On Sleep

The human body requires sleep. This is not a suggestion, nor a lifestyle preference, nor one of those negotiable recommendations that the modern man feels entitled to ignore because he has convinced himself that he functions perfectly well on five hours and sheer obstinacy. It is a biological requirement, as fixed and as indifferent to your opinion as gravity.

The Edwardian household understood this. One retired at a sensible hour and rose at a sensible hour, and the period between was not treated as optional. The bedroom was dark, quiet, and served a single purpose. There was no luminous rectangle on the bedside table emitting the pale blue light of whatever triviality had seized one’s attention at half past eleven. There was a bed, a pillow, darkness, and silence. The arrangement worked.

You have complicated it. You lie in bed with a telephone six inches from your face, scrolling through material that is neither entertaining nor informative but merely present, and you do this until midnight or later, and then you place the telephone on the bedside table and wonder why sleep does not arrive on command. It does not arrive because you have spent the last ninety minutes telling your brain that it is time to be alert, and the brain, that literal organ, has believed you.

The modern habit of treating late nights as a mark of industry or sophistication is worth examining, if only to observe how thoroughly it collapses under scrutiny. Staying up late is not a virtue. It is not evidence of a busy mind or an ambitious spirit. It is, in the vast majority of cases, evidence of poor planning, an inability to stop watching something, or a vague reluctance to end the day because ending the day means beginning the next one, and the next one contains obligations. This is not discipline. It is avoidance dressed in its pyjamas.

The requirements are not obscure. Go to bed at the same time each night, or near enough. The body prefers regularity; give it regularity. The room should be dark. If it is not dark, make it dark; curtains exist for this purpose and have done for centuries. The room should be cool. The bed should be clean. The telephone should be elsewhere; another room, if you can bear the separation, or at minimum across the room where reaching it requires effort you will not, at that hour, be willing to exert.

Do not eat a large meal immediately before bed. Do not drink coffee after the middle of the afternoon, unless you intend to be awake at two in the morning regretting it. Do not exercise vigorously in the hour before sleep; the body does not transition from exertion to rest as quickly as you would like it to.

The man who sleeps well thinks clearly, works effectively, and is considerably less unpleasant to those around him. The man who does not sleep well knows this, because people have told him, repeatedly, that he looks tired, which is the polite version of what they actually mean. Seven to eight hours. A dark room. A consistent schedule. The prescription has not changed in a hundred years; only the excuses for ignoring it have multiplied.