When I was a freshman at Columbia University in 1999, the professor of my Literature Humanities course shared some personal information with my class, which was that she slept exactly three hours per night. I forget what prompted the disclosure, though I do recall it was made not to elicit pity but rather as a matter-of-fact explanation of the way things were: sleeping more than three hours a night simply did not allow her sufficient time to simultaneously maintain her professorship and tend to her baby.
This, of course, was before the era of smartphones took the phenomenon of rampant sleep deprivation to another level. But modern life has long been characterised by a lack of proper sleep – an activity that happens to be fundamental to life itself.
I personally cannot count the times I have awakened at one or two o’clock in the morning to work, unable to banish from my brain the capitalist guilt at engaging in necessary restorative rest rather than being, you know, “productive” 24 hours a day.
And yet mine is a privileged variety of semi-self-imposed sleep deprivation; I am not, for example, being denied adequate rest because I have to work three jobs to put food on the table for my family.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the national public health agency of the United States, approximately one-third of US adults and children under the age of 14 get insufficient sleep, putting them at increased risk for anxiety, depression, heart disease, and a host of other potentially life-threatening maladies. As per CDC calculations, a full 75 percent of US high schoolers do not sleep enough.
While the recommended amount of sleep for adults is at least seven hours per day, a 2024 Gallup poll reported that 20 percent of US adults were getting five hours or less – a trend attributable in part to rising stress levels among the population.
To be sure, it’s easy to feel stressed out when your government appears more interested in sending billions upon billions of dollars to Israel to assist in the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip than in, say, facilitating existence for Americans by offering healthcare, education, and housing options that don’t require folks to work themselves to death to afford.
Then again, pervasive stress and anxiety work just fine for those sectors of the for-profit medical establishment that make bank off of treating such afflictions.
Meanwhile, speaking of the Gaza Strip,…