, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.
No matter what happened to my body, I never felt like it was dangerous for me to keep working. I knew I was irritable and sometimes terse, and I didn’t smell the best, but I didn’t think anything I did was unsafe. Sleep experts often liken sleep-deprived people to drunk drivers: They don’t get behind the wheel thinking they’re probably going to kill someone. But as with drunkenness, one of the first things we lose in sleep deprivation is self-awareness.
In a high-school science-fair experiment in 1964, a 17-year-old stayed awake for 11 days. Since then, standards for science-fair safety have changed.
It’s this way of thinking—that you can power through, that sleep is the easiest corner to cut—that makes sleep disturbance among the most common sources of health problems in many countries. Insufficient sleep causes many chronic and acute medical conditions that have an enormous impact on quality of life, not to mention the economy. While no one knows why we sleep, it is a universal biological imperative; no animal with a brain can survive without it. Dolphins are said to sleep with only half their brain at a time, keeping partially alert for predators. Many of us spend much of our lives in a similar state.
Since my residency, I’ve become sort of obsessive about sleep—how much we really need, how to optimize it, whether there are ways to game the system. What can be said definitively about sleep and wakefulness? What I’ve found is a perpetual divide between what’s known to scientists and what most people do.
How much sleep do I actually need?
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