Wednesday, March 6, 2013

To Sleep, Perchance to ZZZZZZZZ!


I read a report on a medical study this week¹ that identifies lack of sleep as potentially hazardous to our genes. Our genes, for crying out loud! As in, destructive changes to our essential cells if we regularly get less than eight hours of shut-eye! Egad! I think I was 8 years old the last time I got eight hours! That’s a lot of years of genetic alteration! If this study is true, I figure I’m on target for serious mutation! What if I end up an alien life form… or a super model?!?

Honestly. Who actually gets eight hours of sleep every night? Hands up who among you is NOT a serial insomniac. If it’s not the first hour when you hit the sheets and flop around like a mackerel trying to turn off the playback of the day’s events or when you spend an hour endeavoring to flip your spouse over hoping for the finale to the musical score of “Whaddya Mean, I Snore?!?” then it’s the dreaded 4 am when your menopausal body reaches the temperature of a boiled lobster and you lie awake for the next two hours worrying about EVERYTHING! Now we can lose sleep worrying about our genes changing because we aren’t getting enough sleep. How ironic.

Although, it struck me this morning around 5:30 that the study didn’t say anything about the eight hours having to be all in a row. So, I got to wondering, since I was awake anyway, what if you take the hours spent in bed and add it to the time spent snoozing on the couch with the TV on? I bet your usual five to six hours would add up darn close to eight or even nine!

To be fair, I don’t think you can count the head-bobbing “SCHNUH” ² moments. The average SCHNUH really only lasts a few seconds.

(O.K., a SCHNUH is that sound you make when you drift off during Masterpiece Classic, your head does a whip snap and you make that snorting sound that startles you awake. You know, “SCHNUH!!!”)

But you should be able to count the accumulated time when your eyes clank shut involuntarily and you snooze away for an hour or so. You wake up half way through the next program having no idea what happened on the show you were watching before you lost consciousness. That’s some serious sleep.

On Saturdays, your afternoon nap could supplement your weekly total provided you don’t stay up half the night. Bonus points for your Sunday sleep-in. Extra bonus points for watching the Golf Channel. Before you know it, you could be up to 10 or 12 hours!

So, instead of resisting the urge to ZZZ out during House Hunters International, go ahead! Drop off for those extra forty winks. The next study to come out might just prove it’s good for you!
 
Footnotes:
1. http://www.latimes.com/health/la-sci-sleep-genes-20130302,0,4264278.story

2. The SCHNUH, as told to our friend, Marty Bragg, was defined by Morris Panych and Ken MacDonald, well-known to the Vancouver and Toronto theatre community,

2 comments:

  1. As inconvenient and uncomfortable as it is, sometimes I'm grateful for my C-PAP (sleep apnea treatment / machine). I realized a while ago that putting that thing on became like a Pavlovian signal to go to sleep. So I put it on, hit the start button, and usually within a few minutes I'm out like a light. That's not to say that I get 8 hours, but at least I know whatever I get is quality sleep. The downside is that sometimes I fall asleep without having put on the machine, or take it off in the middle of the night (unconsciously), and then I feel hungover the next day.

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    Replies
    1. I appreciate the comment and the sentiment, EJF, but not sure you've done a real "sell" here on the machine!

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