It’s either too late or too early to post this, but as a result of Kathryn Schulz’s NYMag review, I may have to buy a copy of Till Roenneberg’s book Internal Time:Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired…
Among species, we humans are to time what Polish villagers have long been to place: unhappy subjects of multiple competing regimes. The first regime is internal time: the schedule established by our bodies. The second is sun time: the schedule established by light and darkness. These two we share with houseplants and virtually every other living being. But we are also governed by a third regime: social time. That sounds benign enough, like afternoon tea with a friend. But don’t be fooled. Social time is the villain in this drama, out to turn you against health, happiness, nature, sanity, even your own inner self…
Ultimately, though, Roenneberg is more interested in what he calls “social jet lag”: the exhaustion produced by the gap between internal and social time. You can, should you choose, quantify your social jet lag. Simply calculate the difference between the midpoint of your average night’s sleep on a workday and a day off. Say on workdays you fall asleep at eleven and wake up at six: Your midpoint is 2:30 a.m. On weekends, you fall asleep at one and wake up at nine: Your midpoint is 4:30—and you’ve got two hours of social jet lag. You might as well fly from New York to Utah.
Social jet lag, unlike real jet lag, is chronic. Its chief symptom is sleep deprivation, and sleep deprivation is—surely I do not need to tell you this—ghastly. It leaves you with the equilibrium of a despot, the attention span of a toddler, and the working memory of a fire hydrant. It’s one of the few human conditions that can make the characteristics of the tomb—dark, quiet, horizontal—seem unbelievably desirable. Not for nothing are torturers so fond of it…
Adults, too, rapidly lose their equilibrium in the face of even short-term sleep loss. Long-term, it’s associated with depression, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular problems, and cancer. Your odds of being a smoker rise significantly for every hour of social jet lag you suffer. The World Health Organization recently classified “shift work that involves circadian disruption” as a potential carcinogen. The physiological, in other words, bears out the phenomenological. Sleep deprivation makes us sick, sad, and dumb….
Read the whole review, it’s as amusing as it is depressing. For the last few years, I’ve been unemployed (thank goddess and the Spousal Unit it’s been possible for me to survive without working for a paycheck), so I’ve mostly been able to keep my body’s preferred schedule of sleeping from approximately 6am to 2pm. It’s been my impression that us Non-Standard Circadians are overrepresented among bloggers (as among geeks of all persuasions), but maybe that’s just the fatigue poisons talking…
Apart from me making everyone who didn’t get enough rest (even more) cranky, what’s on the agenda for the start of another week?
Early Morning Open Thread: Sleep on ThisPost + Comments (42)