Ain’t No Rest for the Wicked

Are you lying to yourself, 
or is the media lying to you?

We often lie to ourselves when it comes to sleep. Each night a new excuse for why you didn’t go to bed sooner. Maybe it was work? or… maybe it was just that you clicked “continue watching” one too many times on Netflix. Either way, we constantly find ourselves not getting the recommended eight hours of sleep a night. When we wake up, the lies continue and we tell ourselves we didn’t need that sleep anyways.

But what if I told you, you really did need it?

No matter what we tell ourselves, we always need that validation for our excuses, and so the internet searches begin. Because the internet is endless, you can find an article that validates almost any excuse you told yourself this morning. So is it our fault we think we don’t need more sleep, or is it the media’s?

Together, let’s breakdown the top 3 excuses we tell ourselves after a sleepless night and investigate to see where we go wrong:

1. I don’t actually need eight hours of sleep a night.

Eight hours seems like an impossible goal, I mean, it’s a third of your day spent doing nothing but recharging. We can’t possibly actually require that much. We make ourselves believe we don’t need those eight hours because they could be spent doing something more productive or fun. To validate our beliefs, we find articles by sites like welldoing.org that promise we don’t need those eight hours we have always heard about. We avoid eye contact with that glaring Healthline article that we scrolled past before explaining the unhealthy effects when you lose sleep because we want to believe we can cheat the system. Unfortunately, you can’t cheat the system and the facts we choose not to share with ourselves doesn’t make them any less possible or true.

2. I function fine without much sleep.

We have all been there; when we wake up after only 3 hours of sleep feeling surprisingly awake and almost hyper. All of a sudden we assume we are superheroes and we have cracked open pandora’s box. Again, we turn to the internet to validate how we feel and the excuse we told ourselves. We manage to find the new sleep cycle trend in some blog by Cody Monson that swears you can function on less sleep and we believe them. No evidence, or much fact, but we feel awake so we go with it despite it seeming as valid as a diet where you can lose 30 pounds in 3 days.

However, just like we’ve been the person feeling energized after a sleepless night, we have also been the person not able to remember their own name because we’ve had two sleepless nights. This is because of something called sleep debt. Now extremely foggy headed, you must start flying through search results trying to figure out from places like Harvard Health Publishing how to repay your sleep debt before work in an hour. Unfortunately, that’s when you find out that it takes time and consistency to get back those hours lost each night. A consistent amount of sleep debt can be harmful to your health and can hurt your brain and bodily function each day. So next time you think you’ll be fine the next morning, see how many days you’ve already said that.

3. I can’t sleep, I have too much to do.

The to-do list is never empty or done, just different from day to day. One thing that never changes is that we never seem have enough time to do everything in one day. So what if you miss one night of sleep because of it? You can’t manage to spare eight hours a night and the search results have found you 4 alternative sleep cycles from Bustle.com to solve all of your problems. Once again, it seems too good to be true.

You’re ignoring the lost hours or even days of sleep, but how many times can you manage to do that? What many adults don’t realize is that, according to Medical News Today, after just 24 hours of no sleep, sleep deprivation will set in. Those several days you were too busy to sleep, catch up to you quickly and make a lasting effect. Many quick trick alternative sleep cycles ignore the possibility of sleep deprivation, but in the end your body’s reaction will win over what you want to believe.

Whether it’s that new Netflix series, our to-do list, or something else, we generate these excuses we tell ourselves so we feel okay for breaking the rules. Since birth, we have liked to push the boundaries of bedtime, but at what cost? Although you have found “evidence” that validates your excuses, it is not always accurate and shouldn’t be followed. We want to believe the internet has all the correct answers, but in reality, the internet just houses every answer. Dependent on what you search and what you want to see, you can validate any excuse you have. Next time you find yourself wanting to validate why you didn’t sleep last night, leave it to the scientists to tell you what you need.

To find out more about whether you should be sleeping more, check out last week’s blog post!