#115： The Slumbering Masses With Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer
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Summary
Matthew Wolf Meyer is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, San Francisco, and the author of the book The Slumbering Masses. His book is a cultural study and anthropological look at sleep and why we sleep the way we do.
Transcript
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all right so tell me if this has happened to you guys you're lying in bed at night
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and right before you doze off to sleep you have this thought that right now tens of millions of
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people across the country at this exact moment same as you are lying down on these rectangular
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shaped mattresses and are about to be unconscious for the next eight hours while having
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hallucinations because that's what sleep is when you think about it and when you think about it
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that way sleep's kind of weird and it's kind of weird that we sleep the way we do i think we take
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it for granted that you sleep from you know about 10 until 8 or so if you wake up late but our guest
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today makes the case that this hasn't always been the case and that for most of human history sleep
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has actually been very unique to communities and individuals and it wasn't until about the 19th
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century until the whole world basically got on this sleep schedule where you sleep from 10 o'clock
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a night till about 7 o'clock in the morning then you work during the day no naps and then you repeat
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the process before then sleep was much more individualistic it was unique to different
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communities and it's this whole radical transformation of sleep has had profound
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changes effects on the way we approach life work and sleep our guest is named matthew wolf meyer he's
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a professor of anthropology at university of california santa cruz and he's the author of a very fascinating
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book called the slumbering masses and it's basically a cultural study anthropological look at sleep and
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why we sleep the way we do in this podcast we discuss when the transformation to sleep as we know
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today happen we discuss the medicalization of sleep and all the things we do to improve our sleep with
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over-the-counter medications but also the things we use to jolt ourselves awake so we can stick to this
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work schedule that we have either through coffee tea now energy drinks anyways fascinating discussion i think
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you really like it and we even get into what you can do if you have a sleep schedule where it just
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doesn't fit with the the norm right the working norm or the school schedule what you can do to work with
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that um so a great discussion i think you got a lot of out of it without further ado matthew wolf
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meyer and the slumbering masses matthew wolf meyer thank you so much for being here welcome to the
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show thanks i'm glad to be here all right so your book the slumbering masses is a book about sleep
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but it's different from a lot of the books that have come out about sleep in the recent in the past
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10 years i'd say where it's all had about how to get better sleep the science of sleep your book is a
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is like it's cultural study of sleep and the sociology of sleep what made you want to research
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the anthropology of sleep in america so um it depends how uh far back you want to go i mean if
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you and we'll probably talk about a lot of the stuff as we go but um i was always a problem sleeper so
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like as a kid throughout middle school and high school i had pretty what i thought were abnormal
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sleeping times like going to sleep really late having to wake up for school needing to take naps
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during the day um and then when i was in college it gave me the opportunity to tailor a schedule
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sort of around my sleep and what ended up happening was i got a job working third shift so i worked from
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like 10 p.m until 8 a.m which was okay with me and then i would go to school from 8 until 10 o'clock in
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the morning and then go to school from like five until eight o'clock at night and that all totally
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worked um and and at the time i had a bunch of co-workers who just could not handle the schedule
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and whenever they were off work like on their weekends they would end up trying to sleep like
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everybody else did and it was like a decade later as i started to do the research that i realized
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how bad of an idea that actually is but at the so at the time i was always kind of attuned to
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different kinds of sleeping and i always really enjoyed this is in metro detroit like at four o'clock
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in the morning just being able to step out into the middle of a otherwise very busy street and seeing
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the world kind of sleeping around me and being like the one person that was awake um and so when
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it came it came time to actually develop a research project much later um i had initially thought that
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what i was going to do is write a book about night work so um not just people kind of doing factory work
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in the middle of the night but like all the stuff that happens at night in order to make society work
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throughout the day so security guards and police ambulance drivers nurses er doctors um sanitation
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workers construction workers i thought that i would just tell this kind of big story about
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labor at night and in my initial idea about that project i thought that
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i would write one chapter that would be about what everybody else was doing and so everyone else would
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be sleeping the way that i would get into that would be uh going to a sleep clinic um and uh just by sheer
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happenstance there was a piece um in the new york times magazine profiling a sleep center near where i was a
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graduate student and so i got in touch with the director and they invited me over for lunch one day
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and kind of gave me the tour and probably within 10 minutes of being there i thought like oh this is
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the real project like that i can do everything that i want to do just by talking about sleep in american
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society and they were all the doctors and the researchers that i was spending time with there
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were all really interested in having an anthropologist hanging out with them like they had a bunch of
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questions and they thought that i like i didn't know the answer to any of their questions at the time
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but they figured that they could task me with answering the questions that they had and so it was just kind
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of off to the races from that point like that as soon as i got into it i was like oh obviously this is
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the project and the other thing like you kind of mentioned in the intro nobody's written this book
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right that like if you look at the literature out there there's a lot of kind of self-help-y stuff
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there's a lot of popular science books that are like this is why we sleep um although nobody actually
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really knows why we sleep but they um and uh and stuff written by scientists right so there's a bunch
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of books by scientists about sleep but they're really uncritical right they accept sleep as it is right
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and so i figured there's a huge window here that uh i guess needs to be jumped through and i was the
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guy who jumped through that window very good so one of the main points you make in the book is
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americans today sort of take for granted our current sleeping schedule we all assume that
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since time immemorial people have went to bed between the hours of 10 you know around then and they woke up
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at seven or so by seven to go to work but you make the case that well no that's not how sleep was
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until about the 19th century so what was sleep like before this sort of what's called consolidated sleep
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right the eight hours one of the things that got me started on the project was this book written by
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a historian named roger ekurch called at day's close and in at the end of that book he writes a chapter
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about basically a hypothesis that he has that um people before industrialization slept in what
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we now refer to as a biphasic model um and he was looking at the uk and some historical documents that
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he had and what he was hinting at is that people would go to sleep around sundown they would sleep for
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a few hours they'd wake up in the middle of the night for a period that could be anywhere between like an
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hour and four hours then they would go back to sleep and then wake up around dawn to go to work
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and um and when you think about it it makes a lot of sense because it's not like nighttime is eight
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hours long and even if it you know even if it is some of the time it's not consistently eight hours
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long nor is it eight hours long everywhere around the world all the time right so the idea that sleep
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and darkness are necessarily tied together is just wrong on the face of it right and when you think
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about the availability of electric light people like especially the working classes don't have
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cheap accessible electric light in some cases until after the turn of the 20th century right so you
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have so there's that that set of circumstances so i started to look at the historical record in the
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united states and particularly the um medical monographs and medical pamphlets and medical articles
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that are published kind of at the end of the 1700s through the 1800s and um what people are identifying
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is is exactly this pattern of sleep right that people are going to sleep around sundown they sleep for a
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few hours wake up go back to sleep and they sometimes refer to it as first sleep and second sleep or first
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nap and second nap um first slumber second slumber that kind of thing and um and the reason why they're
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talking about is because it's a problem for the new industrial work schedule and so historically what's
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happening is that people are moving from the countryside where they're working either on their family farm
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somebody else's family farm or in a trade that's probably owned by someone that they know very
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intimately because they're living in small settings to big urban centers where they're one of thousands
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of strangers working in a factory for somebody that they have no relationship to right and so in their
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old work situations work times vary if you need to take a nap you can probably take a nap if you need
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to go home early because there's an emergency no problem but when you're working for a large factory where
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everybody's anonymous any of those kinds of uh variances are fireable offenses right and there's a long line
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of people just waiting to take those jobs so people are put into these consolidated work days that are
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structured by the availability of free sunlight right so electric lights not available for most of these
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factories um there's some gas lighting but generally the way the factories are operating is they open at
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dawn they close at dusk and there's one shift and everybody works from dawn until dusk and so what
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happens to people's sleep is that they're so exhausted at the end of the day that they consolidate their
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sleep and so the idea of consolidated sleep is really something that's based on a new model of
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exhaustion so if you were working in a way where you could take a nap whenever you needed to
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you're never as exhausted as you are when you have to stay awake for 16 hours at a stretch right
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um and so what happens in the medical literature is all these doctors are identifying the biphasic
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model as being a problem they start to refer to it as insomnia and they start to think about ways to
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treat that problem right there's a lot of scare tactics involved too that um the they're really
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trying to shame people away from sleeping in a biphasic way um and so you really see from
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basically the beginning of american medicine and american industrial capitalism this tie between
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medicine and capitalism around shaping what workers are supposed to do and how they operate the thing is
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that um that consolidated model of the workday links up with the consolidated model of the school
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day right so for the working classes what do you do with your kids you have to send them somewhere
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so the state basically steps in and gives public education um to the working classes in a way that
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had never been available before and so kids are going to school at the same time that their parents are
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at work and um and so you slowly see over the course of the 19th century all of these institutions that
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we kind of take for granted in american social life abiding by the same set of ideas about time
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and um and so by the turn of the 20th century and this is really the beginning of sleep science as a
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science the earliest guy whose name is nathaniel kleitman and he's a professor of physiology at the
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university of chicago he's starting to do research on sleep and his assumption is that people sleep in
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consolidated way right so he's carrying it into the basis of the science and he's not allowing
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napping or variations and sleeping the schedules it's really what you're testing is consolidated sleep
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and so what happens is he develops a model of our circadian rhythms that's based on consolidated sleep
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rather than biphasic sleep and that's the model of circadian rhythms that everybody uses to this day
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basically so we really don't know what human sleep would look like outside of the context of
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sort of industrial capitalism and the structure around time yeah i want to get back to that uh your
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point about insomnia and sleep disorders i think that's really interesting what i found fascinating
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in your book is that you yeah you point out that the way we sleep is primarily economically and
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productivity driven you made an interesting point how ben franklin was one of the early guys you know
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early to bed early to rise makes a man healthy wealthy and wise and one of his reasons he kind
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of advocated for uh consolidated sleep was that it saved money on candles right like right like he went
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to france and he saw that they just they wasted all this this candle wick you know partying and carousing
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in the night and they didn't get up in the day to go you know be productive he said well no if they just
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slept eight hours they would save on candles right and if they just slept when it's dark rather than
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having to use the light everything right and the i mean the great thing about that essay of his is that
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he does the math to figure out how much it costs to burn something like 40 000 candles a week right which
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like is an insane amount of candles right but if you're a french aristocrat apparently that's what you do
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yeah so yeah we we this consolidated sleep model we take for granted and it was because of cultural
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and economic changes in america going from an agrarian to an an industrial economy and you make
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the point that this american way of sleeping has been has spread to other countries can you talk a little
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bit about how that how our idea of sleeping has spread across the world so in two ways primarily so first
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like i was just talking about the uh in the science what happens is scientific models that are
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invented in the united states get exported elsewhere and so you would think that societies where there's
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long-standing napping traditions like spain and their siesta culture like china like taiwan like italy
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um that they would have sleep scientists working under different assumptions but in fact they just buy
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into the american model whole hog and so it really shapes the science and medicine of sleep around
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the world and uh and secondarily it's structured around uh ideas around capitalist work time right so
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recently um maybe not that recently anymore 10 years ago um in the early stages of the european union
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spain came under a lot of fire in part from conservative movements within spain about getting
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rid of the siesta so that they would be more productive like germany and france and england
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and so what they do in order to make that happen is they pass laws that all state agencies like the
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postal service only operates between nine and five o'clock right so everybody else has to sync up to that
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time and and and so we see that kind of synchronization pressure happen in a variety of ways one of the
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things that i was really interested in um is the synchronization between like the united states
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and call centers in india and the philippines too right and so they what we've exported to them
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in order to harness their labor is our calendar and our work week so they get synced up in a kind of
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inverted way to our work time so that they're awake while we're awake right um and they're asleep while
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everybody else in their society is awake right and they abide by our holidays and you know like the
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structure of how and so like our work week if you look at how it maps onto their work week is hours
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different right and yet they're working on their sundays in order to be available on our mondays right
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um so there's really pervasive and sort of subtle ways that that has uh that our ideas about sleep have
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kind of structured other societies so going back to that uh this idea of sleeping disorders because
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before sleep science there really wasn't such a such as there wasn't sleep disorders right
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insomnia didn't really exist because people were in a biphasic model so and you make the point in the
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book or the case that sleeping disorders aren't so much a well they are a health issue but they're also a
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social problem and that's the thing that drives people to sleep centers and to medication so can you
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explain that a little bit how how is how has how are sleep disorders social problems
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well so one really quick thing that like we actually have pretty good descriptions of a lot
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of the sleep disorders that goes back at least to 1820 so there's a scottish physician named robert
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mcnish who writes this book called the philosophy of sleep um where he is basically coming up with
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descriptions for insomnia and narcolepsy um and like drowsiness of various kinds and um he basically
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gets written out of the history of sleep science and medicine i'm not entirely sure why um but i think
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part of it is that they're by the conditions of the 1820s all of these kinds of medical uh experiences
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are very very rare and it's not until the 1840s and really the 1880s that something like insomnia
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is something that's generalizable to broad swaths of the population right um and you know that medicine
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is more and more available to people more broadly but in terms of the kind of like how are sleep
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disorders social disorders probably you know the the best examples are the ones that are about
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like schedules for sleep interfering with schedules for work or for school and so um for example one of
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the um stories that i often tell and i'll tell again is that at the sleep clinic they would often see
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adolescents or teenagers who had problems waking up for uh public school time so they couldn't get to
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school by 7 30 in the morning it was probably more like 10 o'clock and so what they had done is figured
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out um what the school start times for all of the schools in the area were they would figure out what a
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individual student um would wake up around and what kind of sleep need they would go need and they
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would recommend them to particular schools right so there were a bunch of kids who couldn't wake up
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until 10 o'clock in the morning that all went to catholic school despite not being catholic because it
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fit their sleep schedule right and um the alternative is that like you end up having to wake up to go to
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school at 7 30 and you're a teenager who needs provigil or something else in order to stay awake um
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or drink coffee or whatever um and that like the your sleeping problem is really a kind of mismatch
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between your biological desire for sleep and the institutional times that are normative right and so if we
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just had different institutional times or even flexible institutional times then you would see far
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fewer sleep disorders in society which doesn't mean that like narcolepsy would go away there are like
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very clear biological conditions that lead to narcolepsy and it's always a challenge but like you could have
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more tolerant institutions that would allow people to be sleepy at all sorts of different times of the day
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yeah we'll get back to i want to get back to that what we can do about our different sleeping schedules
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and trying to fit into work and school but um yeah you also make the point in the past 10 years
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there's been this proliferation of uh medications to get us awake and to put us to sleep and so a lot of
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people are on this vicious cycle where they'll you know they'll take an energy drink to wake up or a pot of
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coffee and then at night and then they keep drinking during the day so they stay awake and then at night
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they take some sort of medicine uh to help them fall asleep um so and what's what's going on there is
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this something that's just recent or was this something that started you know a century ago or decades ago
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um this seems pretty recent like it seems like a real intensification of things that have been
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happening for a long time so it and so it's not like it's totally new but the intensity of it is
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pretty new so one of um one of my favorite books that i'll plug is called sweetness and power by a
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anthropologist named sydney mince and the story that he tells is that industrialization in europe
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really depends on exporting sugar and coffee and tea from the caribbean in order to keep workers
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awake throughout the day right and so like the idea of tea time in britain is really based on this idea
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that like you could either take a nap or you drink some caffeine at that point in the day right um and
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that we've lost taking those naps and accepted having some caffeine in the afternoon in order to stay
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awake for the rest of the work day right um and and so you know coffee or caffeination really and sugar
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have always been tied to labor as we know it but the way that we're um medicalizing the sleep and kind
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of alertness these days is is much more intense right so you can just think about the widespread popularity
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of starbucks right that like 20 years ago there were not coffee shops the way that there are now
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right and now there's starbucks everywhere right that this like incitement to always be caffeinated
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is something that's really pervasive right and um and so if you look at the numbers about people who
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have problems sleeping at night something like a third of americans the numbers change a little bit
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but it's about like a third to um almost a half of americans complain about problems falling to sleep
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or staying asleep in any given year right that people have at least intermittent insomnia and so
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you know there's more and more people who are using off-label um sleep aids so like tylenol pm right
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rather than lunester or ambien or something like that or nyquil which is a terrible idea right but that
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you know there are a variety of ways that people are helping themselves get to sleep and also keeping
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themselves awake throughout the day right and it becomes this kind of vicious cycle because
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if you're taking more and more ambien you need more and more coffee to offset the debt that you're kind
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of accruing the sleep what's sometimes referred to as sleep drunkenness that you wake up and you're still
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kind of sleepy so you need more and more coffee right um and there can be i you know there's stories
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in the book about there's one guy who reports to his uh sleep doctor that he drinks something like
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four pots of coffee a day there's like five pots yeah uh but like you know that that's like 16 cups
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of coffee a day right and um that you know that's a profound amount of caffeine to be putting into your
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system yeah but the assumption is that like we need to do it in order to meet the work needs
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that we have right so the alternative might be that you know you have workplace napping right that
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like instead of having you know coffee free for everybody that you give people a place to go take
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a nap and there's some workplaces that have experimented with that but the big problem that
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they run into is that people don't want to be the napper right like they don't want to be the guy
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who's sleeping at his desk or in some cases what they'll do is they'll take an office and turn it
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into a napping space and so you don't want to be the guy that's you know going into the napping space
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or coming out of the napping space and so a lot of the people that i talk to about napping at work
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they're like you know i just like will get in my car go to the nearest fast food place and you know
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sleep in the parking lot right like rather than see my have my co-workers see me sleep um and so there's
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really like we need an attitude shift about sleeping in some respects um i think it's funny
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about nyquils that they have z-quil now because they just realized oh everyone's just taking this
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to go to sleep they don't really have a they don't have the flu or the cold so let's just make
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something with alcohol and you know whatever that drug is that make you sleepy yeah yeah yeah and i
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think it's interesting with the nap thing in businesses that's sort of becoming a thing
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and it's not because you know businesses are like they want to take care of their employees
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they want it they're doing it for productivity right i think it's kind of ironic you know
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decades ago they're like no no napping you need to work be productive and now they're saying oh well
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yeah nap because you're going to be more productive we can get more out of you
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yeah and that's it that's the weird the paradox of it right is that like
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um you as an employee might really want to take a nap but what employers have discovered
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is that if you take that nap they'll get way more labor out of you for free right so if you're a
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salaried employee by five o'clock you just want to go home right if you take a nap at 2 30 and you
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wake up at three you're good until seven or eight o'clock at night right um maybe even later than that
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and so a lot of businesses realize that they can get more work out of people just by giving them
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a nap allowance pretty much and so i had also talked to a bunch of people at a law firm where they
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had a napping facility and they all realized that they were self-exploiting right that like
00:29:24.280
they had started staying later and later and they collectively decided to stop using the napping
00:29:29.780
facilities right that like they just wanted to go home um and so there is this kind of like
00:29:36.700
uh damned if you do damned if you don't around the workplace stamp yeah so so besides using uh
00:29:46.260
medication for off-label uses you know tylenol pm or nyquil um to go to sleep there's also
00:29:54.080
a lot of entrepreneurs you're reading about this a lot entrepreneurs business executives you know high
00:29:59.400
powered attorneys who are taking very powerful stimulating drugs that you know that are used
00:30:05.000
for people who have you know severe sleep disorders uh like provigil or modafinil um not because they
00:30:11.220
don't have a problem with sleep or waking up it's like they just want to stay awake longer so they can
00:30:16.820
get more work done have you looked into that sort of like there's like a cult of modafinil on the
00:30:21.980
internet yeah um and you know students talk about it all the time like in among my students i've seen
00:30:31.460
over the last 10 years total ignorance to provigil to widespread knowledge about it and sometimes use
00:30:39.660
of it right that like um like ritalin drugs you know so for a long time only people with ritalin
00:30:46.800
use those drugs and now it's like well everybody does it during exams right um and you know there's
00:30:52.920
a lot of people who swear by provigil um and the new version of it which is called new vigil um you
00:31:00.200
know it's used by the military to keep people awake for a while um it's expensive you know like the
00:31:08.000
and i think one of the real challenges around it is that um what we see in the kind of off-label
00:31:17.220
pharmaceuticalization of um everyday life is that you know some of these things are available to
00:31:24.940
certain classes of people and they're not available to other classes of people right and so you know
00:31:30.800
sure if you're an elite business person you can get your doctor to write you a prescription
00:31:34.940
for a new vigil but most of us don't have access to that right um and so instead we drink a bunch
00:31:42.480
of caffeine to keep up with people who are using that kind of drug nobody really knows what the
00:31:47.620
long-term effects of drugs like that are yeah because it's only been out for you know like 10
00:31:51.580
years or so right yeah you know and so even the military has kind of backed away from using it quite so
00:31:56.700
much because they they're not sure what the effects of it are going to be and you know it's a it's a
00:32:04.320
it's a new kind of stimulant for the central nervous system and you know there's some doubts about what
00:32:13.900
its effects will be so you know in some cases what people might be doing is getting some kind of gain
00:32:19.320
in the short term but really facing neurological problems in the long term and we just kind of have
00:32:24.660
to wait and see yeah well speaking of sort of like this sort of division between individuals who can
00:32:30.720
afford drugs to keep them away can be super productive and individual individuals who can't
00:32:34.440
let's talk about like the future of sleep i mean you kind of allude to this a little bit in your book
00:32:38.640
and no one really knows what the future of sleep but it seems like there's this push to end sleep
00:32:45.200
right amongst a certain group of people so they can be super productive all the time um what is the
00:32:51.660
future sleep is that going to happen are we going to genetically modify ourselves where we don't
00:32:55.360
need sleep anymore yeah i the um i think the future of sleep is to keep asking about the future of
00:33:03.620
sleep yeah right you know that um and it's one of the things that i track in the the book that like
00:33:10.920
you know people have been asking about the future of sleep since at least the turn of the 20th century
00:33:16.020
right that's how it always goes yeah uh um and um you know so like the early the the there's uh early
00:33:28.120
stuff about like how do you maximize your sleep like can you learn a foreign language in your sleep
00:33:32.880
which you know you still see people talking about can you learn while you're sleeping
00:33:38.120
not really um can we get rid of sleep altogether probably not you know that if you think about
00:33:46.000
life on earth we everything sleeps right so plants sleep every other animal species sleep
00:33:55.300
we sleep um and you know we're not entirely sure what sleep does we do know it has some pretty
00:34:02.360
important effects on like our memory and our ability to learn new things our stress levels you
00:34:08.760
know so if you're not sleeping really well um you get stressed out way more easy and so
00:34:15.220
you know the question might be like if we get rid of sleep at what cost right so like our chances are
00:34:23.040
if we get rid of sleep we're not going to be the humans that we are today we're going to look very
00:34:28.120
different right and um so there there's a book series by nancy kress called beggars in spain where
00:34:35.900
they do genetically modify humans to get rid of sleep and her presumption is that like when you lose
00:34:43.220
sleeping you lose basically creative potential right that like there's something about sleeping and
00:34:50.000
dreaming that's really important to our ability to create and even kind of be human and so the people
00:34:56.240
who get rid of sleep in her world are just like cold calculating computer people right um and so you know
00:35:06.520
that might index us sort of anxiety about like what we would actually be losing when we lose sleep um
00:35:13.940
that being said you know the future of sleep might be um tinkering with it more right and so
00:35:24.060
one of the one of the scientists i've kind of i find really interesting is this italian uh guy named
00:35:31.680
claudia stampy who is a yacht racer and he uh does these experiments on um what he refers to as ultra
00:35:39.500
short sleep so it's basically catnapping for humans that like you're awake for a short period you go to
00:35:47.940
sleep for a short period you're awake for a short period so you don't have long sleeping periods like
00:35:53.280
polyphagic sleep right yeah yeah and so you can i think it's still online there's this uh frontline
00:36:01.040
episode i think that he was on uh and you can find this footage of him running this experiment with an
00:36:06.800
undergraduate where the kid has to wake up do a performance test every two hours then he goes back
00:36:12.160
to sleep and after about 30 days it's just getting harder and harder for this kid to wake up but in the
00:36:19.520
and you know he's pretty groggy when he does get up but he can still actually get through his
00:36:25.380
performance tests pretty well which points to you know this idea that maybe we could organize sleep
00:36:32.800
differently right that like the 24-hour society might not be everybody being awake all the time
00:36:39.200
but it might be that you know some people are going to be able to organize their work in ways
00:36:44.380
that are different than this kind of consolidated work in the period yeah didn't kramer on seinfeld
00:36:52.440
like do an experiment with that like yeah it didn't work out for him yeah they call it the like uh
00:36:58.440
it's how leonard da vinci apparently slept which is um it's something like
00:37:03.860
half an hour every four hours yeah like that right and it really doesn't work out for kramer doesn't work
00:37:11.200
out for him and yeah the whole idea of like getting rid of sleep like if they did i don't know what i
00:37:15.780
would do with myself honestly right it's like i would be bored out and one of the reasons i enjoy
00:37:21.960
sleep is like it takes up time when i have nothing else going on well that's the thing that um one
00:37:28.880
you know like i love my family yeah we spend a lot of time together already sure and the prospect
00:37:37.120
of spending eight more hours a day with my four-year-old son is like is a crazy prospect right
00:37:44.340
and so if we did get to the point where we're awake all the time um we would have to really
00:37:51.100
restructure what society looks like yeah right like um we it doesn't mean that we would have eight hours
00:37:57.260
of recreation we would probably be finding other ways to organize what we're doing yeah um so and that's
00:38:05.980
what i kind of mean that like if we get rid of sleep we're not going to be the human beings that
00:38:09.120
we are today right that like everything is going to change if we got rid of sleep so i don't know i
00:38:14.500
think your book came out right before like this the uptick in like tracking devices where you can track
00:38:20.720
your steps and there's even device where you can track your sleep it's this whole quantified self
00:38:26.040
thing so this idea of you know the track not only how many hours you sleep but your quality of sleep i
00:38:31.120
even bought one of those like zeo things like you strap it to your head and like it reads your brain
00:38:36.360
waves does this sort of entrench people more into the idea that okay you need to sleep you know eight
00:38:43.220
hours straight or nine hours or does it give people information where they can start tinkering and with
00:38:49.100
their own sleep schedule i think it does both right and so the the thing that i would point to and i is
00:38:58.520
and um is that you know there are cultural assumptions embedded in all of this technology
00:39:06.260
right so if the technology really assumes that consolidated sleep is the only way that you're
00:39:14.140
getting good sleep then it's probably a problem if the technology is a little more flexible and is able
00:39:22.380
to work with whatever kind of sleep schedule you want to work towards then it might be a little more
00:39:29.520
liberatory right and so like one of the things that i tell people to do and this is based on
00:39:35.320
clinical practice is that like if you really want to figure out what kind of sleeper you are
00:39:39.920
you need probably about two weeks of not waking up to an alarm clock right and so like what the project is
00:39:46.540
is that you go to sleep when you're tired you time how long you go to sleep for you are awake when
00:39:54.320
you're awake right and you you know maybe you have a cup of coffee right but you don't drink lots of
00:40:00.960
caffeine you also don't drink a lot of alcohol or anything like that you're just trying to isolate
00:40:05.220
what your sleep is actually like right and um and so what one of the things that you can discern by
00:40:13.000
doing that is what an actual sleep period is so if you look at what the physiology of sleep is you
00:40:20.980
have these roughly two hour periods of um moving through the different stages of sleep and um and so
00:40:30.860
our sleep is always kind of built up of a certain number of those periods right so when we talk about
00:40:36.340
consolidated sleep what we're thinking about is four of those periods kind of smashed together
00:40:40.700
but it because the two hour number is pretty soft like it can be anywhere between an hour and a half
00:40:48.780
or three hours that a sleep period is and you always want to be sleeping in factors of that period right
00:40:56.860
so like if you've got a technology that helps you figure out what your sleep period actually is
00:41:02.460
and is helping you kind of abide by the it's like those a factor of those periods then you're
00:41:10.360
probably using that technology pretty well or it's it's decent technology right um
00:41:15.580
if you're being shamed by your technology because you're not sleeping eight hours a night that's a
00:41:21.100
problem right yeah um yeah i think the the zeo does that because like it'll give you a sleep score
00:41:27.280
and like give you suggestions like you need to do this like to improve your sleep i'm like okay
00:41:32.960
i will do that algorithm yeah right right um and so like the and you know the other thing i like
00:41:42.360
apps on your phone that like are supposed to monitor how well you're sleeping by putting it under your
00:41:48.080
pillow probably not worth the money right that like even we it's called actigraphy technology and it's a
00:41:56.160
bracelet that people put on in order to um clinically track their movements and so you can look at
00:42:03.460
somebody's actigraphy report to see when they're awake and when they're asleep pretty much right but if
00:42:09.260
you're a really active sleeper it's a bad technology for you right and if you sit at a desk all day
00:42:16.000
and you don't move your left arm very much yeah it's also a bad technology yeah that's happened to me
00:42:21.020
with this the fitbit like it'll i'll be like on you know sitting writing for you know two hours and
00:42:26.620
they'll say you were taking a nap it's like no i wasn't i was i was writing right um yeah and so i
00:42:33.600
think that's you know that's one of those things that people always need to think about like what is
00:42:38.020
the cultural assumption embedded in this technology right and i'm a little the whole quantified self
00:42:43.620
stuff i'm a little skeptical of more broadly because it you know it really is emphasizing
00:42:51.120
these ideas about productivity right and um and i think that you know ideas about being productive
00:42:58.520
are ways that we tie ourselves to self-exploitation right that like if all we're thinking about is
00:43:05.600
whether or not we're being productive like we have sold out to the system
00:43:12.300
sold your soul so i mean here's the question i know your book is primarily descriptive and it's
00:43:19.740
not prescriptive but and you've kind of alluded this a bit what people can do but what if you have
00:43:24.140
a sleep schedule that just doesn't fit the norm um what can you do and do you think technology
00:43:31.780
is giving us more flexibility in how we work and how we school that will allow us to
00:43:37.940
i don't know change our schedule so it fits our personal sleep schedule
00:43:41.640
i um for some people yes right that like one of the um so one of the recommendations that i make
00:43:54.820
is that we need to think about flex time for all the institutions that we interact with right
00:44:01.720
so some workplaces have this idea that you can come into work late and work late right or you can
00:44:09.120
take a day off and make that day up some other way right and that that flexibility in the schedule
00:44:16.180
is something that um historically has really been for the most elite workers right um and but it
00:44:28.100
provides us a model for thinking about how we might structure institutional time across different
00:44:32.980
kinds of workplaces within schools especially i think having that model in schools would be great
00:44:39.140
um but you can also think about it related to you know family and recreation and stuff like that
00:44:46.300
that like we need a little more flexibility in order to address the different styles of sleep that
00:44:52.600
people have and um and the challenge in that kind of recommendation is that it you know it's really
00:45:01.260
because it's so tied to elite labor in the past it's difficult to get um other kinds of labor
00:45:10.600
on board with that schedule right so if we want to pick on starbucks right that like because it's a
00:45:19.560
low-paying job they're going to give you the hours that they can give you if you can't work those hours
00:45:23.920
you're just going to get fired right and and so what you know what we might need to think about is the
00:45:30.860
kind of like careful management of a work population right so if you find workers that are good in the
00:45:37.260
morning and bad at night then you schedule them in the morning and you schedule other workers at night
00:45:41.820
right and it depends on kind of taking seriously people's variation in sleep and how it might
00:45:50.180
actually fit into scheduling more generally right um you know i think for like the so-called creative
00:45:58.020
class technology makes things a lot easier right that we can telecommute all the time um or you can
00:46:04.140
work kind of flexible hours but you know the real question is what do we do with everybody else
00:46:10.300
right um because everybody else are also the people who have the worst health insurance and
00:46:16.500
they're probably most likely to self-medicate through zequel or alcohol or amphetamines or whatever
00:46:22.900
else right so if you really want a kind of equitable society we need to think about how we arrange school
00:46:31.020
time and work time and family time in a way that's in some ways agreeable to everybody right and so
00:46:39.160
instead of having this static schedule we need to think about what can we actually do in order to
00:46:44.940
make it a little more livable interesting well matthew wolfmeyer this has been a fascinating discussion
00:46:50.380
um thanks so much for your time it's been a pleasure thanks brett it's been a pleasure for me too
00:46:55.700
our guest here is matthew j wolfmeyer he is the author of the book the slumbering masses you can find
00:47:01.100
that on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere well that wraps up another edition of the art of
00:47:08.280
manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness website
00:47:12.180
at artofmanliness.com and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly