The "lie down and die" model of sleep

Source: Biacustica

Do we need less sleep as we age? Experts differ on this question. Some studies find that older people need 1.5 hours less sleep each night than teenagers. Other studies indicate that our need for sleep does not diminish with age.
One thing experts do agree on is that many older people have more difficulty sleeping through the night – problems with falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking too early. But it’s hard to generalize. There seems to be something highly individual about our lifetime sleeping habits.
I thought this observation on sleep, from Patricia Morrisroe in the New York Times, was both interesting and comforting.

Carol Worthman, an anthropologist at Emory University, interviewed a group of researchers who had studied the nighttime patterns of ten non-Western populations, including the Ache foragers in Paraguay and the Swat Pathan herders in Pakistan. She draws a picture that has little in common with our own rigid notions of what constitutes perfect sleep. While we engage in what she calls the “lie down and die model,” confined to our beds for a fixed block of time, people in traditional societies sleep in groups and drift in and out of slumber depending on what’s happening around them. That could be anything from listening to an impromptu concert to engaging in a ritual dance. Worthman speculates that age-related variations in sleep may have been vital to survival; by staggering sleep throughout the night, someone was always on guard.

I also enjoyed Ms. Worthman’s characterization of how sleep changes over time:

The quality and quantity of a person’s sleep changes over time. Just as our skin loses its suppleness and our joints begin to creak, our “sleep architecture,” which refers to the overall pattern of a person’s sleep, becomes increasingly more fragile. It develops wrinkles in a way. If we could hold a mirror to it, we’d probably say, “How did my sleep come to look like this?”

Patricia Morrisroe is the author of Wide Awake: A Memoir of Insomnia.

Some light reading on insomnia

The Times has featured a number of articles this year on sleep and insomnia.
In A Thousand and One Sleepless Nights, Ms. Morrisroe writes of the history of insomnia:

By 2012, the market for insomnia drugs is expected to grow 78 percent, to nearly $3.9 billion. But with sleeping pills what are we really getting? They only provide an additional 11.4 minutes of sleep over placebo pills, and they interfere with memory formation, with the result that people sometimes forget how badly they actually slept.

Terry Sejnowski, a neurologist who studies sleep, writes about sleep deprivation and depression in the article In Sleepless Nights, a Hope for Treating Depression:

Sleep deprivation used as a treatment for depression is efficacious and robust: it works quickly, is relatively easy to administer, inexpensive, relatively safe and it also alleviates other types of clinical depression. Sleep deprivation can elevate your mood even if you are not depressed, and can induce euphoria. This throws a new light on insomnia.

In An Insomniac’s Best Friend, Lily Burana writes movingly of the love and loss of her Labrador retriever, Chief:

Chief was my insomnia buddy. As far as late-night companions go, you could do worse than a dog. We humans fill the sleepless void with mental anguish, constructing indexes of recriminations and future-forward panic. Dogs, anchored in the present, know no such travail. The sum total of their fixations are food, belly rubs and alerting to possible intruders. Chief and I, the worrier and the worry-free, formed a yin and yang of preoccupation. We were perfect partners.

Gordon Marino, in Counting the ‘Blessings’ of Insomnia, discusses several famous insomniacs, including the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran. I remember the thrill of first reading Cioran 30 years ago. Marino quotes Adam Gopnik: “A love of Cioran creates an urge to press his writing into someone’s hand, and is followed by an equal urge to pull it away as poison.” Grimly pessimistic, Cioran’s books have titles like On the Heights of Despair and The Trouble with Being Born. Great stuff, especially in the middle of the night when you can’t sleep.

Related posts:
Links of interest: Sleep
Couples who prefer to sleep alone: Your room or mine?
High school students should sleep in