You Snooze, You Lose

Oh, sleep. Why are you so enticing?

I feel like there are very few things I wouldn’t give up for sleep. I once almost talked myself into sleeping through a final. I have absolutely slept through more classes than I can count, and while in Paris two summers ago, I slept 14 straight hours at one point after an all-nighter.

I know people loosely throw around the phrase, “my biggest weakness,” or my “Achilles heal,” so I will not do that here. My top ten is pretty competitive, and I don’t want to slight any of the other things that I am lousy at. Suffice it to say that the desire to sleep in is a very real personal struggle.

Sadly for me, it seems that learning to master the body’s desire to sleep is a common trait of most successful people. This does not bode well for me. The problem is that all rationale goes out the window when I am trying to wake up and my body is telling me that nothing in the world matters more than getting a few more minutes of sleep. Once I am up, it isn’t really an issue, and I can generally run somewhat effectively on small amounts of sleep, but getting up has always been, and will continue to be a struggle.

I am currently testing out a revolutionary strategy of going to bed early so that I am not quite as tired in the morning. Crazy, I know. The results have not been encouraging thus far. My body seems to intuitively know that I have more time to sleep, so it demands more sleep. I have felt just as tired getting 7-8 hours of sleep over the past 3 nights as I do when I get my typical 5-6 hours of sleep. That really doesn’t seem fair, and if it continues I will revert back to my old ways and just enjoy the extra hours in the day. Groggily.

Currently, I am reading a fascinating biography about Charles Lindbergh, the first man to make a continuous flight across the Atlantic, accomplishing the feat solo from New York to Paris. The flight itself took 33 and ½ hours during which he was forced at times to fly so close to the water that the whitecaps sprayed him with freezing water so that he could stay awake. (He asked that several panels to his cockpit stay removed during takeoff for this very purpose.) Keep in mind with all the chaos and publicity surrounding his departure, he had essentially pulled an all-nighter before he embarked on his flight.

By the time he was finally able to sleep after his heroic landing in Paris, it had been more than 63 hours since he had slept, most of those hours with the enormous pressure of knowing that the slightest mistake would kill him. He wrote the following in his journal during the flight: “My back is stiff; my shoulders ache; my face burns; my eyes smart. It seems impossible to go on longer. All I want in life is to throw myself down flat, stretch out — and sleep.”

It is amazing to me that he was able to remain awake and alert in order to accomplish that Herculean feat. I can’t even comprehend that level of discipline and focus. Great men seem to have that extra gear they can turn to when an ordinary effort would fall short. It is incredibly inspiring. Maybe the most impressive fact is that after sleeping for 4 hours and 45 minutes, he awoke at 9am to begin his day the next morning. I’m going to try and remember this the next time my body is begging for more sleep and tempting me to discard whatever important thing it is that I need to be waking up for.

I can only pray that my body and subconscious don’t adapt and begin to conjure even more enticing lies to keep me sleeping. That would really suck.