Sleep

of self hypnosis trying to force quit consciousness. When I'm on tour, I'll collect all of the hotel pillows and build a pyramid of them on my face, trying to block out whatever it is it is keeping me awake at five am. This is deeply human. I'm Dessa, and if you can hear the sound of my voice, then

you are awake. And I hope that's on purpose, that you're not just whiling away some exasperated minutes in the darkness, the dreaded morning bird song wooming every nearer, trying to coax your rescue dog of a brain to do the reasonable thing and come light down for a while. The question of those angst written hours, and of this program is why can't I sleep? We often hear that screens and stress are to blame. But how much of our insomnia is really a product of the modern lifestyle. How

much and how well to humans sleep? And why does so many of us struggle with sleeplessness. Let's begin with a little science. Let's talk body clocks. I work very closely with blind veterans UK and these extraordinary individuals who have lost their eyes as a result of combat or disease.

They're essentially time blind. Not only have they lost their sense of sight, but they've also lost their sense of time because the eye isn't able to detect the light dark cycle and set the internal master clock within the brain. That is Russell Foster, director of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford, and that term circadian.

It's the external light dark cycle, particularly at dawn and dusk, that is detected by specialized receptors within the eye, which then set the master clock within the brain, and that allows us to be beautifully attuned and aligned to the external world. Does our body know already that the day is twenty four hours long or does it learn that when we arrive on the planet. This is what's I think so extraordinary, because the internal clock is a subcellular

molecular clock. So we could take almost any cell in the body, put it in a dish and monitor its activity, and it would show a near not exactly, but a near twenty four oscillation. Russell is something of a sleep evangelist, very pro sleep, and he's enthusiastic in describing the manifold functions and benefits of getting a full night of it.

It's memory, consolidation, the processing of information. Some really important data that's emerged recently has been the clearance of toxins and particularly some misfolded proteins the plaques which have been associated with the development of Alzheimer's. Sleep also plays a

role in keeping the immune system healthy. Studies have emerged in the last few years showing that if you are tired or sleep deprived prior to or immediately following an inoculation for a vaccine, then your antibody response is actually reduced if you're chronically tired. Russell thinks that sleep is well slept on. Modern society doesn't value or prioritize it

as it should. We have become industrial creatures in the past what two hundred years, and most rapidly since the nineteen fifties, with a massive commercialization of cheap light at night for electric light, we've invaded the night, and in the process we've abandoned sleep. So we're fighting against millions and certainly hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary biology, which is embraced sleep. And it's really interesting to think

how sleep was considered in the medieval parade. Historical records suggest that in many parts of the medieval world, a segmented pattern of sleep was the norm. People essentially slept in two shifts. The first would last for a couple of hours, and then you'd get up and maybe do some work, or eat, or drink or pray, have sex, visit with the neighbors or whatever. And in English, this period of the night was sometimes called the watch. Then you'd go back to bed for a second longer sleep

till morning. Historically, sleep has been prized, says Russell. In the Elizabethan era, people were practically writing love poems about it. I just think of Shakespeare the honey heavy dew of slumber, Sleep, sleep, nature's softness, Have thy forsaken thee We intuitively seemed to embrace sleep. But wait a minute, Wait a minute, because I mean Shakespeare, hold On, Macbeth is an insomniac, right,

his life is a sleepwalker. Falstaff has sleep apnea. The guy with the best take on on sleep as Hamlet, as he's comtemplating suicide like everybody wants it and nobody's getting it. It seems like that was true even in Shakespeare's time. Absolutely, but they realized that if they weren't getting it, they were in trouble. And now we actively

fight against it. At least in Shakespeare's time, the insomniacs had the sense to lament what they were missing, whereas now we might wear a sleepless night is a badge of honor, proof positive that we stay grinding, and everybody from Martha Stewart to Loewayne brags about how a few hours they spend asleep. Okay, but let's pause on the historical and cultural analysis for a second. Let's turn to Moody, our sheet, a real life insomniac. If I were to say, hey, Moody,

what's your sleep life? Like? What are you say to me? I'd really just like burst into tears. I have a toddler, I have anxiety, and we've just moved, and my sleep pattern is a feeling afraid in my bed is definitely something that is familiar to me these days. Is it like essentially a thresholding thing that It's like all of the ghosts of my errors, concerns, and fears haunt me around the clock, but I'm distracted from them in the

daytime hours, whereas they have top billing. At night, when everything is dark and quiet, there are no other stimuli. There are no distractions, or no people to keep alive, or dogs to feed or phone calls. You're really alone with your thoughts, and for me, that kind of amplifies anything that's going on in my head. I'd say at night anxiety is worse, which exacerbates sleep issues for sure. But Moody's perspective on insomnia is informed by a lot

more than just personal experience. I'm a historian of the ancient Middle East, ancient Assyria and Babylonia and the other civilizations that occupied what we call ancient Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, which is now where

Iraq and Syria are. Did people suffer sleeplessness in the same way, as near as you can tell, I think it's hard to say for sure, but I do think there are lots of common denominators in the kind of contexts for sleeplessness, like feeling anxious or feeling depressed, or experiencing other elements of mental distress. That link between anxiety and sleep problems is worth underlining. The sleep Foundation in

the US notes the possibility of a vicious cycle. It's hard to fall asleep if you're anxious, and then being tired just increases the next day's anxiety. But how exactly does Moody know about the complaints of people who did their sleeping thousands of years ago? As it turns out, she's got firsthand accounts ancient medical texts written in terra cotta colored clay in a language called Acadian. Day to day, I'm looking at someone's drawing of one of these objects.

But when I get to actually go to a museum and look at one of these texts, it's a clay manuscript, so it's a clay tablet. Some of them are sort of the size of an iPhone, but the medical texts are usually a little bit bigger, like a very geometric looking writing system. Acadian is kind of like the great great grand dad sort of grand aunt of Arabic, Hebrew, Modern Assyrian, Aramaic, other Semitic language family groups. Can you read Acadian? I can, and I love it. It's such

a beautiful language. An enormous number of these primary texts have survived for thousands of years, so you've got a real portal into the daily lives of people whose stories otherwise might have been lost to history. The quite famous library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh was set on fire in the ancient world as part of a sacking of the city, and that bizarrely perhaps preserved all the tablets perfectly. An ancient Mesopotamia as now, people might suffer insomnia for a

variety of reasons. Somebody might complain of a bodily ailment that's keeping them awaken night. Yeah, so there's a description of the person. My spleen hurts and I can't sleep. Um, where is my spleen? I don't know where. I don't know what where not a clue, or there might be stressed, a condition which seems to have an etymological connection to insomnia in the Akkadian language, so delipped too. It's a noun that means sleeplessness or can sometimes mean just being

troubled in some way. What are the odds that we can get delipped to trending on Twitter? I would say pretty high considering stuff going on in the world, or trouble sleeping might have been a symptom of a larger issue, a cluster of complaints associated with a serious ailment. The Assyrians didn't have a sense of journey is pathogenic vectors for them. Sickness was often understood as the product of witchcraft. You got sick because somebody put a spell on you.

What we call anti witchcraft texts basically descriptions of medical experiences caused by witchcraft, and then the corresponding rituals or incantations and medical prescriptions to deal with those issues. There's a particular text that Moody thinks links insomnia with heartbreak, which is an association that will probably be familiar to anybody who has stayed up late at night scrolling the

social media account of your ex guys new girl. The treatment involves the patient reciting like a prayer incantation addressed to Ishtar, the goddess of love and war and ancient Mesopotamiam, and in that he says and it is a heat. I am tired, I am exhausted, I am ill, I am vexed, I am sleepless, I am scared. That sounds like a I don't know, it sounds like a mash about a new Phoebe Bridgers record. Like that sounds like the hook you know, super relatable. Ah aheah, I am

I am, I am see science. Okay, big shout out here to Andy Thompson, musical genius for that bit of bittersweet guitar on short notice. Oh. Now, as you may already know, the consequences of not getting enough sleep can be pretty ugly. Let's go back to Professor Russell. There's now a very important link between chronic sleep deprivation and cancer. It's a global impact on health. Lack of sleep in the long term can result in a big list of

garbage outcomes for both mind and body. Fluctuation in moods, increased irritability, anxiety, loss of empathy. We failed to pick up those social signals from friends and colleagues. One very important factor, of course, is risk taking an impulsivity. Cognitive impairment due to sleep deprivation has made history and some of our most memorable disasters. Think of the famous images from January when the US launched the Challenger Space Shuttle.

We have a report from Leaply Dynamic confter that the vehicle has exploded. By Director confirmed that we are looking at checking with the recovery forces to see what can be done. At this point, the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster was a failure to appreciate consequences, and that's really very clear as a result of relatively short amounts of sleep disruption.

An investigation was launched to try to understand the cause of the explosion, and a report from the Human Factors Subcommittee listed severe sleep deprivation of NASA managers as a contributing factor. And in your own life, you've probably noticed that being super tired makes you less effective at whatever it is you're trying to do. I suck when I'm tired. I really suck. I'm very sensitive. But would you get in the color and drive? I know, I'm a touring musician, right,

that's my my night job, I guess. And in the beginning of my career, the way that we used to treat night drives was super cavalier. Super cavalier, right. Everyone was worried about had you had too much to drink, but nobody was worried about how exhausted are you? And then I think collectively a lot of people, at least in my community learned because we were terrified of the Stories of flipped van's night drives really scare me. I've definitely been in a vehicle where somebody has drifted off

and the car has drifted onto the rumble strip. Because the thing is, when you really need sleep, you can't resist it through sheer force of will, Like physically, you cannot stop yourself from nodding off. Yes, a micro sleep is this sort of uncontrollable falling asleep so you can actually be driving. There are these overwhelming, uncontrollable falling asleep episodes because you're chronically tired, and a lot of people

have experienced these micro sleeps. Figures shared by the CDC report that one adults drivers in the US say that they've fallen asleep while driving in the past thirty days, and drowsy driving contributes to over a hundred thousand accidents annually in the US. Being chronically tired can be particularly hasitous for people who work long hours or late into the night. Think of the insane schedules of medical professionals. Well tired nurses and doctors do not perform the same

way that well rested nurses and doctors do. The amount of time on the night shift can have a big effect upon accident rates and harm to patients. If sleep is so important, then why aren't we valuing it? Why is low Wayne writing a song called no Sleep? Also incidentally the titles of songs by a bunch of other rappers. And Martha Stewart is bragging about running on four hours

a night. I think he goes back to a rather puritan time when work was was virtuous, and therefore, because when you're sleep, you can't work, sleep must be bad. In her book Insomnia, a Luned Summers, Bremner notes that Dutch Calvinists demanded that sleep be indulged in only in moderation, and I quote English preachers of the seventeenth century made sleep into the equivalent of moral disorder, which is heavy. So let's go someplace untouched by Puritanism to see how

humans sleep there. I've actually spent extended field work in multiple sites, probably close to a year in Bolivia with the chimane, maybe about three or four months with the san people in in the Kalahari also sometimes called the bushman, and more recently, I've spent maybe about three or four months with the Hadza in Tanzania, who are also hunter gatherers. That is. Gandhi as an anthropologist who studies the sleep habits of people who are not concerned with calvinism or

screen time or corporate burnout. Gandhi conducts his research by asking a lot of questions, how tired were you when you went to bed, do you have any dreams? Did you wake up during the night? And he asks study participants to wear an accelerometer, a device kind of like a fitbit that records their patterns of physical activity. These are populations where people don't have money, they don't have

indoor plumbing. Most of them today live in relative isolation, and they certainly don't have a nine to five work schedule, which is what makes them useful for your studying sleep. You are living with people who are in smaller communities, aren't connected to the grid in the same way that we are. Are They sleeping like, you know, ten hours a night and uninterruptedly and waking fresh faced every day?

Like what is their sleep experience? Compared to ours. Actual sleep duration would be somewhere around six to seven hours per night, which is actually pretty much the same pattern we have in the US. If that surprises you, me too. A lot of us somewhere along the way picked up the number eight. You're supposed to get eight hours of shut I every night, but recommendations from the National Sleep Foundation highlight how that changes over the course of development.

Newborns are supposed to get fourteen to seventeen hours a day, which makes them horrible Dutch Calvinists. For adults, the recommendation is seven to nine hours, but the need varies from person to person and night tonight. The right amount of sleep for you is the amount that enables you to wake up well rested and ready for the day. Gandhi has recorded a notable difference, though, in the time that's earmarked for sleep in the communities he studied if they

spend more time in bed. Time in bed is your conscious decision, and sleep duration is not a conscious decision. That means they don't have to optimize their horizontal hours to ring every minute of rest out of them like there's a comfortable margin of air. Do you have a confident answer to the question what is normal human sleep? Normal human sleep fits into your day, like you don't shape your day around your sleep, you shape your sleep

around your day. When people ask me from the other side, like why study sleep, my new elevator pitch is that the only things that are important in your life will affect your sleep. So if something really great happens, you're staying up late, that affects your sleep. If you're really troubled by some thing and you're feeling anxiety, that affects

your sleep. If you've ever read a magazine about getting better sleep, you've probably been told how important it is to have a routine to keep your bedroom a sanctum for rest. However, I've found that consistency from night tonight is totally a Western recommendation thing. When you have the ability to control your environment, you can try to do things like that and sleep at the same time every night and have these routines and rituals to kind of

get yourself into the mood to sleep. But in the environments I've been working in, people don't have that level of control. It's the environment that tells them when to sleep, not their own ritual. Are the populations that you've spent time with. Are they as frequently tired as people who are living in industrial societies? Definitely not. They are more rested and less tired. Why I think that your sleep and your awake have to kind of reach this dynamic equilibrium.

I think it's kind of where in our populations in the West, where time is money, you really push yourself and you really take this flexible phenotype of sleep that we we have the biological capacity to limit it to pursue waking activities, and we really stretch it as far as it can possibly go to the point where we

start suffering consequences. Humans are made of flexible stuff. We adapt our schedules and lifestyles to our particular circumstances, and modern schedules have stretched the elastic about as far as it will go without starting to fray. I think that it's almost like diabetes, because we achieved something as a society where food is so plentiful and sugar is so

abundant that we now get sick from it. That we're so good at staying up late after dark and making good use of that time, that now that we're all chronically sleep deprived, we just push and push push ourselves really freaking hard. The brain can become so tired it can't detect how tired it is, and we fool ourselves spectacularly into thinking you're perfectly okay, but actually your cognitive abilities are really really on the floor. That, of course is our guy rustling in. So what steps can we

actually take to improve our sleep lives? Get as much natural light as possible, particularly in the morning. It sets the body clock, which sets the sleep wake cycle, and morning light is really good for stabilizing Most people skip the sleeping pills. All of the currently available sleeping tablets have the problem that they sedate you. They don't provide a biological mimic for sleep, and don't get too caught up in the sleep apps and all their color coded analytics.

Some of the problems that people are getting with commercially available apps are really sending them into a tail spin. One person came up to me before COVID and said, my app is telling me I don't get any slow way sleep. And so this chap actually would wake himself up at three o'clock in the morning to check how

much slow wave sleep his app was telling him. At first, of all, these apps are really bad at telling us about slow wave sleep and all the rest of it, and we don't even really understand what slow wave sleep is for, so roughly, when did you go to sleep, when do you wake up? How many interrupts in the night. That's kind of useful information, but I think more than that you can be misleading and in fact, really rather harmful. It generates more anxiety. So take him with a pinch

of salt. God, it does have a real cool, like fireplace sound that I got super into here, but it's like so much of technology, it's deeply seductive, all right, James, James hit me. Oh that's a nice It's just a nice How could you not like that? Okay, cut it. I don't want anybody falling asleep before done. Given that sleep is so fundamental, I mean, why is it that we suck at getting enough of it? Sleep is just another victim of human arrogance that we're above the grubby

world of biology. We're not. We expect to do whatever we want, whatever time of day, and we now know that that's not possible. I think things are changing now. We appreciate and the society is appreciating the incredible value of sleep. I've noticed that shift to friends, colleagues, famous people that I follow online all seem to be recognizing

the importance of rest. The NAP Ministry, which frames rest as a form of resistance, has almost halfamillion followers on Instagram alone, which can be called comfort if you're walking down a mental staircase in your head at three am, furious that your body seems so reluctant to meet its own biological imperative. A final thought from Moody are insomniac seriologist is an amazing phrase during a hard night can bed knowing that you need rest unable to get it?

Have you recited that incantation? I have tried a lot of things, but I haven't tried that, And you've just given me the idea why not tonight? Tonight is the night a star you'll be hearing from me. We may struggle to sleep because we're anxious, and then struggle to quell our anxieties because we're tired. Hashtag to lip too, and more generally, we struggle because we've tried to slot

sleep into a neat little window in our schedules. We expect ourselves to do it on command, at the hour that is most convenient for the rest of our more important lives. But falling into sleep like love is not entirely self determined. You can only set the mood and then make way for time and gravity to do their work. And that My far Flown Friends is our last program of Deeply Human second season, which means it's time to

roll credits. So why don't you just why don't you just tuck in and we'll do this a s m R style. Our series producer is Simon Maybin. Producers are our Len Gregorio's Ellie House, Beth Sagar Fenton, Sandra Kenthal, and Craig Templeton Smith with help from Hannah au Guru and May Cameron. Our editor is Hugh Levinson. Our production coordinator is Janet Staples, and this season was mixed by my arrival, James Beard. Speaking of James, will you hit Oh,

they're good. I'll give you that. You're very talented arch enemy who really strives for excellence and takes brightness work. Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American public media co production with I Heeart Media. It's written and hosted by me Dessa. Find me online at Dessa on Instagram and Dessa Darling on Twitter, Okay, James, James, Okay they're out. Let's call get another dessert and watch scary movies with swear words. God, being adults is awesome.