I stumbled on a blog: Theses on Sleep - Alexey Guzey yesterday.
It brought up some interesting views, one of them is that the comfortable sleep we get nowadays is an unnatural superstimulus.
Comparing to cavemen, who slept with predators and enemy tribes roaming around, on an animal’s skin or on the ground, with temperature dropping 5 - 10 ℃ over the night, our modern day sleep occurs in a comfort environment, with no worry for predators, a soft bed, no noise, consistent lighting and temperature. Therefore, sleep offers too much comfort, and is a superstimulus like junk food.
Therefore he argues sleep deprivation can be healthy just like fasting can be.
As someone who has struggled with insomnia for the past decade, and has trouble curbing cravings for junk foods, this idea was mighty intriguing.
I can see the logic, still, something about it feels off.
Sleep just doesn’t feel like a super stimulus for me. I don’t think a good night sleep spikes my dopamine level like a chocolate cake does.
For one thing, sleep is kind of the opposite of “stimulus”, for something to be stimulating, our body is in the arousal state with sympathetic nervous system turned on, but for sleep to happen we need to turn off the sympathetic nervous system and let the parasympathetic department take over, and I would often struggle to turn off the stimuli so that I can fall asleep.
Yes we have improved sleep quality and efficiency, but I wonder if we’re still not there yet.
I wonder if it’s like we used to eat uncooked, raw or rancid meat, drink unboiled or unclean water, which can make us sick and kill us, but we then discovered this wonderful thing called fire and moved on to eat cooked food and drink clean water and wash our hands so that we don’t die from infections.
Sure, our body is probably less robust now in handling raw meat than it was ten thousand years ago, and sure you might be able to train it to tolerate such food better if you try, but I don’t see the point of going back to the old ways.
And yes, we eventually went too far and engineered foods that taste so good and spike so much dopamine that they became addictive and problematic - there is such thing as loving something too much, but I don’t think we have achieved the same level of over-engineering with sleep yet.
Maybe someone will stumble on something that makes sleep so enjoying and feel so good, and I’m sure the capitalism machine, which hums merrily along the dopaminergic way of “more”, will make a great product of it and sell it to the crowd, and we become addicted to sleep, we never want to do anything else but sleeping, at which point, if Alexey’s theory is correct, that sleeping too much can fuel depression, then we might get a huge problem with depression just like the obesity problem fueled by the over-engineered foods.
Anyway, even though I am team “get better sleep”, I do think forcing a certain amount sleep is a bad idea, as it tends to cause too much stress and pain for me.
Maybe things like eating, sleeping, body temperature, and breathing are supposed to be taken care of by the autonomic nervous system, the brain stem and other house keeping departments of the body, and if we try to force it with our conscious mind (such as frontal cortex), we could get into trouble.
A lot of times the body is perfectly capable of doing its job and taking care of us, and it’s the mind that needs to get out of the way, e.g., don’t force the body to sleep longer just because the mind heard from some expert saying so. Try it, and if the body keeps rejecting the idea, it’s probably for good reasons and we should listen to the body and rethink about the whole thing.
P.s. He did say in a later post that: My 2022 self (I don’t know them) was very wrong about meditation, huge monitors, and… sleep. - Alexey Guzey.