Sleep and Mutual Care
One of the booklets I have bouncing around inside me is on how the lesson to learn from Martin Luther King, Jr. isn't that we should all volunteer on his birthday, but is rather about the value and power of supporting each other in community in opposition to oppression. The Montgomery Bus Boycott wasn't just a bunch of people not riding a bus in protest. It was also a community supporting each other and giving rides to each other so they could survive the prolonged protest together.
Sleep!
I bring that up now because that's actually what I've been thinking about the most since the video conversation on August 20th with Ruhi Synder titled Sleep, Circadian Alignment, and Society.
Ruhi presented her research and we learned not only how important sleep is but also how so much of our society makes it harder to get good sleep. That latter point is something I've definitely come to appreciate more after my conversations with Ruhi. The analogy I've used before to help me understand it is how can you blame someone for an unhealthy diet if they live in a food desert and only have easy access to chips in the corner store. Or how can you expect someone to get a good sleep when a massive industrial pig farm was built near their house and now the smell of rotting pig excrement frequently awakens them at night.[1]
So while relieving the burden of the sole responsibility for my own sleep, diet, and exercise as part of wellbeing is freeing, it does frame new questions for me:
How is my environment conducive or not to my sleep?
How are my responsibilities (work, etc.) conducive or not to my sleep?
What does this information mean to me as a father and husband for me and everyone in my family?
For the third, it made me think about how I need to be more informed about how the circadian rhythm of children changes as they age but also what their chronotypes are. Instead of setting arbitrary bed times for my children that inspire explicit or subversive revolt, how can I work with their age and my observations of their chronotypes to help them build healthy habits and an awareness and appreciation of what their body needs?
As a nutritionist friend of my says: don't make your kids eat all the food on their plate. Teach them to listen to their body and eat until they are full. So how can I teach and model to my kids to listen to their bodies about sleep? Also, how can I create an environment to support my own healthy sleep habits? After all, my children won't learn from what I say but rather what I do.
For me, this is where some of my future work with Ruhi is going to focus: what do children (and their parents) need to understand about their sleep and chronotypes to be able to healthily self-regulate?
But that actually brings us back to some of the wonderful questions that participants asked during our video conversation. A theme I heard throughout was basically: "Thank you for framing this in such an incisive social critique. Now what do I do to survive our society's disregard for sleep?"
As Ruhi shared, there are things such as a healthy diet, 20 minute naps, high intensity exercise to help clear toxins form your body, and even camping as a way to reacquaint yourself to your natural circadian rhythm. However, as Ruhi's research also shows all those things can only help so much in the face of a severely disrupted schedule.
Back to MLK
This is where we return to MLK: how do we confront a society that is not designed with our wellbeing in mind? The intent of the comparison here isn't any attempt to say our societies problems with sleep or their immediate severity are the same as the violently segregated South but rather asking if we can learn from their solutions? Which is to say:
How can our mutual care and support of each other improve our sleep in spite of all the obstacles our society creates?
How can this mutual support build the alternatives to the current shift work practices, school schedules, etc. and other barriers that we face?
To be clear, I don't have many answers to this yet, but these are questions I intent to continue asking with Ruhi and others going forward. It's also something I hope to be share with you through newsletters and children's booklets.
Until then, sleep well.
Notes:
Jackson, Chandra L., Nathaniel S MacNell and Christopher D. Heaney. “166 Air emissions from swine industrial livestock operations and sleep among residents in nearby residential communities.” Sleep 44 (2021): n. pag. (link)