The Eighth Deadly Sin
“The literature says that, with the possible exception of around 3 percent of the population, we don’t fare well unless we have at least seven or seven-and-a-half hours of shut-eye. (Nor, apparently, do we fare well with more than eight.)” Sanford Rose
Dolors & Sense
by Sanford Rose
KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—8/27/2012—Micawber’s world depended on the balance between income and outgo—a positive balance, happiness; a negative balance, misery.
My world depends on the amount of my sleep—seven hours, happiness; six hours, misery.
With seven hours, it is easy to concentrate, read and write.
With six, while physical processes seem unaffected, mental processes are torture, accompanied by profound yawning.
It is not clear why the extra hour is so important.
Most of the really restorative sleep—the slow-wave variety—takes place early at night, in the first three sleep cycles.
A sleep cycle runs around 90 minutes, consisting of three stages (four before a recent nomenclature change) of what is called non-rapid-eye movement and one stage of the rapid type, REM or dream sleep.
Deep sleep is Stage 3 of non-REM. It gets scarcer as the night wears on.
By the time we get to the sixth hour, we have done about as much deep sleeping as we’re going to do that night.
Some say that the seventh hour is important because, while it offers no deep sleep, it bestows a dollop of extra dream sleep.
But perhaps it is important only because we’ve been conditioned to believe it is.
The literature says that, with the possible exception of around 3 percent of the population, we don’t fare well unless we have at least seven or seven-and-a-half hours of shut-eye. (Nor, apparently, do we fare well with more than eight.)
No one should pay very much attention to the canonical literature in any field, especially a medical one.
Fear of sleep insufficiency may well be one of the greatest causes of that insufficiency—or at least apparent insufficiency.
Like a gambler, which I most emphatically am not, I live in constant dread of not making that seven.
For me and my emotional equipoise, fear of not getting seven is tantamount to the eighth sin.
And it sure is deadly.
Sanford Rose
Sanford Rose, of New Jersey and Florida, served as Associate Editor of Fortune Magazine from 1968 till 1972; Vice President of Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972; Senior Editor of Fortune between 1972 and 1979; and Associate Editor, Financial Editor and Senior Columnist of American Banker newspaper between 1979 and 1991. From 1991 till 2001, Rose worked as a consultant in the banking industry and a professional ghost writer in the field of finance. He has also taught as an adjunct professor of banking at Columbia University and an adjunct instructor of economics at New York University. He states that he left gainful employment in 2001 to concentrate on gain-less investing. (A lifelong photo-phobe, Rose also claims that the head shot accompanying his Weekly Hubris columns is not his own, but belongs, instead, to a skilled woodworker residing in South Carolina.)