January resolution: sleep

I’m trying a new approach to resolutions this year: introduce one small one on the first day of each month, and try to maintain it for the rest of the year, while adding a new one each month.

I’ll talk about all of the resolutions eventually, but for this post I’ll explain that my resolution for January of 2018 was to be in bed for eight full hours, six nights per week. Since it takes awhile to fall asleep once I’m actually in bed, this rarely results in eight hours of actual sleep. But whatever: it’s way more sleep than I usually get. I’ve probably averaged between five-and-a-half and six-and-a-half hours for… decades? Honestly, the last time I was prone for eight hours was probably fifteen years ago.

There’s mounting evidence not only that we’re almost all underslept, but also that lack of sleep contributes to almost every physical and mental malady there is. NPR stories, newspaper articles, blog posts from all sorts of people, and sketchy click-bait articles all trumpet the importance of sleep, and the volume and stridency of these stories has rocketed in the last three years or so. Arianna Huffington seems to have sold the Huffington Post simply so she can dedicate her every waking hour to making sure other people have fewer, um, waking hours.

I can’t tell if my sub-par memory and general feeling of cluelessness is caused by aging or by the sleep thing, but being chronically underslept can’t help. Since sleep connects up to everything in the body, who knows what might improve with more chance to rest and recover from the day’s stresses? Will my hair stop falling out? Will my weightlifting finally result in me being able to lift more weight? Will I crave sugar less often?

Being in bed for eight hours should be a natural occurrence instead of something that requires a resolution to make happen. I resist this for a number of reasons:

• I’m rarely tired before midnight
• Falling asleep is boring
• Dreams are often stressful and unpleasant
• The sooner I go to sleep the sooner I’ll have to get up and go to work again (even though work is always fine once I get there)
• If I go to sleep it’s possible I’ll never wake up
• There’s so much to do, and so few years in which to do it

We’re at the beginning of March, which means my experiment has been going on for two months. How well have I been able to follow the resolution, and have I seen any improvements in my physical or mental state?

I’ve been almost successful at sticking to this plan. I’ve pretty reliably gotten seven-and-a-half hours of horizontal time. (Mysteriously, making time for the full eight is enormously harder than seven-and-a-half.) Allowing for the time required to fall asleep once I’m lying down, this means I’m hitting around seven hours of actual sleep per night.

During this experiment, I’ve noticed that my sleep has become less consistent. Sometimes I sleep straight through the night, but in general I’m up tossing and turning, not quite asleep, many more hours per week than I used to be. (Before this year, I slept like a log during all of my not-enough hours each night.) Maybe this means my body doesn’t need any more sleep than it’s now getting? The jury’s still out on this, but it’s the main reason I’m not kicking myself for not quite making it to the eight-hour goal. Regardless, I’m still doing a lot better than my old underslept standard.

As for physical or mental changes, I guess I’m a little less tired during the day, and maybe my short-term memory has improved marginally, and perhaps my mood is slightly more upbeat, but wow that’s a lot of qualifiers. I’m not 100% convinced that those effects aren’t illusory. I can’t say that I’ve noticed any physical changes. But I don’t want to draw any conclusions after only two months, so I’ll report back with more confident results after I’ve been on this new schedule for the full year.

Also, there’s a potentially confounding factor here, in the form of one of my other 2018 resolutions. I’ll talk about that in a future blog post, but it’s possible that it’s leading to some of these changes which might (or might not) be occurring.

Living on the Long Tail

In 2004 a Wired magazine writer named Chris Anderson coined (or maybe just popularized) the phrase “long tail,” meaning the many, many items that don’t sell well individually, but which collectively make up a significant part of a company’s sales. For example (and I’m using completely made up numbers here), Amazon might sell thousands of copies of a new Stephen King book in a day, but only two copies of The Odyssey on that same day. The Stephen King book and the other hundred other megasellers of the moment make up the “head” of Amazon’s sales numbers, while The Odyssey and the hundreds of thousands of books that only sell a handful of copies make up the “long tail” of Amazon sales. And because there are so very many books making up the long tail, they might together make Amazon just as much money as the items in the head do.

I think it would be a fascinating experiment to live for a year on the long tail of as many areas of life as possible.

What are some examples of how you might do this?

• At the supermarket, buy only foods that are high up, low down, far back, or otherwise hard to find. These are the low sellers. See that jar of artichoke pesto with pimentos hiding behind the better selling marinara and alfredo sauces? That pesto is on the long tail.
• On your favorite music streaming service, type in random words and see what it pulls up. Odds are it won’t be the latest Justin Timberlake or Yo Yo Ma album. Gregorian Chant layered on top of Glen Campbell songs? I’d give that a spin.
• Remember that bizarre looking novel you made fun of at Goodwill because it had a tentacled alien wearing a sheriff’s badge on the cover? Put down your Dostoyevsky and pick up the alien — that’s your bedtime reading for the next few days.
• Why drive a Toyota, Honda, or Ford when you could be cruising in a Suzuki, Isuzu, or old Plymouth?
• Cancel that Las Vegas vacation and check out Providence instead.

For this experiment to be bearable, the elements of the long tail must be low sellers because they’re old or out of fashion, not because they’re objectively worse than the items at the head. In some cases there’s probably a solid reason why a food/CD/book/car/city isn’t as popular as the top sellers. But if you can identify items that lack buzz and flash but still have a solid, worthwhile core, you might discover all sorts of wonderful things that otherwise would have passed you by (not to mention likely saving a lot of money).

Anyway, this is an experiment I’d like to try out on myself. I don’t know if the results should be recorded in a blog, magazine article, or nowhere at all. But that’s the kind of experiential journalism I’d enjoy reading about, so unless I can pitch it successfully to A.J. Jacobs, maybe I’ll explore the long tail a little myself.