We think we all know what we’re talking about when we talk about sleep, but really we all have a different idea of what this universal need means for us. We humans, with our things to do and life stresses, have maybe a more complicated relationship with sleep than our animal friends. Every individual has their own relationship with sleep, and in my experience, my relationship with sleep has changed over time. We can have a different relationship with sleep that even depends on the day. For something that takes up like a third of our lives, we don’t pay much attention to sleep. Well, I do. Maybe too much attention.

Little kids hate to sleep. There is so much to do that is more fun than sleep. Literally the only time I remember being threatened with a spanking, I was running around resisting bedtime. As an adolescent and teenager, I had trouble falling asleep, with my thoughts clanging around in my head. I left the TV on to out-shout those thoughts, and slept on the couch where the TV was, instead of my room where my bed was. 

In college, I would go to bed at 8pm while my friends were all still partying. I would get up to do homework at 2am. There were a couple of reasons for this. I’ve always been good at getting up to an early alarm, and basically bouncing out of bed ready to take on the day. This is my mom’s fault. She would always wake up at 3am because it was the only time of day no one was around to place their endless demands on her. For a couple of hours in the wee small hours, she could read or crochet and drink coffee and be free for once. From her, I learned that mornings were a meaningful time to be embraced. Since I’m pretty clear-headed in the morning, this was a great time to do homework while my mind is fresh, and to this day, I do my writing in the morning. The only downside to 3am productivity is that my brain is totally useless by 4pm. So the early to bed/early to rise cycle reinforces itself.

The other reason for my early bedtime and wakeup time was that sleeping was the only thing I wanted to do more than drinking with my friends. Do you know how hard it is to focus on conjugating Spanish verbs and outlining passages of The Canterbury Tales when your friends are partying 20 feet away? And of course plenty of days I would stay up with my friends and still get up at 2am to do homework, so throughout college, I was badly sleep-deprived and overcaffeinated. When caffeine wouldn’t cut it, I resorted to Mini-Thins – remember Mini-Thins? Weird little over-the-counter amphetamine tablets. What on earth was in these? I don’t even know, but they kept me awake like speed and made me only slightly insane. I was pretty unstable and miserable throughout my college years. I wonder what problems were caused by the mental health havok of these conditions.

For a lot of my post-college working life, I worked two jobs with hours that extended from early morning into midnight. At times, in addition to horse-killing quantities of caffeine, I was drinking alcohol between shifts to come down from all the caffeine and get a little shut-eye. Apparently I disregarded the obvious health and mental health implications of this speedball lifestyle. This was to my detriment. My mental health was precarious on a good day. Interestingly, for all the doctors and psychiatrists I saw during this time, I don’t remember any of them asking about my sleep. 

When I was hospitalized for a serious suicide attempt, this is the first I remember of a mental health professional taking the issue of sleep seriously. I didn’t take a ton out of my hospitalization, but something I remember is they said getting good sleep was one tangible thing I could do to improve my mental health. I did start to focus on getting a decent night of sleep most nights. For years, I did it with a belly full of wine and in front of the TV, but I was getting a full night regularly for the first time in my adult life. However, because of all the alcohol, a lot of these were still very bad nights of sleep – night sweats, waking up nauseated at 2am, multiple trips to pee, etc. A lot of things changed for me during these years, so it’s hard to isolate the sleep variable, but I know two things are true: 1) I started getting a lot more sleep. 2) My mental health started getting a lot better. 

In recovery from alcoholism, one of the hardest things for me to learn was how to fall asleep instead of just passing out. I remember those early sobriety nights of trying to sleep as being truly miserable. Honestly I still struggle a bit. It takes me an hour of winding down and a good long sleep meditation, and sometimes I still toss and turn. But I do it without the TV on! After over 40 years, I can (most nights) fall asleep in relative silence. And I am blessed with the gift of Sober Sleep, which is better sleep than I ever got with a belly full of wine. 

But now…I’m kind of addicted to sleep. I will prioritize sleep over things I really love – time with friends, time with the cat, time with Dan, time meditating and writing and generally becoming a better person – I will tell myself I don’t have time for those things tonight because I want to get 10 hours of sleep (yep, I get 9-10 hours whenever I can – which is maybe 15% of the time). I will jettison nearly everything but work in my quest to sleep until I naturally wake up, instead of waking up to an alarm. So I wonder if the pendulum has swung too far the other way. After all, there’s a ton more to life than sleep. What I can say is, two things are true: 1) My sleep has never been better. 2) My mental health has never been better.

And then! There are people who literally have no choice about how much sleep they do or don’t get. People with kids. People with kids AND jobs. People with kids and demanding jobs. I can barely do my demanding job, and I don’t even have kids. I wonder how many shouting matches with kids and spouses could be prevented if the kids would just let their parents effing sleep once in a while. 

So I suppose it’s weird to think that any reader would be interested in Stef P.’s sleep habits. I actually love sleep passionately, and wonder why it’s not a topic more of us think is important and worthy of discussion. It’s also been a revolutionary change from my 20s into my 30s and now into my 40s, and has been both a cause of and beneficiary of my steady progress on mental health. The psychiatric hospital seems to have been right – good sleep supports better minds. And anything that makes our poor suffering brains healthier is an excellent topic to talk about.