As I type this, I must admit to being less than alert. I am not going to take up too much space whining about how tired I am, though if a recent poll is to believed the majority of people reading this will feel the same. A CBC poll states that 58 per cent of people in Canada report that they often feel tired.
Not coincidentally, around 60 per cent of people report that they get about less than the six to eight hours of sleep recommended as ideal. Which, of course, aligns neatly with the statistic for how many people feel tired. It even relates to my own tiredness at this very moment, since in spite of making the effort, I too got under the recommended amount of sleep last night. This might explain why I am looking around the office for potential napping places, though none are in sight.
Dr. Margaret Rajda, a psychiatrist with the Sleep Disorders Clinic at QE2 Health Sciences Centre in Halifax, blames the sleep deficit on technology. With artificial light and assorted electronic devices, we can do things well after it gets dark, and that affects our ability to actually sleep well and as much as necessary. Being able to regulate the light around us makes it easy to disrupt sleep patterns and screw with the body's natural clock, leading to unorthodox sleep patterns and difficulty even getting to sleep.
While sleeping when the natural light dissipates is perhaps natural, it does lead to interesting problems the further north you go. It's bad enough in Yorkton, where in late December and early January the light doesn't completely arrive when you go to work in the morning and it's already getting dark when you make your way home. As a result, there is more night than day. While I'm not a medical doctor I'm pretty sure that sleeping for over 12 hours is probably not a good idea, tempting as it might be. This would be even more problematic further north, where there are days with no sun at all, and summers with no night. I'm going to go out on a limb and say not sleeping at all in summer is inadvisable.
Still, the good doctor is right that increased distractions lead to disrupted sleep patterns. I agree from purely personal evidence, due to the fact that I have a small computer in my bedroom for the sole purpose of having some entertainment before bed. According to science, this is foolish, and from personal experience science is right, though in this case that is mostly unrelated to my current predicament, since the little computer was not even turned on yesterday, and I'm more tired than I have been in a long time.
We should figure out how to manage our distractions and actually get to bed at a decent hour, not merely because we could fall asleep at work, something which could be highly embarrassing. Reportedly, metabolism and immunity to disease are highly affected by lack of sleep, and more data comes in all the time, linking a sleep deficit to pretty much everything. Since being tired is far from the worst that can happen, it's time we figure out how to get to bed at a reasonable hour.
It's a situation where the solution is relatively easy, comfortable, and usually quite warm on a cold winter night. Our beds are there, and they're calling out to us. We should listen to them, and try to spend some quality time together.
