Cut From Steel

HE LIT THE NIGHT AND CALLED SLEEP A BAD HABIT

Thomas Edison told the world that sleep was a waste of a man. In a 1914 interview he called it an absurdity and a bad habit, and he predicted that a million years from now we would not go to bed at all. Scientific American had already printed his boast, back in 1889, that he never slept more than four hours a night.

Edison had the standing to say it. In October 1879 his team burned a carbonized cotton filament for more than fourteen hours. By 1882 his Pearl Street station was selling electric light to lower Manhattan. You could fairly say the man personally took the dark out of the evening.

Frank Dyer and Thomas Martin, his authorized biographers, wrote down something Edison never put in an interview. They described him dropping onto a cot in the laboratory, falling asleep almost at once, then waking in full possession of his faculties and walking straight back to the bench. He kept cots and worktables to sleep on all over West Orange.

Mina Edison finally installed a proper bed in an alcove off his office library, hoping he would nap there instead of in his clothes. The great enemy of sleep was sleeping through the middle of the day, on furniture he had arranged for the purpose.

You can take two things from Edison. He was right that a man can own the night. About the price he was wrong, and the record of his own cots says so. Edison did not beat sleep. He rescheduled it. And so, most nights, do you.

THE LIE THAT KEEPS YOU AWAKE

You surface out of sleep somewhere after two. Before you look, you already know it is near three, and you look anyway. Then the arithmetic starts. You have four hours until the alarm. Later you have three. By four you are angry at being awake.

I will take one thing off your shoulders. The waking itself is not the fault. Sleep runs in cycles, and the NIH describes them restarting every eighty to a hundred minutes, with brief awakenings in between. Cleveland Clinic calls waking at three common rather than a disease. At that hour you are mostly in REM, the lightest sleep you do.

You did not break anything at three. The trouble starts in the hour afterwards, when you check the clock and price tomorrow. In other words, the waking is ordinary and the fight is not.

YOU ARE NOT BROKEN. THREE THINGS KEEP YOU UP.

I will give you three reasons a normal blip turns into an hour flat on your back. You can work on all three this week.

01 / The Clock

You check the numbers, and the numbers tell you what you have lost. That lands as stress, and stress wakes you further. A Cleveland Clinic sleep specialist points out that the body can become conditioned to wake at a set hour once it has had a reason to. Frustration in the bed teaches that lesson.

02 / The Nightcap

Your two drinks after dinner put you out fast. Alcohol is a sedative, so the first stretch can feel deep. The bill arrives later. As blood alcohol falls, sleep research describes lighter, more fragmented sleep, with more awakenings in the second half of the night.

03 / The Room And The Bladder

Cleveland Clinic puts the useful bedroom range at roughly 60 to 67 degrees Fahrenheit, because your core temperature needs to fall for sleep to hold. A full bladder does the same job from the inside. Nocturia is very common in men past fifty, and the last glass before bed has to earn its place.

TAKE IT BACK TONIGHT

You can change something tonight without spending a dollar. Turn the clock face to the wall. Put the phone across the room. Knowing the time has never once helped you get back to sleep.

I will give you the instruction sleep clinicians actually hand out. If you have been awake fifteen or twenty minutes and you are wound up, get out of the bed. Cleveland Clinic teaches this inside cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia, so it is standard practice. Go to another room, keep the light low, and read a few pages of something dull. Come back to bed when your eyes get heavy.

You can help it along with three small moves. Take the last drink of the evening earlier. Drop the bedroom a few degrees. Empty your bladder on the way in.

I do want you to know where the line sits. Mayo Clinic lists waking up gasping or choking as a reason to see a doctor, not a reason to try a tip. Loud snoring with breathing pauses belongs in the same box, and so does a pattern that runs for weeks.

One last thing. The waking is normal. Your war with it is not. Get up, be bored for twenty minutes, then go back.

— Travis

Insider Member’s Corner

6 free habits that hold the back half of your night together:

You didn’t put in 45 years to settle for beige.

01 / Home · Eames Lounge Chair And Ottoman

Charles and Ray Eames designed this chair in 1956, and Herman Miller has built it ever since. He wanted it to have the warm, receptive look of a well-used first baseman’s mitt, and that is exactly what he got. You sit in seven-ply moulded plywood shells, on leather, over a cast aluminium base. Herman Miller lists it at $9,395 today, which is real money for a chair. It is also the last chair you will ever buy, and it is a far better place to sit at three in the morning than your own bed.

02 / Watch · Omega Seamaster Diver 300M

Pierce Brosnan strapped on a Seamaster Professional in GoldenEye in 1995, and Bond has worn Omega ever since. The current 42mm steel Diver 300M carries a Co-Axial Master Chronometer calibre 8800, good to 300 metres, with the laser-engraved wave dial and the conical helium escape valve. Omega lists the black-dial steel model at $6,700. You are never going to 300 metres. That was never the point of it.

03 / Book · Man’s Search For Meaning

Viktor Frankl was a Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist who was held in Theresienstadt, Auschwitz and a sub-camp of Dachau. He lost his mother, his brother and his first wife to the camps. Frankl wrote this book in nine days after the war, and it appeared in German in 1946 under a title that translates as A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. By 2022 it had sold around sixteen million copies in fifty-two languages, and a 1991 Library of Congress survey named it one of the ten most influential books in America. You should own a copy, and the small hours are the right time to read it.