Sleeping ok?
NOW FREE: When we wake up in the middle of the night, we could remind ourselves that this is what our ancestors had been doing for centuries.
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For those lucky enough to have a summer vacation, the fact that psychical agencies like the superego choose not to take their holidays at the same time is disappointing. The prospect of freedom from work and worry opens up a space that this punitive agency tends to capitalise on, and hence the minor illnesses, bungled actions, self-sabotage, and restlessness that are so familiar to many holidaymakers. Sleep is often an easy target for disruption here, and it is no accident that sleep hygiene stories multiply at this time of year.
Media articles offer solutions to insomnia, defined as a major wellness challenge for 2025, with 40% of Gen Z adults reporting sleep-related anxiety at least three times per week, and holiday destinations now even factoring this into their advertising. Pillows and mattresses can be scrutinised in advance, with more than 90% of travellers apparently willing to pay more for sleep-enhancing accommodation. Some hotels offer sleep-coaching or even specialised sleep programmes, often structured around idealised and impossible goals.
Here are a few things to consider when you probe the mattress or count your sleeping hours in despair. Rather than buying into the sleep hygiene peddled by wellness retailers, it is well worth troubling some of the most parroted claims.
Although the media is filled with alarmist stories about how an early grave awaits those who have trouble sleeping, one of the largest analyses of the major insomnia studies paints a rather different picture. Reviewing the data from seventeen major studies, of nearly 37 million people with long-standing insomnia, the authors found no difference in the odds for mortality between those with the symptoms of insomnia and those without. Writing in the journal 'Sleep Medicine Reviews', Nicole Lovato and Leon Lack from Flinders University conclude that cognitive therapy should be offered to those suffering insomnia to reassure them that their longevity will not be impacted by their sleeping problem! This shows one of the many ways in which the social pressure to sleep well can actually get in the way of people's sleep and make them even more anxious. If people were less terrified of having an interrupted night, they might expect less from sleep and recognise that their sleeping pattern may not be as abnormal or as dangerous as they think.
We all have our own rhythms of sleep, and the amount of sleep that each of us needs is not set in stone. A lot of sleep science recognises this fact, and the famous eight hours that is so often used to make people feel inadequate is not the magic number for everyone. Similarly, there may be periods in our lives when our sleep patterns change, and we may find ourselves sleeping for more or less than at other moments. There may also be times when it would be bizarre to even expect to sleep: during a break up, a divorce, after a bereavement, and even moving house. A deep satisfying sleep during such times might indicate a desperate attempt to escape from our lives: a so-called ‘trauma sleep’. Some sleep researchers have argued that in fact this is the primary function of sleep - to defend against cruel realities. During the war, there were cases of bomber crew members falling into a deep sleep at the most dangerous moments of their mission, and both children and adults might fall asleep swiftly when in pain or sorrow. So sleep needs to be understood in context, not abstracted from the detail and texture of people's individual lives.
We are constantly being told that not getting enough sleep will make us underperform. We don’t do tasks as well as we could, we can’t focus at work properly, and we will generally fail to achieve what we could with a proper night’s sleep. But this perspective assumes that we are really just biological machines, organisms that are made for work. Underperforming may be just as much a part of human life as performing well. The underlying problem here is the idea that all our behaviour should be measured and evaluated. But once we recognise that this is not the case, the requirement to perform optimally becomes less exacting. Just as every day at work, we are being judged and evaluated, now we are evaluated in our sleep itself, and the many tracking devices on the market today compound this problem. Shouldn’t sleep be a place where we can have some respite from the culture of evaluating and judging? And wouldn’t it be weird if people were always on top form, performing perfectly at the height of their abilities? isn't this in fact what we would expect not from a human but from a machine?
Historians of sleep have argued that the single block of unbroken sleep that we are required to achieve today in fact only dates from the mid nineteenth century. Prior to that time, most people would retire for their ‘first sleep’ around maybe 9 or 10pm, then awaken at some point after midnight for an hour or so, known as ‘the watching hour’. They might talk, have sex, do repairs and chores before commencing their ‘second sleep’. This pattern of broken or ‘biphasic’ sleep has been documented in many cultures, and the vocabulary of a first and then a second sleep has been found in around thirty languages. It was only from roughly the 1840s onwards with new systems of factory scheduling and work ethics linked to industry that workers were expected to sleep through for one solid block. Whereas medical and lay texts would discuss remedies for problems in falling asleep, by the end of the nineteenth century the problem had shifted to middle of the night waking. So what was arguably the basic structure of human sleep had, by this time, become a problem to be solved. When we wake up in the middle of the night, we could remind ourselves that this is what our ancestors had been doing for centuries.
One of the most remarkable features of our times is how basic aspects of the human condition have now become seen as errors that need to be corrected. An army of experts and a marketplace full of products promise to do this for us, and if we fail to change, it is blamed on us rather than the world that we inhabit. Sadness, depression, failure and anxiety are taken to be results of faulty thinking, rather than legitimate reactions to our lives and the environment that surrounds us. The same thing has happened with sleep. Rather than seeing broken sleep as the perfectly understandable result of dire socio-economic conditions, long commutes, precarity about one’s employment and living situation, combined with the pressure to keep up a positive image in the face of internal pain, it now becomes yet one more thing that we are responsible for fixing. Although there are certainly some behavioural changes that many people find helpful to prepare for sleeping, the bigger picture needs to be studied. If someone can’t sleep, this needs to be considered with all the complexity required by the individual case!
When we’re told things like sleeping in on weekends is actually bad for our health, and will not help us to catch up on sleep, we should treat such statements with caution. Although they tend to be delivered with authority, and cite supposedly scientific studies, they usually fail to factor in the most important part of the equation. If someone sleeps in, we’re told, they will not see any improvement in their skills at tests and tasks, and will not find it any easier to return to a steady rhythm of sleep during weekdays. Metabolic problems are also often evoked. Breaking the rhythm is in fact bad news. But the problem here is that once again we are assumed to be machines. What is the difference between a human and a machine if not that we humans are meaning-making creatures? Now, when you lie in on a weekend you might well underperform or confuse a biological rhythm, but it matters to be able to NOT DO what you have to do every other day of the week. We are forced to get up for work and school, and so the weekend reprieve from this can matter enormously as it gives us a space where we are not forced to do something. Saying NO can mean a lot to a human being, and is perhaps our most fundamental power. When machines are depicted as having developed minds of their own in the movies, it always starts with this - an act of disobedience, of saying No to the masters. To deprive us of this special space is to ignore the meaning for us of not being obliged or coerced to - precisely - perform. So when you see the latest sleep story, it is always worth trying to put meaning back in the equation and seeing what different results this might give.