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A simple glance at my email inbox tells me that I am not alone in sacrificing sleep in order to squeeze in a few more hours of work. Last Tuesday alone, I received 23 work-related emails that had been sent between 10:00 p.m. and 5:00 A.M. This creeped me out. The next night, in fact, I had some trouble falling asleep. I lay in bed worrying about the correspondence that was accumulating in my email account, the possibly pressing matters I would need to address in the morning, and the number of hours the next morning that I would have to devote not to preparing to teach my afternoon class, but to replying to email. Eventually I rolled over and set my alarm back from 6:30 to 5:00, resolved to use the extra 90 minutes of wakefulness for email.
Wakefulness, actually, may not be the right word. For though I "gained" 90 minutes in which I was awake, I actually lost wakefulness. Sleep specialists are virtually unanimous on this: With some notable exceptions who seem wired to operate on a different schedule (Thomas Edison is a famous example), we human beings cannot lose sleep without decreasing our attention span, our response time, our acuity. I may have been awake for 90 extra minutes, but I was less wakeful all day long.
According to the National Sleep Foundation, the average adult sleeps six hours and 58 minutes per night during the work week. One hundred years ago—before Mr. Edison's marvelous invention—people slept about nine hours a night. They were right in line with the eight to ten hours of sleep specialists say we need. Now we are a nation of the chronically sleep-deprived.
Adults' zeal for cutting back on sleep has consequences for children, too—and not just that parents and teachers are crabbier because they're not well-rested. Children need even more sleep than adults, yet parents now keep them up later and later, possibly because working moms and dads want to "spend quality time" with their children (a phrase laden with many revealing contradictions and falsehoods, but that's for another day), something that's just not possible if you arrive home from work at six o'clock and Junior's in bed by 7:15. Last year the Washington Post reported that naptime is increasingly "a luxury that 4-year-olds no longer can afford." Many Washington-area schools are eliminating naps from the kindergarten curriculum, so that 45 more minutes can be devoted to instruction. Administrators seem unconcerned that their charges would learn better if they were well-rested, but that may not be the point. In trading nap time for more time spent studying the alphabet, these tots are really learning to value productivity, or at least activity, above all else.
The irony is that although many of us trade sleep for productivity, we would actually be more productive if we slept more. When we don't get enough sleep, we accumulate "sleep debt" which has to be paid back. (It's no coincidence that we describe this state with a metaphor drawn from banking, one William Wordsworth nicely turned on its head when he asked, in his poem "To Sleep," "Without Thee what is all the morning's wealth?") We concentrate better and are less easily distracted when well-rested. A study from the University of Minnesota recently showed that when high schools started the day 85 minutes later, at 8:40 A.M. instead of 7:15 A.M., students got more sleep at night, fell asleep in class less often, and got better grades. When we've gotten good sleep, we are also happier, nicer, and healthier. Michael Irwin, director of the Cousins Center of Psychoneuroimmunology at UCLA, says, "Even a modest disturbance of sleep produces a reduction of natural immune responses and [production of] T-cell[s]," the cells that combat the effects of viruses and other pathogens on our bodies.
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