The sleeper (sorry) hit of the year, has to be Ottessa Moshfegh’s novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation.
In it, the unnamed protagonist, in love with oblivion, aims to spend a year resting and resetting. She uses prescription drugs in order to sleep for days on end.
While not as extreme, I relate – regularly oversleeping. I start with good intentions of getting no more than eight hours’ sleep a night, but unless I have to be somewhere, I’ll keep punching the snooze button. When I wake up naturally, I’ll have often slept between nine and 11 hours a night.
I beat myself up about it, vowing to cut down – but the truth is, I love sleeping. The alarm rings, but wherever I am down there, five fathoms deep in sleep, I resist being pulled up to full consciousness. The plots of dreams are unfolding and to wake would be to end something that seems rich and (at the time) coded with significance – if only I could keep sleeping until the dream story is resolved.
But it’s more than that. Sleep itself seems like the ultimate bio-hack, a regenerative process that sets you up properly for the day. Anything less than seven hours’ sleep and I feel like a smartphone on less than 20% battery. Yes, I work. But I am liable to “die” at any time. Nine hours is like waking with 100% battery – which we all know is a secure, wonderful feeling.
As Moshfegh writes in her novel: “Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart – this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then – that when I’d slept enough, I’d be OK. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories.”
Yet too much sleep can be bad for our health. For many of us oversleepers, our battles to stay awake are ignored or mocked. Sometimes we are threatened with violence.
When I complained recently about oversleeping, a sleep-deprived friend (with a newborn) threatened to cut off my feet with a bone saw.
Making the same complaint, a mother of a teething baby spoke of her desire to suffocate me with a pillow.
Yet each week, multiple sympathetic stories are published about people’s battles with insomnia. No one threatens to kill insomniacs!
Kate Edgley’s piece in the Observer this week is typical of an insomniac’s lament: “Ping! 4am. Sometimes it was 3am. Or 2am. I stared at the red neon numbers, blood crawling beneath my skin. Slumping back down, my wide open eyes fell on faint shadows on the blank ceiling. Why? Why can’t I sleep?”
Why? Why can’t I wake up?
Since Arianna Huffington had her brutal epiphany (cheekbone meets desk as she collapses in her office from lack of sleep), getting less than seven or eight hours a night is seen as a health issue that needs to be urgently addressed. All sorts of sleep aids, new technology and sleep centres have sprung up in recent years to address insomnia.
But a study published in the European Heart Journal this month warned that oversleepers (ie those who sleep more than eight hours a day) faced their own problems, including a higher risk of death by cardiovascular disease.
Researchers studied more than 116,000 people from 21 countries over an eight-year period. The study found that those who slept more than eight hours a night were more likely to experience a cardiovascular disease or death.
If participants in the study slept eight to nine hours, the increased risk was 5%, and for people (like me) who slept nine to 10 hours a night or more than 10 hours a night, the risk jumped to 17% and 41% respectively.
You can have too much of a good thing.
