The sleep I protect
A small audit of the things I have given up to protect eight hours of sleep — and what came back when I did.
I am someone who needs eight hours of sleep. Seven and a half is fine. Seven is a noticeably worse day. Less than that and I am, by every measure I trust, a less competent and less pleasant version of myself.
It took me until my late twenties to take this seriously. For years I had been operating on six and a half, sometimes six, with the help of coffee and a low-grade willingness to push through. The pushing through was not as costly as I had thought; it was costly in a way I had not been measuring. The cost was in my skin, in my mood, in my patience with the people I lived with, in the small accuracies of my work.
What I gave up
Late dinners with friends who keep late dinners. I now eat with them earlier, or I see them on weekends. The friends have been understanding.
Evening television series with cliffhanger episodes. The cliffhangers used to keep me awake another hour past my bedtime. I now watch series with self-contained episodes and stop after one.
Reading in bed past eleven. The reading was reliably good but the next morning was reliably worse. I now read in the chair until ten-forty-five and the last fifteen minutes are screen-free preparation.
Alcohol past nine. A glass of wine with dinner is fine. Anything past nine fragments the sleep in a way I can feel even if I cannot prove.
What came back
Mornings. Real mornings. Mornings where I woke up before the alarm and felt rested and was, by seven, a functioning person. The mornings I have now are not just longer than the mornings I had on six hours; they are a different quality. The first hour of the day is, on eight hours, available for things I care about. On six hours it was available only for getting started.
On the smaller things
Skin: better. Patience: more of it. Memory: noticeably sharper for small things — names, where I put the keys, what I was about to say. None of these are dramatic improvements. They are the small recovery of capacities I had been slowly losing without noticing.
Eight hours is not a luxury. It is the maintenance of an organ — the brain — that has to work continuously for the rest of your life. If you have been getting less, consider what you would have to give up to get more. The math is, almost always, in favour of the sleep.