Sleep in Academia: Sleep Tight

(This piece is the fourth in a series on sleep deprivation in academia; here are part one, ampoule part two, and part three.)

Step One: We admitted that we were powerless over academia’s sleep-deprivation culture, that our lives had become unmanageable.

If we want better sleep, then there are two aspects. First, there are the physiological solutions, many of which will seem both obvious and impractical. Second, there is the task of making these possible by Jobby-Jobbing Our Job.

Acknowledging the Physiological

Whatever else you may be, you are a body. Remember the two armies? The sole idea here is to allow the Sleep Army its total victory during the 7–9 hours per day that are right for this particular body that you have inherited. Many strategies are well known to us. Again, don’t panic over those that seem impossible; note them and read on into the Jobby-Jobbing section below. So, the strategies:

• Wake at the same time every morning, including weekends. Your body wants to do this anyhow, you just have to sign off as willing. Even better, this is the domino that sets many of the other dominoes falling.
• Go to bed when you’re tired, Phase One: At some point during the day, you have to quit caffeine in order for your body to be able to feel “normally” tired. Yes, I miss having coffee after dinner. I also miss summer camp and the birthday pony I never got. Keep working this back: for me, 2pm is the cutoff for caffeine. Bonus points: start looking also at sugar.
• Go to bed when you’re tired, Phase Two: Backlit screens are the new caffeine. Desktop monitors, laptop screens, phone screens, tablets, and (sorry) television: Turn them off at least an hour before going to bed, or better, two hours before. Surely there’s something else you can do during that time: read a book or magazine, play cards or a board game with your family or roommates, iron your pants, wash dishes, hone your knives, walk the dog. (Good news: you can listen to podcasts or audiobooks!)
• Darken the bedroom. Even a small amount of ambient light penetrates your eyelids, inhibiting the production of Sleep Army chemicals and promoting the production of Wake Army chemicals. If hotel-quality “blackout curtains” and electric tape over the smoke-detector light seems impractical, then try a sleep mask. (I like the ones that contour to the nose.) It takes getting used to, but the difference between 7 hours of semi-darkness and 7 hours of real darkness is, in my experience, substantive. When you’ve acclimated, take the next step: ear plugs. Or do you enjoy rising an hour early on loud-garbage-truck day?

Note: Some people have particular issues that problematize sleep, such as (for starters) Apnea or chronic pain. All I can say about that is to honor it, and avoid any temptation to deny it or to address it with machismo alone. Also, many of us are working out our sleep schedules in negotiation with others, like partners and children. Alluding back to the Twelve-Step theme established at this piece’s top: “Progress, not perfection!”

If you could manage these steps, then a lights-out time will fall naturally into place, and you’ll grow into a pretty good idea about whether you need 7 hours sleep, or 8, or even 9. But of course, you can’t manage these steps, because you’re in academia. Let’s see what we can’t do in any case.

Jobby-Job your Job

You know people with jobby-jobs: they work on a regular schedule, and for the most part, are able to leave their jobs at work and be at home when they’re home. These are the people who don’t understand why you can’t golf on Saturday. They’re not all nine-to-fivers, but they know when they are, and aren’t, working.

Given that we might not ever get all the way there, how can we begin to enjoy enough of the benefits of a jobby-job, while in academia, such that we can sleep better?

First: Track it. When I was preparing to quit smoking cigarettes, I first spent a couple of weeks logging into a notebook every single cigarette I smoked. This was just an awareness exercise, with no effort to control the habit. This contributed to the kind of “moment of clarity” that allowed me to quit successfully. So try the same with your work hours: keep a notebook, logging when you start and stop “work” every day for two weeks. When you find yourself perplexed (“Is this work or play?”), make a note of it. (Let me solve one for you: YES, reading work emails is work.) At the end of fourteen days, tally it up. Do you work more hours than you thought? Fewer? Do you work them when you want to, or when other people want you to? Some academicians will find they work fewer than 40 hours and are still overwhelmed and under-rested…if that’s you, it’s by no means necessarily shameful. (Caring long hours for an aging parent or a child with special needs? Dealing with health problems of your own? Over-committing to tasks in other communities in your life?) But for most of us, the answer will be that we’re working long, odd, ever-changing hours. Look at the details, and begin to ask what’s okay with you and what isn’t.

Second: Honor your clock. Whether you are part of the “night owl” or “morning lark” minorities, or one of the “nine-to-five-feels-about-right” majority, see if you can own it. Owls and Larks can be departmental heroes for taking on more than their share of those night classes or 8:00 a.m. snoozers. Or reserve that time for research and scholarship in your guild. Note that you may have to solve at least some of the physiolgical factors above to determine whether (say) you really are a morning person, or rather someone who rises early against her body’s natural rhythms.

Third: Review your tracking data with the physiological goals above in view. What prevents you from rising at the same time every day? What one thing can you change to address that? (Yes, that one change causes problems for you elsewhere; don’t panic, it’s still a net gain toward better sleep.) If you habitually process work-related emails before bed, where can you move that block of time? How about where you used to wash dishes or iron your pants?

Fourth: Set a happiness goal. What do you envy in the lives of the jobby-jobbers? If it’s their weekends, then set a goal of sandboxing part of every weekend for play: Saturday afternoon? Sunday afternoon? If it’s their non-working evenings, then set aside one day each week where work absolutely ends at 5pm. Do something amazing with that time. Maybe eventually you’ll add a second evening, and a third.

By now, we’re hopefully getting significantly better sleep, and making some success toward taking ownership of our working hours. At points, we’re running up against obstacles, especially institutional. Remember that academia, like the Internet or Soylent Green, is made of people: by making decisions for ourselves and our well-being, we are changing academic culture for the better.

Sleep tight!

Photo Credit: Dog in Sleep, by Eugene0126jp, in Wikipedia Commons by CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.

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