Snoozing

In the wake of Typhoon Soudelor’s direct hit on Saipan, any other topic is trivial. The dangers didn’t leave with Soudelor, of course, but will stalk the island via threats to public health and compromised infrastructure. Fortunately, Saipan’s residents are good-natured and resilient, and Uncle Sam was fast on the draw for providing assistance, so the balance sheet in this equation has some assets. Still, the story of Soudelor isn’t ending. It’s just beginning.

By contrast, the piece I planned to run today is a snoozer. It is, in fact, about just that, literally: sleep.

I’ve noticed that the topic has popped up in the news a lot over the past few years. I suspect a couple of reasons for this.

One is just the general march of progress in the health field. Sleep, as it turns out, gets all sorts of attention from high-powered research institutions such as UCLA and Johns Hopkins. As they perform their studies, the scientists seem to confirm what makes intuitive sense to most of us: Sleep is more than a matter of comfort. It’s a matter of health.

The other reason I suspect for the awakening on the sleep front is what seems like an epidemic of addiction to electronic screens. Various studies are popping up that suggest that screen-staring, particularly at night time, can mess up sleep patterns. The human body has apparently not evolved to have light beamed into its eyes when it’s time to downshift into snooze time.

Anyway, some of the sleep studies have been funded by some interesting benefactors. For example, Estee Lauder, the cosmetics company, commissioned a study that was performed by the University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Ohio.

The study, which was mentioned on the University Hospitals’ website in 2013, looked at the skin condition (items mentioned are lines, pigmentation, slackening, elasticity) of various subjects who were sorted by how well they slept.

Apparently, lousy sleeping and lousy skin went together. The take-away is that sleep influences more than mere state of mind, but it has physical effects as well.

This sure jibes with what I’ve seen in the real world. I’ve had gigs where fatigue is an ever-present factor, namely, working night-shifts as a pilot, and, if you hang with it long enough, those miles can start to look pretty rough. That’s not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it does require some extra thought about how you manage your time and your habits.

In the habit realm, a 2010 CNN article says, “Trouble sleeping? Maybe it’s your iPad.” The article goes on to mention the possibly problematic link between computer light and sleep patterns, when, for example, computers supplant books for bedtime reading. How much of this is actually proven, and how much is just reasoned conjecture, well, I don’t know.

Even though I’m no spring chicken, I still enjoy staying awake all night sometimes. For example, if I’m taking a long road trip, if the weather is good and the roads are open, I might opt to drive all night, leapfrogging in 400-mile jumps from truck stop to truck stop. It’s a good feeling to be snug in the car while old country tunes are playing on the radio and while I gnaw on beef jerky and drink coffee. This is better than sleep. It might be the last bastion of true peace in the modern world.

Meanwhile, I’ll note that the modern standard of eight (more or less) hours of continuous sleep might not be the way it used to work. In days of old, at least in some cases, people may have fallen asleep shortly after dark, only to arise at around midnight, walk around and even socialize for a matter of hours, and then conk out again until sunrise. So maybe our modern routines, having been built around artificial light and the scheduling imperatives of mechanized societies, are a divergence from our biology’s default settings.

What’s not so surprising is that light plays a big role in this stuff. At Saipan’s easy latitude in the middle of the tropics, days and nights are always roughly equal spans. That’s a nice arrangement. By contrast, the further you get from the tropics, the more lopsided the days and nights get, and this messes up some people’s sleep patterns. It has, fortunately, never messed with mine, since I sleep like a ferrous rock no matter what; this is one virtuous consequence of being completely devoid of any ambition.

Still, I have noticed that beyond, say, 45 degrees of latitude, I’m soon ready to head for the tropics again where the days and nights are balanced. Why? I don’t know. But that’s one of those gigs where you don’t even notice it until you miss it.

Such is the current state of the snooze world. Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ve discovered a wrinkle. Yikes! Where do they sell the Estee Lauder face cream? I’ll swing by the beef jerky and coffee section; seems like the logical place to look, and truck stops, they’ve got everything these days.