{"id":5630,"date":"2010-08-31T11:06:55","date_gmt":"2010-08-31T15:06:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=5630"},"modified":"2020-07-24T04:32:47","modified_gmt":"2020-07-24T08:32:47","slug":"dont-sleep-so-much","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/anonymous_banker\/08\/31\/dont-sleep-so-much\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t Sleep So Much"},"content":{"rendered":"

In hindsight, my high school Algebra teacher may have been certifiably insane. The first day of class he wandered off on a tangent about a Medieval prince who loved his sleep. This prince loved his sleep so much he decided to sleep five minutes longer every night: 8 hours, 8 hours 5 minutes, 8 hours 10 minutes \u2026 until he slept over 24 hours. Then, he died. Class dismissed, Professor continued. Don\u2019t forget the quiz on polynomial expressions this Thursday.<\/p>\n

I asked around, and no one has ever heard of this prince\u2019s cautionary tale. I did, however, find a bizarre news story about 15-year old British girl named Louisa Ball.<\/a> My friends sleep through half of every class (but still get better grades). And I\u2019ve been known to sleep through flights. But Louisa sleeps through entire family vacations. Louisa is stricken with a rare disease called Kleine-Levin Syndrome, dubbed Sleeping Beauty Disease, that makes her sleep for weeks. Her longest snooze was 13 straight days. Baffled doctors can\u2019t stop it, so Louisa\u2019s parents must her wake up once a day so she can eat and use the bathroom. <\/p>\n

In spite of Louisa\u2019s affliction, people today sleep less than ever before. According to an American Cancer Society study, Americans slept 8 hours a night in 1960. Today? 6.7 hours. That\u2019s a groggy 15% drop in sleep within 50 years\u2014despite NBC\u2019s late-night lineup\u2019s best efforts. In our defense, our grandparents\/parents didn\u2019t have the following distractions: sensationalized 24-7 news-cycles, Red Bull, the Internet, and late-night SportsCenter reruns. National Geographic pegged the costs of our national \u201csleep debt\u201d at $15 billion dollars in health care expenses and up to $50 billion in lost productivity (or Syria\u2019s nominal GDP). <\/p>\n

As usual, our grandparents were right. Eight is the correct answer for number of sleep hours. Sleep more than that and you are more likely to die sooner. With modern life getting busier each year, the average age of people not getting enough sleep is slowly dropping down. The advent of technology that is easily in our hands has made it even easier to get immediate satisfaction in expense of one’s sleep. College students are spending more time late at night studying, opting to get Modafinil they can get from https:\/\/buy-modafinil-online.org<\/a> to stay awake and focus as they cram through the exam weeks. Children are spending way too much time on mobile devices during the night unattended.<\/p>\n

A University of California San Diego psychiatry study found \u201csleeping more than 7 to 8 hours per day has been consistently associated with increased mortality.\u201d But beware of sample bias here. The guy who sleeps 11 hours a night is more likely to be lazier and\/or unhealthier.
\n
\nSleep less than 8 hours and you are more likely to be a) cranky and b) fat. Scientists observed a hormonal correlation between sleep deprivation and obesity. The hormone ghreline triggers your appetite and is found in higher concentrations in sleep-deprived people. Another hormone, leptin, lets your body know when it\u2019s full and was seen in much lower levels in the under-slept. <\/p>\n

I know what you\u2019re probably thinking, Kirstie Alley, and we\u2019re not buying it. It\u2019s not your lack of sleep that\u2019s the problem. It\u2019s the lack of occasional light jogging. And you just eat too much.<\/p>\n

*******<\/strong><\/center><\/p>\n

It is the only time in my life I will ever pity Leonardo DiCaprio. Sure, he is Hollywood\u2019s Golden Boy, and, at 35, he\u2019s decades younger than George Clooney and Tom Hanks. And, oh yeah, he\u2019s on-and-off with Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover-model Bar Refaeli. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But poor, poor Leo. You can just picture him preparing for \u201cInception\u201d. Waking up from his Egyptian 1000-thread-count sheets, sending Bar off to her latest Turks & Caicos photo shoot, and then hunkering down to read every book on dreaming and sleep he could find. There was just one problem. Leo would not be in a normal dream world. He\u2019d be in director Christopher Nolan\u2019s. And Christopher Nolan spent the last decade architecting it. <\/p>\n

\u201cThis was Chris Nolan’s dream world, and he had his own set of rules and his own structure to it,\u201d Leo lamented. \u201cSo I needed to understand what that Rubik\u2019s Cube was in his mind. It took months to tap into how my character directly related to these different levels of the subconscious.\u201d Leo somehow pulled it off after recycling his jangled \u201cShutter Island\u201d acting jitters, but Christopher Nolan was the real star. At last.<\/p>\n

You see, Christopher Nolan wanted to make \u201cInception\u201d a decade ago. But he realized to create the movie on the scale and grandeur it deserved he would have to cut his teeth with a couple For-Them studio blockbusters. So Nolan bided his time. He aced \u201cBatman Begins\u201d, then ho-hum shattered the opening weekend box office record with \u201cDark Knight\u201d, and he finally had his For-Him movie. And Youtube had a new mash-up favorite:<\/p>\n

<\/param><\/param><\/param><\/embed><\/object><\/center><\/p>\n

Nolan briefly speculated \u201cInception\u201d could eclipse \u201cAvatar\u201d as the highest grossing movie of all time. He wisely backed off. Scoreboard: \u201cAvatar\u201d $2.75 billion, \u201cInception\u201d $655 million. But \u201cAvatar\u201d is a mere kid\u2019s movie by comparison. There are two types of movies. There are movies you look at (\u201cAvatar\u201d, any flick with Megan Fox) and then there are movies you watch. \u201cInception\u201d is the rare blockbuster that satisfies both. A masterpiece whose mind-bending, CGI Penrose stairs are girdered by Descartesian and Jungian pillars.<\/p>\n

\u201cInception\u201d is more fact than science-fiction. You can influence your dreams. Christopher Nolan experimented with designing his own dreams since he was 16. It\u2019s called \u201cdream incubation\u201d, and novelists do it all the time to inspire narrative break-throughs. In a one week-long study<\/a>, college students stared at homework problems framed on their night-stands before going to sleep. 50% of the students dreamed about the problems and 25% solved them. Yet 100% of the students were believed to be lousy conversationalists at the Saturday football game. <\/p>\n

Group dreaming is still the stuff of misty Shaman legend. But dreams within dreams (within dreams, within dreams) do occur\u2014though they were found in less than 1% of studied sleepers. False awakenings in different layer dreams have also been observed. And it\u2019s true. You never remember how your dream starts, because your short-term memory does not convert into long-term memory during deep REM dream sleep. <\/p>\n

Leo wasn\u2019t just acting when he said what feels likes hours in your dream span only seconds in real time because of intense neural brain activity. When you die, it\u2019s been reported the brain experiences up to 12 minutes of this same neural activity. This could feel like years, decades, even millennia. Couldn\u2019t this endless dream, then, be forever?<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Warning:<\/strong> The views in the following section are not endorsed by the Department of Health or the Department of Education. Results may vary.<\/em><\/p>\n

When Bill Clinton was at Georgetown, a saner professor told him great people conditioned themselves to sleep 4-5 hours a night. The simple reason being: you get more done. Bill Clinton applied the theory in his dorm room that night and remembered it well during his famous all-night pizza meetings at the White House. (Warning #2:<\/strong> The Bill Clinton Sleep Schedule is not to be confused with the Bill Clinton Sleeping Around Schedule.<\/em>)<\/p>\n

When I was on a high school tour, the scruffy tour guide mused you can attain two of three things at school. You can 1) learn a lot, 2) meet interesting people, and\/or 3) get great sleep. I never saw the kid again. I didn\u2019t even get into the school. But I never forgot his tip. And I don\u2019t understand why anyone would pick any combination other than 1) and 2). <\/p>\n

Stay up late, my high school buddy, always said. Just stay up late. And the less compelling the reason, the better. \u201cMad Men\u201d marathon at 12:27 AM? Watch. A random Spice Girls reunion concert on a school night? Go. The most intriguing conversations happen then. These are the times when the \u201cremember the time\u2026\u201d stories are minted.<\/p>\n

\"Spice<\/p>\n

\u201cThose were the days\u201d adults reminisce wistfully about school. And those Raman Noodle-fueled late-nights? Those are the hours. I can\u2019t tell you anything about my high school papers except they probably had \u201cneeds more development\u201d and B+ scrawled in red ink on them. But I recall every vivid detail of our spontaneous sledding trip the night before finals.<\/p>\n

After a while, my buddy said, you almost hate sleep. You see those restless, toss-and-turn hours as the most wasted hours of all. So give me 4 or 5 hours, a shower, and let\u2019s get on with it. Today You grumbles at Yesterday You for a while. You may say something odd in 9 AM Marketing class. But then you remember the impromptu 1:17 AM dance party or the roommate\u2019s spot-on George W. Bush impersonation. You laugh maybe a little too loud to yourself, in maybe a little too packed library or Subway car. Then you sigh: time to prove your worth a damn. Crack the menacing Capital Markets book. And go out and earn tonight. <\/p>\n

So that the next morning you can grumble at the blaring alarm clock: not again. <\/p>\n

[tags]sleep, insomnia, leonardo dicaprio, inception, sleep, article, column, essay, sleep debt, science of sleep[\/tags]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In hindsight, my high school Algebra teacher may have been certifiably insane. The first day of class he wandered off on a tangent about a Medieval prince who loved his sleep. This prince loved his sleep so much he decided to sleep five minutes longer every night: 8 hours, 8 hours 5 minutes, 8 hours […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":11028,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nDon\u2019t Sleep So Much - Prose Before Hos<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In hindsight, my high school Algebra teacher may have been certifiably insane. 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