this article yesterday\u2013The Shorter Your Sleep, the Shorter Your Life.<\/a>\u00a0And it has totally scared me straight. Overnight, I\u2019ve gone from \u201clife is too short to sleep\u201d to \u201cIf I don\u2019t sleep, my life will be too short.\u201d<\/p>\nHow can one article completely change my sleep philosophy? Well for one thing, it contains all sorts of alarming statistics\u2013based on actual science\u2013 about all the ways that sleep deprivation totally wrecks your body, your cognitive state, and your mental health too. Awesome.<\/p>\n
It\u00a0also offers some speculation on why such a high number of Americans are trying to get by on less than 7 hours of sleep at night. The short answer: electric lights, digital devices, alcohol and caffeine. Our usage of all these things has ramped up in the past few decades and made us a nation of walking zombies. It is affecting not just our health, but our relationships, and the very fabric of our society. In fact, the more I think about it, a national epidemic of sleep deprivation is probably the true heart of our healthcare crisis.<\/p>\n
But I think the most powerful effect of this article was its timing in my own life. It offered some very direct answers to the lingering internal question I\u2019ve been holding lately, which is:\u00a0why are none of these things I\u2019m doing for\u00a0my body making me feel better?\u00a0<\/em>Well, because I\u2019m withholding the one thing that my body is trying to tell me it wants.<\/p>\nWith that in mind, I had to recognize the convicting truth of this statement: \u201cIn the developed world,\u00a0sleep is strongly associated with weakness, even shame. We have stigmatised sleep with the label of laziness. We want to seem busy, and one way we express that is by proclaiming how little sleep we\u2019re getting. It\u2019s a badge of honor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Well, hell. That sounds a little too close to home, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
It also sounds, ironically,\u00a0like the kind of thinking that I preach against ALL THE DANG TIME. I am constantly telling my people\u00a0that we are embodied beings,\u00a0so much more\u00a0<\/em>than anything we can accomplish or produce. And yet, here I am, spinning my wheels long into the night and wondering why I feel so dang tired all the time. This article was a blessed\u00a0wake-up call for me. Or rather, a go-the-f***-to-sleep<\/em> call. It is a glaring testament to some of the ways that I do not quite practice what I preach; a reminder that, while I know better,\u00a0I do not always embody and internalize what I know to be true about the nature of God, and the nature of embodiment.<\/p>\nThere you have it. My public confession is my accountability. I\u2019m ready to call this what it is\u2013a spiritual sickness\u2013and offer myself the only real antidote available, which is rest. I\u2019m going to get\u00a0off of this hamster wheel\u00a0of toxic, caffeinated\u00a0productivity, and maybe let\u00a0my body catch up to the rest of me. It is just my wild hunch that many of you might be on the same vicious treadmill. Let\u2019s hop off together, and aim to stick around awhile longer for the people we love.<\/p>\n
I make this shift grudgingly. I am a night owl, and I hate giving up that window of down time to a state of non-awesomeness. I find sleep boring and un-fun (yes, Enneagram people, I am a 7. Full stop, no wing ambiguities). As much as I like to think I\u2019m avoiding sleep to more fully enjoy my waking moments, I know deep down I am just programmed to think I should be\u00a0doing\u00a0<\/em>something, every second. Having had a mirror held up to that particular dysfunction, I can\u2019t un-see it. So, I\u2019ll\u00a0resign myself to the pillow and let it have me for awhile.<\/p>\nNow that I think of it\u2026 one night a couple weeks ago, in some rare fluke of whatever, I slept for NINE hours.\u00a0\u00a0I could not help but notice that I felt amazing the next day. I accomplished more before noon than I normally would in a day. And I was like, \u201cwow, crazy,\u201d scarcely acknowledging that maybe it was because I was functioning like an actual human-being and not an espresso fueled robot.<\/p>\n
My goal is to have more nights like that, and more good days to follow. I\u2019ll let you know how it goes. But it might be awhile. I have a feeling that once I lay down, I may not get up again for awhile.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We’ve become a nation of walking zombies. It is affecting not just our health, but our relationships and the very fabric of our society. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1154,"featured_media":5120,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[105,805,1088,1599,1600,10],"class_list":["post-5119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-being-a-person","tag-ministry","tag-pastoral-life","tag-self-care","tag-sleep","tag-sleep-deprivation","tag-spirituality"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/p>\n