Base sleeping

Though the alarm clock that guarantees I'm up and awake in time for my Tuesday and Thursday morning ride—which I shirked this morning in favor of staying dry instead—springs to life just as precisely on-time and blares just as loud during the dark and cold winter months, I consider myself something of a seasonal sleeper. That is, I aim to adjust my sleeping pattern over the course of the year to coincide, somewhat, with the lengthening and shortening of the days.

In endurance training there's the concept of base training. Its basic idea is simple: train easy and allow the body time to recover while remaining plenty active. Elite athletes, the ones who train inconceivably hard for much of the year, sometimes do base training and only base training for months at a time during the off season; their bodies need that much rest after the demands of the racing season are done. I look at sleeping in a similar manner; let's call it base sleeping.

The basic idea of base sleeping is simple: during summer, when the days are long, it's generally okay to push the body through times of little sleep; during winter, when the days are short, it's best then to recover, to go to sleep a little earlier at night and awake a little later in the morning.

My primary premise for base sleeping is thatle it's easier to fall asleep when light input to the retinas is kept to a minimum—i.e., when it's dark. It follows then, without modern light-emitting technology to which homo sapiens is not yet fully adapted, winter is the time for more sleeping and summer is the timer for less. My own personal preference, excluding the Tuesday and Thursday alarm clock and the other need-to-wake-up-by-this-time mornings, is to avoid the alarm clock altogether and consequently to settle into the pattern of waking up around the time of the day's first light. At night, my preference, excluding the too-frequent last-minute cranking out of a JEC blog post or some other such illumination-needed activity, is to keep the lights dim and naturally fall asleep not long after the sun is done for the day—within reason. This is one of the reasons why I enjoy camping. Not only do I get to enjoy my preference nearly spot on, but even the type of people who, upon reading this essay and insist that, no, they don't feel much natural tie to the daylight rhythms of the seasons, more often than not find themselves retiring to the sack not long after the sunset. There's a unique peacefulness of a camp settling down for quiet sleep in accord with sun and earth, and it gives me joy to be a part of it. However, my preference does not match up well with modern convention. Laura, I'll admit, is far from sold on my philosophy of sleep.

Convention, at least among most of the working-stiff middle class, tells us that we should be waking up about the same time year-round, weekends and other days-off being the exception. Convention tells us that regardless whether first daylight arrives before 5AM or after 7AM, we should show up to work at about the same time. Afternoon and evening scheduling, from indoor get-togethers to what's playing on television, suggests that regardless whether it's first dark outside at 6PM or 8PM, our evening and nightly routines should be about the same year-round. In my opinion, this is absurd. It's also not how our ancestors lived until only very recently, as in the last few centuries.

Though it's gaining traction as of late, the history of sleep is not something we hear much about, which is strange given how so many people in modern, industrialized societies have trouble doing it. Pre-industrial sleep patterns are actually rather different from modern norms. Absent those light-emitting devices, from the ubiquitous light bulb to my laptop's LCD monitor that's inundating my retinas with photons right now as I type this, most people feel a strong desire for sleep soon after the day's light fades away, regardless whether the day is a long summer day or a short winter one. Similarly, most people, absent alarm clocks and those light-emitting devices, feel little need to awake much if any before the next day's first light. But during the winter the dark of night may last well over half the twenty-four-hour day. How did pre-industrialized people sleep so long?

The answer is that often they didn't. Adults often awoke sometime around the middle of night, say around midnight, and stayed awake for up to a few hours before returning to the mat to slumber away the remaining hours of the night. During that wakeful period at night, people were alert and active, getting done many of the things for which they had not enough time to do during the daylight hours. Such a sleeping pattern is called biphasic sleep.

The history of sleep is an interesting one. Still, the fact remains that we are an industrialized people, and we enjoy our light-emitting devices, and it then follows that perhaps we should have a different pattern of sleep. However, I reject the notion that our light-emitting devices have completely smoothed over all the natural, year-long fluctuations in sleeping rhythms and that we should seek a one-day-fits-all pattern to the whole year. I find base sleeping to be a good compromise.