In the wake of Typhoon Soudelor\u2019s direct hit on Saipan, any other topic is trivial. The dangers didn\u2019t leave with Soudelor, of course, but will stalk the island via threats to public health and compromised infrastructure. Fortunately, Saipan\u2019s residents are good-natured and resilient, and Uncle Sam was fast on the draw for providing assistance, so the balance sheet in this equation has some assets. Still, the story of Soudelor isn\u2019t ending. It\u2019s just beginning.<\/p>\n
By contrast, the piece I planned to run today is a snoozer. It is, in fact, about just that, literally: sleep.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve noticed that the topic has popped up in the news a lot over the past few years. I suspect a couple of reasons for this.<\/p>\n
One is just the general march of progress in the health field. Sleep, as it turns out, gets all sorts of attention from high-powered research institutions such as UCLA and Johns Hopkins. As they perform their studies, the scientists seem to confirm what makes intuitive sense to most of us: Sleep is more than a matter of comfort. It\u2019s a matter of health.<\/p>\n
The other reason I suspect for the awakening on the sleep front is what seems like an epidemic of addiction to electronic screens. Various studies are popping up that suggest that screen-staring, particularly at night time, can mess up sleep patterns. The human body has apparently not evolved to have light beamed into its eyes when it\u2019s time to downshift into snooze time.<\/p>\n
Anyway, some of the sleep studies have been funded by some interesting benefactors. For example, Estee Lauder, the cosmetics company, commissioned a study that was performed by the University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Ohio.<\/p>\n
The study, which was mentioned on the University Hospitals\u2019 website in 2013, looked at the skin condition (items mentioned are lines, pigmentation, slackening, elasticity) of various subjects who were sorted by how well they slept.<\/p>\n
Apparently, lousy sleeping and lousy skin went together. The take-away is that sleep influences more than mere state of mind, but it has physical effects as well.<\/p>\n
This sure jibes with what I\u2019ve seen in the real world. I\u2019ve had gigs where fatigue is an ever-present factor, namely, working night-shifts as a pilot, and, if you hang with it long enough, those miles can start to look pretty rough. That\u2019s not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it does require some extra thought about how you manage your time and your habits.<\/p>\n
In the habit realm, a 2010 CNN article says, \u201cTrouble sleeping? Maybe it\u2019s your iPad.\u201d The article goes on to mention the possibly problematic link between computer light and sleep patterns, when, for example, computers supplant books for bedtime reading. How much of this is actually proven, and how much is just reasoned conjecture, well, I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
Even though I\u2019m no spring chicken, I still enjoy staying awake all night sometimes. For example, if I\u2019m taking a long road trip, if the weather is good and the roads are open, I might opt to drive all night, leapfrogging in 400-mile jumps from truck stop to truck stop. It\u2019s a good feeling to be snug in the car while old country tunes are playing on the radio and while I gnaw on beef jerky and drink coffee. This is better than sleep. It might be the last bastion of true peace in the modern world.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, I\u2019ll note that the modern standard of eight (more or less) hours of continuous sleep might not be the way it used to work. In days of old, at least in some cases, people may have fallen asleep shortly after dark, only to arise at around midnight, walk around and even socialize for a matter of hours, and then conk out again until sunrise. So maybe our modern routines, having been built around artificial light and the scheduling imperatives of mechanized societies, are a divergence from our biology\u2019s default settings.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s not so surprising is that light plays a big role in this stuff. At Saipan\u2019s easy latitude in the middle of the tropics, days and nights are always roughly equal spans. That\u2019s a nice arrangement. By contrast, the further you get from the tropics, the more lopsided the days and nights get, and this messes up some people\u2019s sleep patterns. It has, fortunately, never messed with mine, since I sleep like a ferrous rock no matter what; this is one virtuous consequence of being completely devoid of any ambition.<\/p>\n
Still, I have noticed that beyond, say, 45 degrees of latitude, I\u2019m soon ready to head for the tropics again where the days and nights are balanced. Why? I don\u2019t know. But that\u2019s one of those gigs where you don\u2019t even notice it until you miss it.<\/p>\n
Such is the current state of the snooze world. Now if you\u2019ll excuse me, I think I\u2019ve discovered a wrinkle. Yikes! Where do they sell the Estee Lauder face cream? I\u2019ll swing by the beef jerky and coffee section; seems like the logical place to look, and truck stops, they\u2019ve got everything these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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