Sleep in Academia: An End-of-Term Tantrum

I’m sleeping terribly this month. Because it’s May. Again.

In the first two installments of this sleep-deprivation series I bragged about how meticulously I average 8+ hours of sleep per night. But it’s May. Again. Normally, “May” means “grading,” and “grading” means “throwing out my lower back and suffering 3–4 weeks of sleep- and work-inhibiting chronic pain.” As it happens, I’m on sabbatical this term, but I do have an end-of-month writing deadline, which turns out to have the same effect.

You don’t need me to tell you what work-related stressors prevent you from getting enough sleep. But having named the problem, and having acknowledged the crippling effects of sleep deprivation on our performance and our health, and before looking for solutions, it seems right to ask out loud: What are the stressors in academia that kill our sleep, whether by introducing physical pain, or by keeping our brains in fight-or-flight mode, or by simply filling too many hours?

The Larger U.S. Culture of Sleep Deprivation:

Some of these stressors are not peculiar to academia. For the larger cultural factors, you can pretty much blame this guy:

Oh, you want to visit a café, spend more time with your family than it takes to slap a high-five and pass the Wall Street Journal, or enjoy substantive vacation time before you die of heart disease in your 60s? Bon voyage, serf. You might as well get yourself to France, since your job here was just outsourced overseas to someone willing to “do more with less.”

N’est pas? (Also, does the gratuitous French bashing give anyone else flashbacks to the Iraq-War run-up and 2004 elections?)

The “lost generation” of 2008+ PhDs aren’t the only casualties to this post–employment economy. Everyone is an at-will employee, working longer hours (often when not “at work”), with less to show for their labors. And those are the lucky ones, the professional types; many of the rest are “marginally attached” to the labor force or have disappeared to wherever you go when you can’t afford to keep looking for work.

Under these conditions, it’s no surprise that you’re responding to emails in bed before lights-out, working weekends, eating horribly, missing the company of those you love, and otherwise courting poor sleep (triggering the poor performance and health effects associated with chronic sleep deprivation…and then how is that job security doing?). Academic sleep deprivation is a variant on a larger cultural sickness. About all you can do regarding the latter is to vote in favor of your own economic self-interest, rather than those of the plutocrats you kid yourself you may join one day. (Though things may be too far gone for those votes to matter much.) So let’s look at conditions on campus.

The Academic Culture of Sleep Deprivation:

First, recall that about 3/4 of the teaching is being done by “contingent” faculty: most are adjuncts contracted on a per-class basis without health benefits or (often) such basics as office space or even an institutional email address. A smaller number are part-time or full-time multi-year “contract” faculty off the tenure track. When teaching a full-time rota of classes grosses perhaps $15–25k/year, it’s a little silly to try to isolate factors that interfere with sleep: your sleep is awful because you’re in hell. The adjunct problem is well documented elsewhere. So let’s turn to the full-timers, acknowledging that this is now only a minority subset of “academia.”

The academic calendar is enough to dampen any hope for regularity in one’s life, especially for teaching staff. The long-term calendar is irregular: aside from sabbatical semesters (about which I am NOT complaining), some semesters are heavier or lighter than others in terms of teaching load or institutional service. The semester schedule is irregular: orientation, the “October surprise” when learners slump into a sullen sense of betrayal, the halcyon days after they (hopefully) surmount the midterm “hump,” late-term anxieties (when next-term preps are usually due), Grading Hell. The weekly calendar is irregular: teaching and non-teaching days, meetings days, office hours days, and classes falling in the morning or afternoon or evening. Overlaid upon this (one hopes) is the rest of one’s life: family calendars, other communities of interest, church, and so on. Yet we know that, however much or little sleep you need, it’s best had on a regular daily schedule.

Then there are academic power structures. The PhD student lives in a feudalistic relationship to her adviser; if she judges herself to have been mistreated, her choices are to work it out with that faculty lord, or go outside that relationship (to administration or the law) at the likely cost of the future in which she had invested her resources of time and money. All the hours of the seminary MDiv student sit between the academy and the church like a steak between two lions. As institutions move into a post-tenure model for faculty employment, instructors come to grips with the humilating truth that the publishing and service they planned accomplish for tenure now serve only to sweeten their prospects for contract renewal. Our bodies are made to survive stressors that last moments (a fall, a bear). Stress as a lifestyle kills, starting with loss of sleep.

For the academic and the non-academic, any strategies for an improved quality of life run counter to current trends, which position laborers onto a place of permanent vulnerability. To set boundaries for yourself is to declare yourself replaceable. The only appropriate response in the workplace is “Yes,” and (as a friend of mine once quipped about graduate school) the only appropriate response to anything is gratitude.

Next post, I’ll examine some ideas about what we can do to sleep better in academia. In the meantime, how are you sleeping? Me, my back hurts. It’s May. Again.

Photo Credit: “Tantrum,” by Chirag Rathod, some rights reserved.

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