don't
know what where not a clue, or there might be stressed,
a condition which seems to have an etymological connection to
insomnia in the Akkadian language, so delipped too. It's a
(09:37):
noun that means sleeplessness or can sometimes mean just being
troubled in some way. What are the odds that we
can get delipped to trending on Twitter? I would say
pretty high considering stuff going on in the world, or
trouble sleeping might have been a symptom of a larger issue,
a cluster of complaints associated with a serious ailment. The
(09:58):
Assyrians didn't have a sense of journey is pathogenic vectors
for them. Sickness was often understood as the product of witchcraft.
You got sick because somebody put a spell on you.
What we call anti witchcraft texts basically descriptions of medical
experiences caused by witchcraft, and then the corresponding rituals or
(10:18):
incantations and medical prescriptions to deal with those issues. There's
a particular text that Moody thinks links insomnia with heartbreak,
which is an association that will probably be familiar to
anybody who has stayed up late at night scrolling the
social media account of your ex guys new girl. The
treatment involves the patient reciting like a prayer incantation addressed
(10:43):
to Ishtar, the goddess of love and war and ancient Mesopotamiam,
and in that he says and it is a heat.
I am tired, I am exhausted, I am ill, I
am vexed, I am sleepless, I am scared. That sounds
like a I don't know, it sounds like a mash
about a new Phoebe Bridgers record. Like that sounds like
the hook you know, super relatable. Ah aheah, I am
(11:25):
I am, I am see science. Okay, big shout out
here to Andy Thompson, musical genius for that bit of
bittersweet guitar on short notice. Oh. Now, as you may
(11:49):
already know, the consequences of not getting enough sleep can
be pretty ugly. Let's go back to Professor Russell. There's
now a very important link between chronic sleep deprivation and cancer.
It's a global impact on health. Lack of sleep in
the long term can result in a big list of
garbage outcomes for both mind and body. Fluctuation in moods,
(12:09):
increased irritability, anxiety, loss of empathy. We failed to pick
up those social signals from friends and colleagues. One very
important factor, of course, is risk taking an impulsivity. Cognitive
impairment due to sleep deprivation has made history and some
of our most memorable disasters. Think of the famous images
(12:31):
from January when the US launched the Challenger Space Shuttle.
We have a report from Leaply Dynamic confter that the
vehicle has exploded. By Director confirmed that we are looking
at checking with the recovery forces to see what can
be done. At this point, the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster
(12:52):
was a failure to appreciate consequences, and that's really very
clear as a result of relatively short amounts of sleep disruption.
An investigation was launched to try to understand the cause
of the explosion, and a report from the Human Factors
Subcommittee listed severe sleep deprivation of NASA managers as a
(13:13):
contributing factor. And in your own life, you've probably noticed
that being super tired makes you less effective at whatever
it is you're trying to do. I suck when I'm tired.
I really suck. I'm very sensitive. But would you get
in the color and drive? I know, I'm a touring musician, right,
that's my my night job, I guess. And in the
(13:36):
beginning of my career, the way that we used to
treat night drives was super cavalier. Super cavalier, right. Everyone
was worried about had you had too much to drink,
but nobody was worried about how exhausted are you? And
then I think collectively a lot of people, at least
in my community learned because we were terrified of the
Stories of flipped van's night drives really scare me. I've
(13:59):
definitely been in a vehicle where somebody has drifted off
and the car has drifted onto the rumble strip. Because
the thing is, when you really need sleep, you can't
resist it through sheer force of will, Like physically, you
cannot stop yourself from nodding off. Yes, a micro sleep
is this sort of uncontrollable falling asleep so you can
actually be driving. There are these overwhelming, uncontrollable falling asleep
(14:21):
episodes because you're chronically tired, and a lot of people
have experienced these micro sleeps. Figures shared by the CDC
report that one adults drivers in the US say that
they've fallen asleep while driving in the past thirty days,
and drowsy driving contributes to over a hundred thousand accidents
annually in the US. Being chronically tired can be particularly
(14:44):
hasitous for people who work long hours or late into
the night. Think of the insane schedules of medical professionals.
Well tired nurses and doctors do not perform the same
way that well rested nurses and doctors do. The amount
of time on the night shift can have a big
effect upon accident rates and harm to patients. If sleep
(15:06):
is so important, then why aren't we valuing it? Why
is low Wayne writing a song called no Sleep? Also
incidentally the titles of songs by a bunch of other rappers.
And Martha Stewart is bragging about running on four hours
a night. I think he goes back to a rather
puritan time when work was was virtuous, and therefore, because
(15:26):
when you're sleep, you can't work, sleep must be bad.
In her book Insomnia, a Luned Summers, Bremner notes that
Dutch Calvinists demanded that sleep be indulged in only in moderation,
and I quote English preachers of the seventeenth century made
(15:49):
sleep into the equivalent of moral disorder, which is heavy.
So let's go someplace untouched by Puritanism to see how
humans sleep there. I've actually spent extended field work in
multiple sites, probably close to a year in Bolivia with
the chimane, maybe about three or four months with the
(16:12):
san people in in the Kalahari also sometimes called the bushman,
and more recently, I've spent maybe about three or four
months with the Hadza in Tanzania, who are also hunter gatherers.
That is. Gandhi as an anthropologist who studies the sleep
habits of people who are not concerned with calvinism or
screen time or corporate burnout. Gandhi conducts his research by
(16:35):
asking a lot of questions, how tired were you when
you went to bed, do you have any dreams? Did
you wake up during the night? And he asks study
participants to wear an accelerometer, a device kind of like
a fitbit that records their patterns of physical activity. These
are populations where people don't have money, they don't have
indoor plumbing. Most of them today live in relative isolation,
(16:56):
and they certainly don't have a nine to five work schedule,
which is what makes them useful for your studying sleep.
You are living with people who are in smaller communities,
aren't connected to the grid in the same way that
we are. Are They sleeping like, you know, ten hours
a night and uninterruptedly and waking fresh faced every day?
(17:17):
Like what is their sleep experience? Compared to ours. Actual
sleep duration would be somewhere around six to seven hours
per night, which is actually pretty much the same pattern
we have in the US. If that surprises you, me too.
A lot of us somewhere along the way picked up
the number eight. You're supposed to get eight hours of
(17:38):
shut I every night, but recommendations from the National Sleep
Foundation highlight how that changes over the course of development.
Newborns are supposed to get fourteen to seventeen hours a day,
which makes them horrible Dutch Calvinists. For adults, the recommendation
is seven to nine hours, but the need varies from
person to person and night tonight. The right amount of
(17:59):
sleep for you is the amount that enables you to
wake up well rested and ready for the day. Gandhi
has recorded a notable difference, though, in the time that's
earmarked for sleep in the communities he studied if they
spend more time in bed. Time in bed is your
conscious decision, and sleep duration is not a conscious decision.
(18:23):
That means they don't have to optimize their horizontal hours
to ring every minute of rest out of them like
there's a comfortable margin of air. Do you have a
confident answer to the question what is normal human sleep?
Normal human sleep fits into your day, like you don't
shape your day around your sleep, you shape your sleep
(18:43):
around your day. When people ask me from the other side,
like why study sleep, my new elevator pitch is that
the only things that are important in your life will
affect your sleep. So if something really great happens, you're
staying up late, that affects your sleep. If you're really
troubled by some thing and you're feeling anxiety, that affects
your sleep. If you've ever read a magazine about getting
(19:04):
better sleep, you've probably been told how important it is
to have a routine to keep your bedroom a sanctum
for rest. However, I've found that consistency from night tonight
is totally a Western recommendation thing. When you have the
ability to control your environment, you can try to do
things like that and sleep at the same time every
(19:26):
night and have these routines and rituals to kind of
get yourself into the mood to sleep. But in the
environments I've been working in, people don't have that level
of control. It's the environment that tells them when to sleep,
not their own ritual. Are the populations that you've spent
time with. Are they as frequently tired as people who
are living in industrial societies? Definitely not. They are more
(19:49):
rested and less tired. Why I think that your sleep
and your awake have to kind of reach this dynamic equilibrium.
I think it's kind of where in our populations in
the West, where time is money, you really push yourself
and you really take this flexible phenotype of sleep that
(20:10):
we we have the biological capacity to limit it to
pursue waking activities, and we really stretch it as far
as it can possibly go to the point where we
start suffering consequences. Humans are made of flexible stuff. We
adapt our schedules and lifestyles to our particular circumstances, and
(20:32):
modern schedules have stretched the elastic about as far as
it will go without starting to fray. I think that
it's almost like diabetes, because we achieved something as a
society where food is so plentiful and sugar is so
abundant that we now get sick from it. That we're
so good at staying up late after dark and making
(20:53):
good use of that time, that now that we're all
chronically sleep deprived, we just push and push push ourselves
really freaking hard. The brain can become so tired it
can't detect how tired it is, and we fool ourselves
spectacularly into thinking you're perfectly okay, but actually your cognitive
abilities are really really on the floor. That, of course
(21:17):
is our guy rustling in. So what steps can we
actually take to improve our sleep lives? Get as much
natural light as possible, particularly in the morning. It sets
the body clock, which sets the sleep wake cycle, and
morning light is really good for stabilizing Most people skip
the sleeping pills. All of the currently available sleeping tablets
(21:38):
have the problem that they sedate you. They don't provide
a biological mimic for sleep, and don't get too caught
up in the sleep apps and all their color coded analytics.
Some of the problems that people are getting with commercially
available apps are really sending them into a tail spin.
One person came up to me before COVID and said,
my app is telling me I don't get any slow
(21:59):
way sleep. And so this chap actually would wake himself
up at three o'clock in the morning to check how
much slow wave sleep his app was telling him. At first,
of all, these apps are really bad at telling us
about slow wave sleep and all the rest of it,
and we don't even really understand what slow wave sleep
is for, so roughly, when did you go to sleep,
when do you wake up? How many interrupts in the night.
(22:20):
That's kind of useful information, but I think more than
that you can be misleading and in fact, really rather harmful.
It generates more anxiety. So take him with a pinch
of salt. God, it does have a real cool, like
fireplace sound that I got super into here, but it's
like so much of technology, it's deeply seductive, all right, James,
(22:42):
James hit me. Oh that's a nice It's just a
nice How could you not like that? Okay, cut it.
I don't want anybody falling asleep before done. Given that
sleep is so fundamental, I mean, why is it that
(23:04):
we suck at getting enough of it? Sleep is just
another victim of human arrogance that we're above the grubby
world of biology. We're not. We expect to do whatever
we want, whatever time of day, and we now know
that that's not possible. I think things are changing now.
We appreciate and the society is appreciating the incredible value
(23:24):
of sleep. I've noticed that shift to friends, colleagues, famous
people that I follow online all seem to be recognizing
the importance of rest. The NAP Ministry, which frames rest
as a form of resistance, has almost halfamillion followers on
Instagram alone, which can be called comfort if you're walking
down a mental staircase in your head at three am,
(23:46):
furious that your body seems so reluctant to meet its
own biological imperative. A final thought from Moody are insomniac
seriologist is an amazing phrase during a hard night can
bed knowing that you need rest unable to get it?
Have you recited that incantation? I have tried a lot
(24:06):
of things, but I haven't tried that, And you've just
given me the idea why not tonight? Tonight is the
night a star you'll be hearing from me. We may
struggle to sleep because we're anxious, and then struggle to
quell our anxieties because we're tired. Hashtag to lip too,
and more generally, we struggle because we've tried to slot
(24:27):
sleep into a neat little window in our schedules. We
expect ourselves to do it on command, at the hour
that is most convenient for the rest of our more
important lives. But falling into sleep like love is not
entirely self determined. You can only set the mood and
then make way for time and gravity to do their work.
(24:51):
And that My far Flown Friends is our last program
of Deeply Human second season, which means it's time to
roll credits. So why don't you just why don't you
just tuck in and we'll do this a s m
R style. Our series producer is Simon Maybin. Producers are
our Len Gregorio's Ellie House, Beth Sagar Fenton, Sandra Kenthal,
(25:17):
and Craig Templeton Smith with help from Hannah au Guru
and May Cameron. Our editor is Hugh Levinson. Our production
coordinator is Janet Staples, and this season was mixed by
my arrival, James Beard. Speaking of James, will you hit Oh,
(25:38):
they're good. I'll give you that. You're very talented arch
enemy who really strives for excellence and takes brightness work.
Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American public
media co production with I Heeart Media. It's written and
hosted by me Dessa. Find me online at Dessa on
Instagram and Dessa Darling on Twitter, Okay, James, James, Okay
(26:11):
they're out. Let's call get another dessert and watch scary
movies with swear words. God, being adults is awesome.
That is the sound of a fake fireplace. But I
sometimes play on my real iPhone when I really can't sleep.
As a slumberer, I would give my performance a sea.
I sometimes have trouble falling asleep, and I almost always
have trouble staying down in my apartment. I've hung blackout drapes,
stocked the pantry with melatonin, and have tried every variety
(00:28):
of self hypnosis trying to force quit consciousness. When I'm
on tour, I'll collect all of the hotel pillows and
build a pyramid of them on my face, trying to
block out whatever it is it is keeping me awake
at five am. This is deeply human. I'm Dessa, and
if you can hear the sound of my voice, then
(00:48):
you are awake. And I hope that's on purpose, that
you're not just whiling away some exasperated minutes in the darkness,
the dreaded morning bird song wooming every nearer, trying to
coax your rescue dog of a brain to do the
reasonable thing and come light down for a while. The
question of those angst written hours, and of this program
(01:09):
is why can't I sleep? We often hear that screens
and stress are to blame. But how much of our
insomnia is really a product of the modern lifestyle. How
much and how well to humans sleep? And why does
so many of us struggle with sleeplessness. Let's begin with
a little science. Let's talk body clocks. I work very
(01:31):
closely with blind veterans UK and these extraordinary individuals who
have lost their eyes as a result of combat or disease.
They're essentially time blind. Not only have they lost their
sense of sight, but they've also lost their sense of
time because the eye isn't able to detect the light
dark cycle and set the internal master clock within the brain.
(01:52):
That is Russell Foster, director of the Sleep and Circadian
Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford, and that term circadian.
It's the external light dark cycle, particularly at dawn and dusk,
that is detected by specialized receptors within the eye, which
then set the master clock within the brain, and that
(02:13):
allows us to be beautifully attuned and aligned to the
external world. Does our body know already that the day
is twenty four hours long or does it learn that
when we arrive on the planet. This is what's I
think so extraordinary, because the internal clock is a subcellular
molecular clock. So we could take almost any cell in
the body, put it in a dish and monitor its activity,
(02:35):
and it would show a near not exactly, but a
near twenty four oscillation. Russell is something of a sleep evangelist,
very pro sleep, and he's enthusiastic in describing the manifold
functions and benefits of getting a full night of it.
It's memory, consolidation, the processing of information. Some really important
data that's emerged recently has been the clearance of toxins
(02:58):
and particularly some misfolded proteins the plaques which have been
associated with the development of Alzheimer's. Sleep also plays a
role in keeping the immune system healthy. Studies have emerged
in the last few years showing that if you are
tired or sleep deprived prior to or immediately following an
inoculation for a vaccine, then your antibody response is actually
(03:23):
reduced if you're chronically tired. Russell thinks that sleep is
well slept on. Modern society doesn't value or prioritize it
as it should. We have become industrial creatures in the
past what two hundred years, and most rapidly since the
nineteen fifties, with a massive commercialization of cheap light at
night for electric light, we've invaded the night, and in
(03:46):
the process we've abandoned sleep. So we're fighting against millions
and certainly hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary biology,
which is embraced sleep. And it's really interesting to think
how sleep was considered in the medieval parade. Historical records
suggest that in many parts of the medieval world, a
(04:09):
segmented pattern of sleep was the norm. People essentially slept
in two shifts. The first would last for a couple
of hours, and then you'd get up and maybe do
some work, or eat, or drink or pray, have sex,
visit with the neighbors or whatever. And in English, this
period of the night was sometimes called the watch. Then
you'd go back to bed for a second longer sleep
(04:30):
till morning. Historically, sleep has been prized, says Russell. In
the Elizabethan era, people were practically writing love poems about it.
I just think of Shakespeare the honey heavy dew of slumber, Sleep, sleep,
nature's softness, Have thy forsaken thee We intuitively seemed to
(04:50):
embrace sleep. But wait a minute, Wait a minute, because
I mean Shakespeare, hold On, Macbeth is an insomniac, right,
his life is a sleepwalker. Falstaff has sleep apnea. The
guy with the best take on on sleep as Hamlet,
as he's comtemplating suicide like everybody wants it and nobody's
getting it. It seems like that was true even in
Shakespeare's time. Absolutely, but they realized that if they weren't
(05:14):
getting it, they were in trouble. And now we actively
fight against it. At least in Shakespeare's time, the insomniacs
had the sense to lament what they were missing, whereas
now we might wear a sleepless night is a badge
of honor, proof positive that we stay grinding, and everybody
from Martha Stewart to Loewayne brags about how a few
(05:36):
hours they spend asleep. Okay, but let's pause on the
historical and cultural analysis for a second. Let's turn to Moody,
our sheet, a real life insomniac. If I were to say, hey, Moody,
(05:56):
what's your sleep life? Like? What are you say to me?
I'd really just like burst into tears. I have a toddler,
I have anxiety, and we've just moved, and my sleep
pattern is a feeling afraid in my bed is definitely
something that is familiar to me these days. Is it
(06:16):
like essentially a thresholding thing that It's like all of
the ghosts of my errors, concerns, and fears haunt me
around the clock, but I'm distracted from them in the
daytime hours, whereas they have top billing. At night, when
everything is dark and quiet, there are no other stimuli.
There are no distractions, or no people to keep alive,
(06:36):
or dogs to feed or phone calls. You're really alone
with your thoughts, and for me, that kind of amplifies
anything that's going on in my head. I'd say at
night anxiety is worse, which exacerbates sleep issues for sure.
But Moody's perspective on insomnia is informed by a lot
more than just personal experience. I'm a historian of the
(06:57):
ancient Middle East, ancient Assyria and Babylonia and the other
civilizations that occupied what we call ancient Mesopotamia, the land
between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, which is now where
Iraq and Syria are. Did people suffer sleeplessness in the
same way, as near as you can tell, I think
it's hard to say for sure, but I do think
(07:18):
there are lots of common denominators in the kind of
contexts for sleeplessness, like feeling anxious or feeling depressed, or
experiencing other elements of mental distress. That link between anxiety
and sleep problems is worth underlining. The sleep Foundation in
the US notes the possibility of a vicious cycle. It's
hard to fall asleep if you're anxious, and then being
(07:41):
tired just increases the next day's anxiety. But how exactly
does Moody know about the complaints of people who did
their sleeping thousands of years ago? As it turns out,
she's got firsthand accounts ancient medical texts written in terra
cotta colored clay in a language called Acadian. Day to day,
I'm looking at someone's drawing of one of these objects.
(08:05):
But when I get to actually go to a museum
and look at one of these texts, it's a clay manuscript,
so it's a clay tablet. Some of them are sort
of the size of an iPhone, but the medical texts
are usually a little bit bigger, like a very geometric
looking writing system. Acadian is kind of like the great
great grand dad sort of grand aunt of Arabic, Hebrew,
(08:29):
Modern Assyrian, Aramaic, other Semitic language family groups. Can you
read Acadian? I can, and I love it. It's such
a beautiful language. An enormous number of these primary texts
have survived for thousands of years, so you've got a
real portal into the daily lives of people whose stories
otherwise might have been lost to history. The quite famous
(08:53):
library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh was set on fire in
the ancient world as part of a sacking of the city,
and that bizarrely perhaps preserved all the tablets perfectly. An
ancient Mesopotamia as now, people might suffer insomnia for a
variety of reasons. Somebody might complain of a bodily ailment
(09:16):
that's keeping them awaken night. Yeah, so there's a description
of the person. My spleen hurts and I can't sleep. Um,
where is my spleen? I don't know where. I don't
know what where not a clue, or there might be stressed,
a condition which seems to have an etymological connection to
insomnia in the Akkadian language, so delipped too. It's a
(09:37):
noun that means sleeplessness or can sometimes mean just being
troubled in some way. What are the odds that we
can get delipped to trending on Twitter? I would say
pretty high considering stuff going on in the world, or
trouble sleeping might have been a symptom of a larger issue,
a cluster of complaints associated with a serious ailment. The
(09:58):
Assyrians didn't have a sense of journey is pathogenic vectors
for them. Sickness was often understood as the product of witchcraft.
You got sick because somebody put a spell on you.
What we call anti witchcraft texts basically descriptions of medical
experiences caused by witchcraft, and then the corresponding rituals or
(10:18):
incantations and medical prescriptions to deal with those issues. There's
a particular text that Moody thinks links insomnia with heartbreak,
which is an association that will probably be familiar to
anybody who has stayed up late at night scrolling the
social media account of your ex guys new girl. The
treatment involves the patient reciting like a prayer incantation addressed
(10:43):
to Ishtar, the goddess of love and war and ancient Mesopotamiam,
and in that he says and it is a heat.
I am tired, I am exhausted, I am ill, I
am vexed, I am sleepless, I am scared. That sounds
like a I don't know, it sounds like a mash
about a new Phoebe Bridgers record. Like that sounds like
the hook you know, super relatable. Ah aheah, I am
(11:25):
I am, I am see science. Okay, big shout out
here to Andy Thompson, musical genius for that bit of
bittersweet guitar on short notice. Oh. Now, as you may
(11:49):
already know, the consequences of not getting enough sleep can
be pretty ugly. Let's go back to Professor Russell. There's
now a very important link between chronic sleep deprivation and cancer.
It's a global impact on health. Lack of sleep in
the long term can result in a big list of
garbage outcomes for both mind and body. Fluctuation in moods,
(12:09):
increased irritability, anxiety, loss of empathy. We failed to pick
up those social signals from friends and colleagues. One very
important factor, of course, is risk taking an impulsivity. Cognitive
impairment due to sleep deprivation has made history and some
of our most memorable disasters. Think of the famous images
(12:31):
from January when the US launched the Challenger Space Shuttle.
We have a report from Leaply Dynamic confter that the
vehicle has exploded. By Director confirmed that we are looking
at checking with the recovery forces to see what can
be done. At this point, the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster
(12:52):
was a failure to appreciate consequences, and that's really very
clear as a result of relatively short amounts of sleep disruption.
An investigation was launched to try to understand the cause
of the explosion, and a report from the Human Factors
Subcommittee listed severe sleep deprivation of NASA managers as a
(13:13):
contributing factor. And in your own life, you've probably noticed
that being super tired makes you less effective at whatever
it is you're trying to do. I suck when I'm tired.
I really suck. I'm very sensitive. But would you get
in the color and drive? I know, I'm a touring musician, right,
that's my my night job, I guess. And in the
(13:36):
beginning of my career, the way that we used to
treat night drives was super cavalier. Super cavalier, right. Everyone
was worried about had you had too much to drink,
but nobody was worried about how exhausted are you? And
then I think collectively a lot of people, at least
in my community learned because we were terrified of the
Stories of flipped van's night drives really scare me. I've
(13:59):
definitely been in a vehicle where somebody has drifted off
and the car has drifted onto the rumble strip. Because
the thing is, when you really need sleep, you can't
resist it through sheer force of will, Like physically, you
cannot stop yourself from nodding off. Yes, a micro sleep
is this sort of uncontrollable falling asleep so you can
actually be driving. There are these overwhelming, uncontrollable falling asleep
(14:21):
episodes because you're chronically tired, and a lot of people
have experienced these micro sleeps. Figures shared by the CDC
report that one adults drivers in the US say that
they've fallen asleep while driving in the past thirty days,
and drowsy driving contributes to over a hundred thousand accidents
annually in the US. Being chronically tired can be particularly
(14:44):
hasitous for people who work long hours or late into
the night. Think of the insane schedules of medical professionals.
Well tired nurses and doctors do not perform the same
way that well rested nurses and doctors do. The amount
of time on the night shift can have a big
effect upon accident rates and harm to patients. If sleep
(15:06):
is so important, then why aren't we valuing it? Why
is low Wayne writing a song called no Sleep? Also
incidentally the titles of songs by a bunch of other rappers.
And Martha Stewart is bragging about running on four hours
a night. I think he goes back to a rather
puritan time when work was was virtuous, and therefore, because
(15:26):
when you're sleep, you can't work, sleep must be bad.
In her book Insomnia, a Luned Summers, Bremner notes that
Dutch Calvinists demanded that sleep be indulged in only in moderation,
and I quote English preachers of the seventeenth century made
(15:49):
sleep into the equivalent of moral disorder, which is heavy.
So let's go someplace untouched by Puritanism to see how
humans sleep there. I've actually spent extended field work in
multiple sites, probably close to a year in Bolivia with
the chimane, maybe about three or four months with the
(16:12):
san people in in the Kalahari also sometimes called the bushman,
and more recently, I've spent maybe about three or four
months with the Hadza in Tanzania, who are also hunter gatherers.
That is. Gandhi as an anthropologist who studies the sleep
habits of people who are not concerned with calvinism or
screen time or corporate burnout. Gandhi conducts his research by
(16:35):
asking a lot of questions, how tired were you when
you went to bed, do you have any dreams? Did
you wake up during the night? And he asks study
participants to wear an accelerometer, a device kind of like
a fitbit that records their patterns of physical activity. These
are populations where people don't have money, they don't have
indoor plumbing. Most of them today live in relative isolation,
(16:56):
and they certainly don't have a nine to five work schedule,
which is what makes them useful for your studying sleep.
You are living with people who are in smaller communities,
aren't connected to the grid in the same way that
we are. Are They sleeping like, you know, ten hours
a night and uninterruptedly and waking fresh faced every day?
(17:17):
Like what is their sleep experience? Compared to ours. Actual
sleep duration would be somewhere around six to seven hours
per night, which is actually pretty much the same pattern
we have in the US. If that surprises you, me too.
A lot of us somewhere along the way picked up
the number eight. You're supposed to get eight hours of
(17:38):
shut I every night, but recommendations from the National Sleep
Foundation highlight how that changes over the course of development.
Newborns are supposed to get fourteen to seventeen hours a day,
which makes them horrible Dutch Calvinists. For adults, the recommendation
is seven to nine hours, but the need varies from
person to person and night tonight. The right amount of
(17:59):
sleep for you is the amount that enables you to
wake up well rested and ready for the day. Gandhi
has recorded a notable difference, though, in the time that's
earmarked for sleep in the communities he studied if they
spend more time in bed. Time in bed is your
conscious decision, and sleep duration is not a conscious decision.
(18:23):
That means they don't have to optimize their horizontal hours
to ring every minute of rest out of them like
there's a comfortable margin of air. Do you have a
confident answer to the question what is normal human sleep?
Normal human sleep fits into your day, like you don't
shape your day around your sleep, you shape your sleep
(18:43):
around your day. When people ask me from the other side,
like why study sleep, my new elevator pitch is that
the only things that are important in your life will
affect your sleep. So if something really great happens, you're
staying up late, that affects your sleep. If you're really
troubled by some thing and you're feeling anxiety, that affects
your sleep. If you've ever read a magazine about getting
(19:04):
better sleep, you've probably been told how important it is
to have a routine to keep your bedroom a sanctum
for rest. However, I've found that consistency from night tonight
is totally a Western recommendation thing. When you have the
ability to control your environment, you can try to do
things like that and sleep at the same time every
(19:26):
night and have these routines and rituals to kind of
get yourself into the mood to sleep. But in the
environments I've been working in, people don't have that level
of control. It's the environment that tells them when to sleep,
not their own ritual. Are the populations that you've spent
time with. Are they as frequently tired as people who
are living in industrial societies? Definitely not. They are more
(19:49):
rested and less tired. Why I think that your sleep
and your awake have to kind of reach this dynamic equilibrium.
I think it's kind of where in our populations in
the West, where time is money, you really push yourself
and you really take this flexible phenotype of sleep that
(20:10):
we we have the biological capacity to limit it to
pursue waking activities, and we really stretch it as far
as it can possibly go to the point where we
start suffering consequences. Humans are made of flexible stuff. We
adapt our schedules and lifestyles to our particular circumstances, and
(20:32):
modern schedules have stretched the elastic about as far as
it will go without starting to fray. I think that
it's almost like diabetes, because we achieved something as a
society where food is so plentiful and sugar is so
abundant that we now get sick from it. That we're
so good at staying up late after dark and making
(20:53):
good use of that time, that now that we're all
chronically sleep deprived, we just push and push push ourselves
really freaking hard. The brain can become so tired it
can't detect how tired it is, and we fool ourselves
spectacularly into thinking you're perfectly okay, but actually your cognitive
abilities are really really on the floor. That, of course
(21:17):
is our guy rustling in. So what steps can we
actually take to improve our sleep lives? Get as much
natural light as possible, particularly in the morning. It sets
the body clock, which sets the sleep wake cycle, and
morning light is really good for stabilizing Most people skip
the sleeping pills. All of the currently available sleeping tablets
(21:38):
have the problem that they sedate you. They don't provide
a biological mimic for sleep, and don't get too caught
up in the sleep apps and all their color coded analytics.
Some of the problems that people are getting with commercially
available apps are really sending them into a tail spin.
One person came up to me before COVID and said,
my app is telling me I don't get any slow
(21:59):
way sleep. And so this chap actually would wake himself
up at three o'clock in the morning to check how
much slow wave sleep his app was telling him. At first,
of all, these apps are really bad at telling us
about slow wave sleep and all the rest of it,
and we don't even really understand what slow wave sleep
is for, so roughly, when did you go to sleep,
when do you wake up? How many interrupts in the night.
(22:20):
That's kind of useful information, but I think more than
that you can be misleading and in fact, really rather harmful.
It generates more anxiety. So take him with a pinch
of salt. God, it does have a real cool, like
fireplace sound that I got super into here, but it's
like so much of technology, it's deeply seductive, all right, James,
(22:42):
James hit me. Oh that's a nice It's just a
nice How could you not like that? Okay, cut it.
I don't want anybody falling asleep before done. Given that
sleep is so fundamental, I mean, why is it that
(23:04):
we suck at getting enough of it? Sleep is just
another victim of human arrogance that we're above the grubby
world of biology. We're not. We expect to do whatever
we want, whatever time of day, and we now know
that that's not possible. I think things are changing now.
We appreciate and the society is appreciating the incredible value
(23:24):
of sleep. I've noticed that shift to friends, colleagues, famous
people that I follow online all seem to be recognizing
the importance of rest. The NAP Ministry, which frames rest
as a form of resistance, has almost halfamillion followers on
Instagram alone, which can be called comfort if you're walking
down a mental staircase in your head at three am,
(23:46):
furious that your body seems so reluctant to meet its
own biological imperative. A final thought from Moody are insomniac
seriologist is an amazing phrase during a hard night can
bed knowing that you need rest unable to get it?
Have you recited that incantation? I have tried a lot
(24:06):
of things, but I haven't tried that, And you've just
given me the idea why not tonight? Tonight is the
night a star you'll be hearing from me. We may
struggle to sleep because we're anxious, and then struggle to
quell our anxieties because we're tired. Hashtag to lip too,
and more generally, we struggle because we've tried to slot
(24:27):
sleep into a neat little window in our schedules. We
expect ourselves to do it on command, at the hour
that is most convenient for the rest of our more
important lives. But falling into sleep like love is not
entirely self determined. You can only set the mood and
then make way for time and gravity to do their work.
(24:51):
And that My far Flown Friends is our last program
of Deeply Human second season, which means it's time to
roll credits. So why don't you just why don't you
just tuck in and we'll do this a s m
R style. Our series producer is Simon Maybin. Producers are
our Len Gregorio's Ellie House, Beth Sagar Fenton, Sandra Kenthal,
(25:17):
and Craig Templeton Smith with help from Hannah au Guru
and May Cameron. Our editor is Hugh Levinson. Our production
coordinator is Janet Staples, and this season was mixed by
my arrival, James Beard. Speaking of James, will you hit Oh,
(25:38):
they're good. I'll give you that. You're very talented arch
enemy who really strives for excellence and takes brightness work.
Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American public
media co production with I Heeart Media. It's written and
hosted by me Dessa. Find me online at Dessa on
Instagram and Dessa Darling on Twitter, Okay, James, James, Okay
(26:11):
they're out. Let's call get another dessert and watch scary
movies with swear words. God, being adults is awesome.
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