The week we challenged sleep norms
An exploration of sleep-wake cycles and how they shape us.
I made the mistake of writing out the title for this recap *The week we challenged sleep norms*, and then nothing else. My draft was blank for a whole day. I touted my defiance of sleep norms to the void, but paradoxically, it turns out the void is teeming with life and energy. It shouted back "Oh yeah?! Prove it!" I ended up typing this as the sun rose on Monday morning. I managed to close out my week pushing a 20 hour waking window simply because that's where my energy took me that day.
Sleep rhythms became a topic of interest for me this week. On Thursday, a mom friend of mine asked how long Abigail's naps were. We call Abigail's naps "cat naps". She's got wakefulness endurance. She loves to be awake during the day! And we love to see her exploring and engaging with the world. As I relayed this to my friend, she was relieved to hear that she knew someone else with a short-napping baby. She admitted that every article she read treated short-duration naps like a problem, and that if only she made the room darker, her son should be sawing logs for hours. We discussed the curious and borderline toxic nature of baby sleep training literature. As adults, we hardly bat an eye when we learn of fellow adults' sleep preferences. The same sleep preferences in babies are labeled as "problems". Why this double standard? I find that a lot of sleep training advice makes a few key assumptions:
1. The more predictable baby's sleep patterns, the more the rest of the family benefits.
2. Baby sleep habits influence lifelong sleep habits.
3. The more continuous sleep a person gets per night, the more healthy and productive (read: valuable) they are.
Sleep training experts design their courses and literature to primarily serve the family and broader societal community. The baby's well-being is optimized only when the needs of the community are met first. I don’t subscribe to those assumptions myself, yet I recognize their merit. In a normal distribution, I bet these assumptions resonate with the majority of modern families on some level. A question worth considering is: is this the kind of relationship with sleep that benefits humans at an intuitive level? Or are these standards a byproduct of a society that needs more cogs for its wheels?
The day following the baby sleep conversation with my friend, my husband told me about the geologist Michael Siffre, who, in 1962, spent two months in a glacier cave in the French Alps without any time indicators like daylight or clocks. He followed his body's natural urges to sleep and eat without any schedule. He spent 63 days underground, yet he believed it had only been 35. His sleep-wake cycle had drifted from the standard 24 hour rhythm, but not drastically. A decade later, he went underground again, this time for six months (205 days) in Texas's Midnight Cave. During this longer isolation, he fell into a 48-hour sleep-wake cycle where he stayed awake for 36 hours before sleeping for 12. It was one of the first scientific demonstrations of our endogenous circadian rhythm and how it keeps time all on its own.
Growing up, I turned to clocks often. I checked the clocks on classroom walls dozens of times per day. At home, I adhered to the schedule made for me by my parents, coaches, and eventually, bosses. Weekday bedtimes were followed without resistance (we started managing our own schedules in high school). One of my most memorable bedtimes was a middle school evening where I deliberately slid under the radar to stay up and watch MTV in the basement. My mother was shocked to find me there. Not mad, just bewildered.
My husband, on the other hand, had parents with varying work schedules. His dad worked a lot of second and third shifts, so there was some level of activity in the household during all hours of the day, which left young Daniel without a strict bedtime. He believes that freedom was crucial to his development. He spent his nights mostly reading with occasional tinkering. He learned how to think deeply for long periods of time. He became proficient at pushing his waking period to serve his creative and studious endeavors, then crashing hard for as long as he could. This became very useful (and exploitable) in his software development career. When managers needed a project shipped, or a bug fixed ASAP, his mental stamina was up for the task. Rather than thinking of long waking periods as being a *detriment* to creative output, could staying awake longer *unlock* creative flow states?
Siffre’s experiments demonstrated that we don’t need to train ourselves (or our babies! 🫢) to sleep optimally. Our body is designed to take care of itself, and I believe it’s up to us to let our bodies do their jobs. In today's society, it’s a bit counter-culture to follow our natural, intuitive rhythms. Thankfully, it’s getting easier to do since technology increasingly makes working and learning more accessible, efficient, and flexible. One thing I’ve noticed about fellow homeschool families - who I spot in the wild at the library mostly - is how unhurried they are. For good reason - homeschoolers typically have few external restraints on their schedule. We have nowhere to rush off to. Consequently, we close down the library when it’s open until 9pm on Tuesday nights. While other families show up at 9:45am for 10:30 story time because they’ve already been awake for five hours and are ready for a change of scenery, homeschoolers show up around 1pm after they’ve cleaned up from second breakfast. I am grateful to have the freedom to choose homeschooling for my family, and blessed to have a husband that faithfully navigates uncharted territory with me.
I am a proponent of minimizing external restraints on a schedule. I lived a heavily scheduled life for most of my childhood and adolescence, and subsequently left for college with few life skills or hobbies. I also lacked a self-defined value system, so I had little guiding me besides impulse and the expectations of others. Ten years later, after many mistakes and tough lessons, I am rebuilding from the ground up. Internalizing a value system takes a lot of thought, experimentation, and calibration.
This week, my family gave ourselves space to calibrate an intuitive sleep rhythm. One night, my 4 and 3 year old boys stayed up past midnight because my 3 year old took a nap from 5-9pm and my 4 year old and his dad were collaborating on a project together. Another night, the boys were in bed and lights were out an hour after sunset. It became easy for me to pick up on my children's sleep cues and the needs of the home once I dropped all arbitrary expectations for our sleep-wake cycles.
Our bodies carry generations of information on how to take care of itself, and that ancient knowledge works in conjunction with the abundance of information it obtains from its present environment. That marriage between legacy and presence is the perfect blueprint on how to care for ourselves and our responsibilities. The one caveat is - this blueprint? It works best when we trust in it.