Somnambulant

For most of the last fifteen years, I’ve averaged about six, maybe six and a half hours of sleep a night.  And, honestly, that always seemed like enough.  I woke up before my alarm clock, and felt like I was functioning totally fine.

With each year, I read more and more research about the negative impact of insufficient sleep, the countless adverse consequences that slowly accrue if you don’t hold to seven and a half or eight hours nightly.  But, as I said, I felt okay, so I tended to shrug all that research off.

Then, eventually, I came across a study on the cognitive effects – as well as the perceived cognitive effects – of lack of sleep.  The researchers started out by getting a group of people caught up on sleep/well rested.  Then, for one night, they had the subjects cut back, sleeping six hours rather than eight, and assessed them with a battery of cognitive tests the following day.  Further, they then asked the subjects how they thought they had done on the tests.

After that first night of short sleep, the people reported feeling tired, and assumed they had performed worse on the tests than when they were sharp and rested.  And, indeed, they were correct.

Then, a second night in a row, they slept for just six hours.  Once again, they thought their scores had further declined, and once again, they were right.

Third night, third day, same thing.

But then, the fourth day!  For yet another night, the people slept six hours, and for yet another day, they took a battery of tests.  Except, this time, the people felt totally fine.  As they explained to the researchers, they had finally adjusted to the shorter nights of sleep.  They were back to feeling good, and they knew their scores were back up, too.

Problem was, they were completely wrong.  Just as before, their scores continued to decline with each day of sleep deprivation.  But after the fourth day or so, they simply lost the ability to recognize as much any longer.

That study definitely gave me pause, made me question my own self-assessment of how well I was functioning on my standard six hours and change.  Enough so that, despite a decade and a half of habit to the contrary, I decided it was worth some self-experimentation.  I made some serious lifestyle shifts, and started sleeping a full seven and a half or eight hours every single night.

And, actually, for the most part, I felt pretty much exactly the same as I did before.  But then, every so often, I ended up once again short-sleeping, and I felt terrible enough to realize the necessity of the shift.

I was thinking about that today, because for the past two nights I stayed up way past my bedtime, unable to put down a good book.  And while I don’t really regret that (in the words of Lincoln, “it’s been my experience that those with no vices have very few virtues”), I now definitely feel the effects of those two six-ish hour nights.  I’m sluggish, foggy, cranky, craving sweets, and ready for a nap.  In short, I feel like crap.

And, at the same time, I don’t mind at all.  As ever, it’s a good reminder that those extra hours snoozing aren’t wasted.  Despite years of convincing myself to the contrary, I really do need seven and a half or eight hours of sleep to be at my best.

With that, I’m off to bed.

Sorry, Morrie

Yesterday, as I was chatting with a friend, he referenced something in the book Tuesdays with Morrie and I admitted I’d never actually read it.  As I told him, I had no interest in it.  Though, honestly, I couldn’t really tell him why.  Or even precisely what the book was about.  I just knew that it was wildly popular, in an inspirational, Chicken Soup for the Whatever kind of way, and so I disliked it on principal.  Which, once I said it out loud, sounded more than a bit dumb.  So, on his strong urging, I borrowed my friend’s copy, and read through the first half this morning.  And, I am dismayed to admit, it is actually pretty much delightful.

Whether it’s my New Yorker soul, my Silicon Valley roots, or just douchey hipster affectation, I’ve always gravitated towards the new and the cool, the up-and-coming, the overlooked favorites of those in the know.  From spotting talented bands before they go mainstream, to eating at top-notch restaurants when they’re still just in soft opening, it’s satisfying to feel like you’ve found something amazing before the rest of the world has caught on.

Which is fine.  But the problem is, I realize I’ve also generalized that to believe the converse, and to distrust anything that achieves too much popular success – especially when it comes to books.  So, for example, it was only this past year that I finally read All the Light We Cannot See and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius—two genuinely excellent books that I really liked, yet that I had also previously avoided liking (or even reading) because I felt like too many people had liked and read them already.

And, written in black and white, that’s patently ridiculous, the sort of myopic snottiness that would make me roll my eyes if I saw someone else doing it.  Yet, looking back, I can see I’ve done it myself, over and over, whether with The Life of Pi, or The Help, or Water for Elephants, or probably dozens of others, too.

So, it appears, I need to stop judging books by their proverbial covers.  Or, at least, by the ‘#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER’ taglines and ‘Oprah’s Book Club Selection’ stamps running along the cover tops

Keep Driving

It’s been a frustrating and impatient few weeks on my end, so I was glad to come across a favorite E.L. Doctorow quote, about driving at night:

“You can see only as far as the headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Pretty good advice for life.

 

Patience, Grasshopper

Right now, I’m about six months short of my 40th birthday – the official shift into middle age.  Though, at this point, I can hardly believe I’m that old.  And I’m not alone; I’ve only recently aged into feeling happy about it, but I’ve long been told I look younger than I am.  In fact, I shaved off my beard completely this past weekend, to start the new year fresh, and have since been getting heckled by friends and colleagues about steering clear of vans with tinted windows and strangers bearing candy.  Still, whether I look the part or not, the big four-oh is nearly upon me.  And, actually, I feel pretty good about that, and about generally hitting a sort of midway point in life.

Looking back at my first 40 years, I’ve done a ton of stuff that I feel proud of, and I’ve done a bunch that I screwed up pretty spectacularly.  Such is life.  Or, such was life 1.0.  These days, I’m trying to think about this birthday as an upgrade to life 2.0, and therefore a fresh start on the second half.  Sort of a do-over, but new and improved, with all the wisdom gleaned the hard way in the prior four decades.

I’ve been thinking a bunch of late about specific lessons, and about what I’m hoping to do differently – better! – in the next chunk.  And while I’m sure I’ll be blogging a ton about that in the months to come, at the moment, there’s one improvement that’s particularly on my mind: this next half, I’m going to make sure I take my time.  Because, looking back, I see I spent so much of my first 40 years racing forward, trying to make everything happen RIGHT NOW.  But, it turns out, there’s way less hurry than I thought.  And, further, I can see that most of my mistakes in life came from trying to get there the fastest way rather than the most strategic one, or from trying to make things happen more quickly than the world seemed to want to unfold on its own.  Conversely, when I look back at the things I feel most proud of, almost all of them were the proverbial ten years to “overnight success.”   Which is to say, sometimes what looks like the slow route actually turns out to be the fast one, paradoxically enough.

At the moment, for example, my wrist is in a splint.  It’s fractured, though only minorly so – a hairline at the end of my right radius bone.  And, in my youth, I might have just tried to power through.  But, now, I’m at least slightly wiser.  I haven’t given up on working out altogether, but I have adjusted to do everything with only my other good hand for the next six to eight weeks.  And though, after making a huge amount of fitness progress over the past year or two, I’m sad for the backslide that will doubtless cause, in the scheme of things, two months is nothing.  I can make back the progress lost a few more months down the road.  And, in the meanwhile, bones heal at the speed they heal.  Bad things happen if you try to push life faster than it will organically go.

Thus, these days, I’m thinking a lot about the classic joke: an old bull and a young bull, standing on top of a hill, looking down into a valley of cows.  The young bull says, “I’m going to run down the hill, and I’m going to fuck one of those cows.”  The old bull replies, “I’m going to walk down the hill, and then I’m going to fuck them all.”

And though I’m happily taken (I was going to say I’m a one-cow bull, but suspect Jess might object to that characterization), I increasingly relate to the joke nonetheless.  Whether it’s something as small as rehabbing a broken wrist, or as big as figuring out the details of Composite and the next decade of my career, I’m taking my time.  I’m thinking like the old bull.  And, going forward, I’ll be strolling down each and every hill.