I like everyone else in the western world have heard the theory of sleep-debt. That each time we miss an hour of sleep it gets added into some mystical sleep bank and that in order to clear that balance we must get that hour of sleep back.
Well what this has meant for me is that whenever I have a sleepless night for whatever reason I worry. Worrying about the first sleepless night means I can’t fall asleep the next and it becomes a cycle. I get less sleep each night forward until I reach a point of sheer exhaustion and crash. It’s always how my insomnia has worked, one night triggers it and one night of proper sleep ends it.
Now even though the night I crash usually marks the end of a cycle of insomnia the worry over how many hours I’ve added onto my sleep debt sticks with me. I believe this worry has on occasion even prompted a new cycle of insomnia to begin.
So while dealing with a sleepless night a while back I began thinking about the idea of sleep debt. I thought about how it I were to add up all the hours of sleep I’ve missed in my whole life from teenage all nighters to the days as new parents just how many hours it would be. The closest I could estimate is somewhere in the realm of astronomically high.
So short of pulling a rip van winkle there is nothing I can do about all the past hours of sleep I’ve missed and further along that train of thought I began to question how if I carry this ever expanding sleep debt around do I ever feel rested. While I’m often fairly tired it isn’t constant and if sleep debt truly is cumulative throughout your life I should be a walking zombie.
So I decided I was going to stop worrying about sleep-debt and start thinking about it as nothing more than an urban myth. I decided to consciously remind myself that sleep-debt is only a theory and rather than worry about it let it just let it go.
For the first time in my adult life I can mark the time since my last bout of insomnia in months not weeks. I still don’t get enough sleep fairly regularly and I’m often tired but I’m no longer exhausted and one sleepless night no longer leads to a week of sleepless nights.
Whether sleep-debt is a real thing or not I’ve decided to no longer hold stock in it. Each night is its own, whether it’s spent watching the moon slowly move across the sky or in a deep sleep for a full 8 hours one has no bearing on the other. Not carrying a sleep debt has made my nights free.
