Insomnia: spend a long night with modern people
In 2001, the Global Sleep and Health Program sponsored by the International Foundation for Mental Health and Neuroscience launched a global activity focusing on human sleep and designated March 21 each year as "World Sleep Day."
In 2003, World Sleep Day officially entered China.
Every year on World Sleep Day, people will give it a unique theme.
What is the theme of people’s sleep nowadays?
I am afraid it is "lost sleep".
According to the 2020 Xilinmen China Sleep Index, the average sleep duration of Chinese citizens is only 6.92 hours, which is 1.58 hours less than in 2013.
People usually fall asleep as late as the early hours of the morning, and at the same time, the proportion of people who have deep sleep is less than one-third.
We may be the generation that pays no attention to sleep. "Don’t sleep, get up!", "Why sleep for a long time before you die, you will sleep forever after death" has become a popular ridicule, and some people even ask, "Why do humans need to sleep? "This kind of problem.
This question may surprise you and me, but it is indeed a real problem in the scientific community.
From Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, who solved the mystery of the DNA double helix, to Sigmund Freud, no one can answer this question.
If understood from common sense, human beings do not create any social production value while sleeping, nor can they improve themselves.
At the same time, sleeping humans are still unsuspecting and are extremely vulnerable to various external dangers-so much so that in the political philosopher Hobbes, one of the important meanings of the social contract to mankind is to ensure that everyone can When you sleep, you can avoid being framed suddenly.
It's no wonder that American sleep scientist Hertschaffen will not dismissively say: "If sleep does not provide absolutely important functions, then it must be the greatest sin in the evolution of mankind."
With so many celebrities endorsed by everyone, it seems that the meaning of sleep is very problematic.
But at this time, if we ask: How long can you not sleep?
Maybe all of you will be silent again for a while.
Think about ourselves, who is not willing to fall asleep while missing the lost sleep in countless long nights of insomnia?
Today, this kind of "rejection and welcome" for sleep is so common, and it has become a well-deserved alternative theme for people's sleep nowadays.
Why are contemporary people's attitudes towards sleep so ambiguous and contradictory?
What are the scientific laws and cultural concepts behind sleep and insomnia?
Modern society and deprived sleep
In order to answer the question of the meaning of sleep, humans have made seemingly incredible adventures.
Mammoth Cave, located in Kentucky, USA, is one of the deepest caves in the world. It's so dark that you can't see your fingers and crawled with all kinds of creatures, large and small.
In 1938, two sleep researchers Nathaniel Kleitman (Nathaniel Kleitman) and assistant Bruce Richardson (Bruce Richardson) stayed in such an environment for 32 days.
They found that even in caves where day and night cannot be felt at all, humans can still rely on the circadian rhythm inside the body to arrange their own work and rest, and the cycle of this rhythm is longer than one day, not exactly one day.
Although people can not only rely on light to adjust their work and rest, light is still our most frequently used reference.
In the center of our brain, there is an area called "suprachiasmatic nucleus", which is located directly above the intersection of the optic nerve in the brain. It is well known by analyzing the light signals received by the two eyes. The concentration level of melatonin-the increase in the concentration of melatonin seems to give the body a signal to enter the night. It makes us wake up during the day and sleep peacefully at night.
The lighting conditions therefore affect our routines to a considerable extent.
In this sense, Thomas Edison dispelled the darkness for mankind, and at the same time threw us into another darkness.
The invention of the incandescent lamp made the streets and alleys of the city brightly lit, and our brains gradually became accustomed to treating the night as the day.
Matthew Walker, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, pointed out that the electric light delays the 24-hour internal biological clock of humans by about 2-3 hours per night.
He also found that in terms of delaying people's drowsiness, more advanced LED lights have more than twice the inhibition of melatonin than incandescent bulbs, making it more difficult for us to fall asleep at night.
In 2014, the inventor of the LED light bulb Shuji Nakamura and others were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for "substantially reducing the energy consumption of lighting". Deprived by the pursuit.
Efficiency is the core theme of enlightenment modernity, and enlightment, as its name implies, is "say goodbye to the night and let the world light up".
If we look at the works of these Enlightenment philosophers who laid the foundation of modernity, we will find that Hobbes's attitude towards sleep mentioned above is really polite.
For example, in Descartes who put forward "I think, therefore I am", thinking is a process that must be continuous, and there can be no pauses.
The interruption of sleep to thinking also means the interruption of existence.
Hume even openly wrote in "On Human Nature": "Sleep, along with madness and fanaticism, has become an obstacle to human pursuit of knowledge."
Even with the anti-Enlightenment Nietzsche, the status of sleep has not been significantly improved. The genius philosopher even invented a term that is talked about by existentialists: "Hypnophobia" (Hypnophobia).
——But some irony is that these philosophers keep admonishing people not to sleep and keep thinking, but the books they write often become the best sleeping pills for contemporary people.
After Haussmann’s transformation, the bright Paris Avenue, the brightly lit factory with the roar of the machines, the panoramic prison with unobstructed views...Under the banner of enlightenment, people sang praises of efficiency and constantly upgraded all kinds of technology, chasing that forging ahead. "Light" dispels the lazy "dark night", and sleep becomes an innocent victim.
From incandescent lamps to LEDs, the process of human sleep deprivation will only accelerate and never stop.
iPad and smartphones have become upgraded versions of LED lights-an empirical study shown by Walker shows that using iPad 2 hours before going to bed, the rising level of melatonin will drop by 23%.
If you are crackling on the keyboard in the middle of the night in front of the screen that emits a faint blue light at this moment, it may be another night that you can't sleep.
A secret project carried out by the Soviet Union in the 1990s fully illustrated how cruel humans can go to the imagination of sleep deprivation.
In order to provide industrial lighting for alpine regions such as Siberia, this plan vainly aims to increase the reflection of sunlight by launching orbiting satellites, the brightness can be as much as 100 times that of moonlight.
American technology historian Jonathan Clary described this modern society that uses sleep for efficiency as a "24/7" society. However, for him, sleep deprivation is not only a technical issue, but also a political issue— —It symbolizes the compulsory transformation of the circadian rhythm of the human body by modern capitalism.
Think of the generally sleepy modern "beaters" and you will feel that what Clary said is true.
If you were born in ancient Rome, it is completely impossible to adapt to a "996" job: you would wake up with a yawn in the noon sun, lie on a bench and listen to stories from slaves reading, and quickly run out of lunch. Take another short cold shower, then sit at the desk and write a letter sent to a distant place, and fall asleep at the beginning of the twilight.
But just in the early morning, you will wake up naturally, put on formal clothes, start to write some serious words vigorously, or go out to recite poetry, make love with other people, or just wander aimlessly.
When the morning light approaches, you will enter the dreamland sweetly again with mental and physical satisfaction.
This is exactly what Pliny the Elder, the chief executive of Rome in the first century, really did. At that time, this kind of "biphasic sleep" with two periods of sleep in one night was extremely common in Rome.
Historian Glenn Reed Storey commented after archeology of sleep behavior in ancient Rome that the uniqueness of this time rhythm is especially incomprehensible for modern people.
I don’t think we can understand why they can wake up and go to sleep so naturally in the early morning, let alone understand in an era when mobile phones are on standby almost all the time and clocking in to work is commonplace. There are jobs that can tolerate people getting up until noon. .
Constantly pressurizing KPIs, seemingly flexible and flexible, are actually extremely disrupting the rhythm of life. The expropriation and transformation of human rhythms by modern capitalism has become the most popular biopolitics in contemporary times.
Of course, the political nature of "sleep deprivation" does not stop there.
Hannah Arendt has always been known for reflecting on the dark side of enlightenment. In her view, the "fading of twilight" also means the expansion of public space and the destruction of private space.
Sleep not only means recuperating, it also means turning off the lights, closing the curtains, isolating from order and efficiency, and enjoying the dialogue with one's soul in the dark.
However, the story of ancient Rome made me a little skeptical of Arendt's statement, and at the same time I realized once again how contradictory modern people's sleep is.
If sleep symbolizes the destruction of privateness and the expansion of publicity, can this kind of publicity be compared with the entertaining "night tour with candles" of the Romans?
The answer is obviously no.
In 2013, in an interview with Harris survey company, more than half of the respondents in the United States regarded stress and anxiety as the primary cause of insomnia. Among the causes of anxiety and stress, in addition to lack of money, there is also job burnout. , Emotional dissatisfaction, family conflicts, etc.
Look, on those nights when we can't sleep, what we think of are our bosses and girlfriends who never understand us, mortgages and family debts that we never pay off-those days that are so boring and so lonely.
If we want to talk about "publicity," sleep deprivation under the modern capitalist system at best embodies a passive publicity. It turns the light-off room into an abyss instead of a small world for self-talking with us.
It just allows our body to belong to a collective to a greater extent, but deep in the spirit, our soul has long been torn apart during those sleepless nights.
From Kafka to Nabokov, are writers really escaping sleep?
However, is our sleep really just deprived of external things?
Recently translated into Chinese version of "Why should we sleep?"
In the book, Matthew Walker pointed out that lack of sleep and insomnia are two different things.
The former refers to: if you have enough sleep ability, but don't give yourself enough sleep time, the latter is really wanting to sleep but can't-think about it, there are many people who actively stay up late in life.
Among the more typical ones, in addition to philosophers, there is also a category of people who often "take the initiative to escape" sleep-writers.
When Grigor Samsa woke up and found himself turned into a beetle, what was his first reaction?
It may well be that I didn't sleep well last night.
He noticed that he had missed the train while complaining about the upcoming work. This is not only the behavior of the characters in the novel, but also the inner portrayal of the author of the novel.
Independent writer Christopher Hooten commented on Kafka’s grotesque fable about modern experience: “From Kafka’s most famous works, we read that what lies at the center is lack of sleep.” .
Kafka not only suffers from chronic insomnia, but also often feels anxious about it. He once wrote in his diary: "Sleeping people are the purest and innocent creatures in the world, while insomniacs bear the heaviest burden. Sin".
However, what is intriguing is that Kafka also has an almost Stockholm-style complex for the pain of insomnia.
In a letter to a German writer, he said: "Maybe I am afraid that my soul leaves myself in sleep and cannot return."
The guilt of insomnia, the boundless fear of staring at the night alone, became his alternative source of inspiration.
Italian medical researchers Antonio Perciaccante and Alessia Corrari have studied various unpublished manuscripts and works of Kafka from the perspective of psychoanalysis. They have recently been among the top medical A result published in the journal "The Lancet" is intended to demonstrate that a large number of Kafka's works were created in a state of "lucid dreaming".
In this state, the writer himself wanders on the edge of reality and illusion. On the one hand, he is anxious in drowsiness, but he is extremely resistant to falling asleep completely. The edge emotions stimulated by these emotions are difficult to experience in a daily awake state. , And they eventually turned into the weird images in Kafka's writings.
Persika Kante even believes that if the problem of insomnia is overcome, Kafka will probably write fewer widely circulated classics.
For a similar diagnosis, the writer Yan Geling’s doctor once said to her: If insomnia is cured, you may not be able to maintain your creative inspiration.
It is well known that Yan Geling suffered from insomnia for a long time because of her long-term and high-intensity writing. During her stay in the United States, she never really fell asleep for more than 30 days.
Compared with Kafka's anxiety and fear, Yan Geling's insomnia is the subject of Yan Geling's insomnia.
"Until one night, I turned my face slightly and saw a large pile of black on the white bed sheet. I don't recognize my hair, but I recognize my insomnia"-in this "Aventure of the Insomniac", the one she wrote I stared at the always-lit window in the tall building opposite: The only company for the insomniac, there is always only another insomniac who has never met.
Compared with Yan Geling and Kafka's entanglement with insomnia, Russian writer Nabokov is quite straightforward: "Sleep is the most idiotic thing in the world, it kills human genius and rationality."
He regards sleep as the natural enemy of imagination, and believes that the aforementioned state of insomnia, which is half-dream and half-awake, can instead open up the passage between people and a surreal world.
Another prominent female writer, Emily Bronty, also praised that the night gave her more clear eyes and helped her see the things that she would not see in the ordinary day: "Come back, night and the stars! Cover that for me." Unkind daylight. There is no warmth in it, only burns!" ("Stars").
However, the scholar Mariana Benjamin found that even if he praised the night like this, Bronte gradually became tired of it, “she walked around the room hysterically hoping to get rid of insomnia and fall asleep as soon as possible”.
It seems that the writers are just mere mortals, there is no way to escape sleep completely outspoken.
Why write the stories of these writers?
The entanglement faced by writers is actually very similar to the insomnia experience of most people today: we don't want to sleep, but we always feel that we don't get enough sleep. This cycle repeats and we fall into the infinite loop of contemporary sleep.
Contemporary sleep cycle: not wanting to sleep while not getting enough sleep
Some people may say that the poor sleep of writers is related to their work, writing is brain-intensive and easy to get excited before going to bed.
This statement is of course reasonable, but not all writing makes it difficult to fall asleep. A recent paper published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in the United States tells us that in addition to understanding math problems, writing a diary may also help sleep. .
Of course, this is not an ordinary diary.
The author of the paper, Michael K. Scullin, found that if people write about tomorrow’s "to-do list" for five to ten minutes before going to bed, they are more likely to have a good night's dream.
Compared to writing "things that have happened or tasks that have been completed", this kind of writing can make people fall asleep faster by an average of 9 minutes. This kind of sleep aid is almost as effective as many sleep aids on the market.
"When you have a large number of memory segments circulating in your brain, and you can't help but reflect on them, it will be difficult for you to fall asleep," Skulin said in an interview with the media.
Although the universality of this research has also been questioned by some experts, I personally feel inexplicably that it directly pokes the truth about the insomnia experience of contemporary people.
Writers say that insomnia allows them to see "things that are invisible during the day." The ordinary version of this sentence is that contemporary people will not think about the big problems of life until night: we think about the meaning of life in the tossing and turning of insomnia , The value of work, think of relatives who have not been in contact for a long time, and feel guilty for the choices that have to be made due to circumstances.
However, shouldn't the so-called meaning of life and the value of work be practiced and considered in daily life and work?
It is at this point that insomnia has become the epitome of people's survival in modern society: whether in life or work, we all feel all kinds of uncertainty, loneliness and anxiety.
These senses of uncertainty are like the "risk" described by sociologist Ulrich Baker, coming from all directions, as if they are close at hand but unpredictable.
They exist in technology, politics, work, and interpersonal relationships.
Those questions about the meaning of life that linger in our minds during insomnia reflect not the troubles that night brings us, but the confusion about the meaning of the day.
In a survey on insomnia conducted by East China Normal University last year, an interviewee who was taking a Ph.D. test even said that he regarded insomnia as a "trial", and felt that it was "the heavens will come to the end of the people." A kind of performance, these are the necessary tribulations before we can succeed-our sense of uncertainty is so strong that the sleepless night becomes the only moment when we feel we can control ourselves.
This is the sleep paradox of modern insomniacs: we resist sleep, but it is because we desire sleep-craving for a sense of security and support for life.
The sense of certainty that insomniacs crave at night can actually be understood as sleep itself—just like Clary sees sleep as a metaphor for a sense of security: a society where everyone can sleep at ease, meaning This allows people to fall asleep in an environment where they are not defended against each other.
This kind of safety lies not only in personal safety, but also in the sense of value, meaning and connection with others.
In the past, it is difficult for people to imagine that in East Asian society today, a profession called "sleep master" will emerge. Are people looking for a sleep master just for a good night's sleep?
I'm afraid it's much more than that.
However, treating insomnia as an antidote to seeking a sense of security and meaning is tantamount to drinking poison to quench thirst and seeking fish.
Existing empirical studies have strongly proved that insomnia brings more unstable emotions, a higher incidence of Alzheimer's disease, and cancer, and it also significantly affects our work efficiency.
As early as 1984, W.B.Weber and Levi had already proven through research that less sleep would reduce the accuracy of people's work plans and the frequency of generating innovative ideas.
The survey data of the RAND Corporation in 2016 found that due to lack of sleep and lack of innovation, the average annual cost of productivity lost by each employee in a US company is close to 2,000 US dollars. It is conceivable that when we perform so abnormally during the day, we doubt life at night. I'm afraid it can only get worse, and it must be said that it is also an infinite loop of contemporary sleep.
How can we get rid of emptiness, confusion, and uncertainty, not insomnia in the suspicious life at night, and get out of this endless loop?
This is a big question of the century, but this answer must not include the help of insomnia itself.
Although existentialists such as Sartre and Camus despise sleep, existentialism does not contribute nothing in helping us find a sense of security: they say that modern people are destined to be a stone-pushing Sisyphus. If the daytime world is meaningless, then give it meaning.
If you reflect on many things at the moment of insomnia, the question mentioned at the beginning is also included: Why do humans sleep?
So I suggest reviewing the words of the sleep scholar William Dement of the last century. After fifty years of sleep research, Dement returned to the basics: "The only reason we need sleep is actually very reliable. That’s that we get sleepy and want to sleep."
Author/Liu Yaguang