Enemies of sleep keep growing
Electric light first to upset our circadian rhythms and slumber, learns
Shakespeare called sleep ‘‘great nature’s second course’’ and said it ‘‘knits up the ravelled sleave of care’’. We would all agree with him if we could.
There’s nothing so refreshing as a good night’s sleep. Trouble is, too many people are no longer getting a good night’s sleep. The numbers who suffer from insomnia or sleep apnoea grow each year.
So is the modern world killing sleep, the way Shakespeare said Macbeth did?
Michael McGirr seems to know the answer. Eight years ago, the urbane Australian essayist wrote a book called
The Lost Art of Sleep. He’s now revised and expanded it and retitled it Snooze.
McGirr firmly believes that the invention of the electric light started the damage, turning night into day, upsetting our circadian rhythms and making it harder for us to slip into our nightly slumber.
Coffee, of course, has something to do with it. When the drink first hit Europe in the 17th century, it was welcomed as a soother and soporific. Now we are addicted to it, we take too much of it, and we are agitated by it rather than calmed down.
Then there are the new enemies of sleep – television, the internet and texts online.
McGirr has good medical evidence to show that while reading a book will help you drop off, reading off a screen will make sleep more elusive. It has to do with the difference between light reflected off a page and light beamed directly into your eyeballs.
Snooze is organised not as one ongoing argument, but as a series of quite separate observations. They are, in effect, little essays of the sort you can read before lights out.
The range of McGirr’s vision is broad – everything from the construction of beds to narcolepsy, the numbing nature of small-hours TV ads, the vagrant and the homeless who live in city streets at night, dreaming and the interpretation of dreams by Freud and others, and the perils of Z class drugs – touted as a cure for insomnia until their side-effects were found to be lethal.
McGirr is at his best when relating this problem of sleep to his own experience. He underwent a cure for sleep apnoea and has worn the masks designed to keep the snoring sleeper’s air passages open.
As the father of young children, he knows the impact kids can have on parents trying to get enough sleep.
He also brings to his survey a wealth of literary and historical knowledge. His neat re-readings of stories from The Odyssey and The Bible and The
Thousand and One Nights bring out much ancient wisdom on sleep.
He’s a good man for the one-liners, too.
My favourite? ‘‘Many people share a bed, but everybody sleeps alone.’’