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Institutional Sleep Deprivation is killing us
The inability to achieve our dreams may be structural.
We can no longer judge what is “normal”. We live most of our lives on a sleep deficit, operating on sub-par consciousness, our memories left half-sorted, our traumas half-healed. Is all the vitriol we see on social issues a process and product of our sleepless lives? What toll does this take from us? What unintended consequences?
Humans operate best on eight hours of sleep. That’s two REM cycles of 4 hours each. To further complicate things, the optimal period of sleep differs between individuals due to circadian rhythms (for reasons we still don’t understand). Even our age impacts our sleep needs.
Despite knowing this, we consistently lose sleep and structure our lives and our societies around the results. We insist on working from 9 to 5, even though many of us aren’t “awake” until 11 (raising my hand here) while others have been up and ready since 4 am, flagging at noon. We stare at blue light screens until long after dark. We stuff more activity into every day, subtracting from our sleep hours like those don’t matter. In compound our deficit with drugs to stay awake and more to fall asleep. When we finally do sleep, the cat or the kid or the dog or a text or the city outside wakes us in the middle of REM. We do not value sleep, and by extension we devalue…