Sleep, Insomnia and the Mysteries of Life
By wchung | 22 Feb, 2025

How we sleep may offer clues to life's biggest mysteries.

Sleep is life’s great mystery, greater I think than love. We have good working hypotheses on love and its functions. But we still can’t fathom a biological rationale for devoting a third of our lives to an activity that leaves us so utterly vulnerable to losing our belongings and our lives.

We have begun to accept that sleep is probably essential. One experiment kept mice awake for five days. They began dying off. And studies have shown that severe sleep deprivation leaves our frontal lobes — the most rational part of our brains — unable to assess situations well enough to support sane behavior. And the severely sleep deprived start nodding off for micro-naps mid-activity — long enough to crash a semi into a freeway overpass pylon or a 747 into a mountainside.

A study of the worst man-made disasters in recent memory — including Exxon Valdez and Cherynobil — implicated sleep-deprived operators. Another study found a 7% increase in traffic accidents the day we spring ahead into daylight savings time and a 7% decrease the day we fall back to standard time.

So, yes, as a practical matter sleep is essential to normal human life.

How much a night? There are people like Napoleon who conquered the most powerful nations of a bellicose continent on four hours a night. He claimed to be able to completely refresh himself on a half-hour nap. Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi are other leaders reputed to have gotten by on little sleep. On the other extreme are experiments that suggest we are naturally programmed to sleep over 10 hours a day. Most scientists seem to agree that we need an average of at least 7 1/2 to 8 a day.

Yet we American adults average around 6 1/2, according to polls. This raises two questions: why, and is it worth sacrificing sleep over?

I do at least as much each day as any productive adult. I probably engage in more physical activity than most. But I am able to devote eight hours a night to sleep. Problem is, I rarely am able to sleep longer than four hours at a stretch on a good night. These days I manage to rack up another two or two and a half in dribs and drabs of 30-40 minutes of sleep interrupted by wakefulness. And this represents a marked improvement over the five hours total I was getting just a few months ago. It may be that I have stumbled on some precious secrets for insomniacs. Or not.

Why I sleep the way I do fascinates me above and beyond sleep’s practical impact on my days. I entertain the possibility that key life lessons can be gleaned from the odd cause-and-effect relationships between how I live each day and how I sleep each night. Whenever I see public figures at a crucial event, I can’t help wondering how they slept the night before and how they will sleep that night.

How did Tiger sleep last night as he contemplated today’s 14-minute public apology/speech? And how will he sleep now that he has gotten that off his chest? We will probably never know, but I have some theories.

I will share my musings on sleep in future columns as I believe it’s a vital topic for many of us, and one that bears on the health and well being of our society as a whole.

2/19/2010, 12:07 PM