Sleep Therapy

By Lauren Winner


Last night, I pulled one of my very few all-nighters. Though not uncommon in my college years, my capacity to stay up all night and be anything approximating coherent the next morning has declined as I've marched through my twenties, and now the all-nighters happen very rarely, once every two years or so, and only when I am truly desperate.

But the storied all-nighters are just the most extreme example of something many of us do quite a lot: chip away at needed sleep in order to do something else. Usually that something else is work.

A simple glance at my email Inbox tells me that I am not alone in sacrificing sleep in order to squeeze in a few more hours of work. Last Tuesday alone, I received 23 work-related emails that had been sent between 10:00 p.m. and 5:00 a.m. This creeped me out. The next night, in fact, I had some trouble falling asleep, because I lay in bed worrying about the correspondence that was accumulating in my email account, the possibly pressing matters I would need to address in the morning, and the number of hours the next morning that I would have to devote not to preparing to teach my afternoon class, but to replying to email. Worried that I would be left without enough time for class prep, I rolled over and set my alarm back from 6:30 to 5:00, resolved to use the extra 90 minutes of wakefulness for email.

Wakefulness, actually, may not be the right word. For though I "gained" 90 minutes in which I was awake, I actually lost wakefulness. Sleep specialists are virtually unanimous on this: we human beings cannot lose sleep without decreasing our attention span, our response time, our cogence. I may have been awake for 90 extra minutes, but I was less wakeful all day long.

According to National Sleep Foundation, the average adult sleeps 6 hours and 58 minutes per night during the work week. Compare this to 100 years ago—before Mr. Edison's marvelous invention—when we slept about 9 hours a night. Indeed, we are a nation of people who are chronically sleep deprived. Those pre-Edison people were right in line with the 8 to 10 hours of sleep specialists say we need.

Sleep more: this may seem a curious answer to the question of what Christians can do for the common good. Surely one could come up with something more other-directed, more sacrificial, less self-serving. Or more overtly political—refusing to serve in the current war.

But for the moment I am sticking with the small, if challenging, task of becoming more well-rested. Not only does sleep have evident social consequences, not only would sleeping more make us better neighbors and friends and family members and citizens. Sleeping well may also be part of Christian discipleship, at least in our time and place. For not only might a counter-cultural embrace of sleep witness to values higher than "the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desires for other things"

A night of good sleep—a week, or month, or year of good sleep—also testifies to basic Christian story of Creation. We are creatures, and we are creatures with bodies that are finite and contingent. The unarguable demands that our bodies make for sleep are a good reminder that we are mere creatures, not the Creator. For it is God and God alone who "neither slumbers nor sleeps." Of course, the Creator has slept, another startling reminder of the radical humility He embraced in becoming Incarnate. He took on a body that, like ours, was finite and contingent and needed sleep. To push ourselves to go without sleep is, in some sense, to deny our embodiment, to deny our fragile incarnations—and perhaps to deny the magnanimous poverty and self-emptying that went into His incarnation.

French poet Charles Peguy makes the point well:

I don't like the man who doesn't sleep, says God.
Sleep is the friend of man,
Sleep is the friend of God.
Sleep is perhaps the mot beautiful thing I have created.
And I myself rested on the seventh day..
But they tell me that there are men
Who work well and sleep badly.
Who don't sleep. What a lack of confidence in me.

Peguy's words have perhaps never been more fitting: to sleep, long and soundly, is to place our trust not in our own strength and hard-work, but in Him without whom we labor in vain.