Sleep Should Have Killed Us. Instead, Every Animal Does It
Every animal on earth sleeps, even though it makes them defenseless. So why do I treat sleep as the first thing to cut?
Every animal sleeps. Mammals, birds, even insects. And it makes no obvious sense that they should.
Think about it from evolution’s point of view. When you’re asleep, you’re defenseless - blind, slow, oblivious, easy prey. For a third of your life, you’re a sitting duck. Any mutation that let an animal skip it, or cut it down, should have been a massive survival advantage. And yet sleep is everywhere. Every creature with a nervous system does it, and the ones that try to skip it die.
The only way that adds up: the benefits of sleep must be so enormous that they outweigh spending a third of your life helpless. Evolution ran the cost-benefit, over hundreds of millions of years, and sleep won every time. There isn’t a system in the body or brain that doesn’t depend on it.
Which makes what I’ve been doing kind of absurd.
For about two years, I’ve had the same problem. I fall asleep fine, then wake at 3 or 4 in the morning and can’t get back down - lying there for hours, turning over every problem in my life, watching the next day get ruined before it starts. If you’ve been there, you know how lonely 3 AM is.
So I did what I do - I went and learned the subject. There’s a whole field called “sleep hygiene”: same bedtime, dark room, cool room, no caffeine, no screens before bed. I did all of it. It helped a little, then the problem crept back. I was up before five most mornings, running on less than six hours.
Then, on a day I’d completely unplugged - no work, no phone - I slept eight hours straight for the first time in ages.
I almost missed why. It wasn’t the dark room or the caffeine; I’d been doing those for months. The only thing different was that I hadn’t worked right up until I closed my eyes. Normally I’m on the laptop or phone until the second I get into bed - then I lie down and wonder why my brain won’t switch off.
The next night I tried it on purpose: work and phone away two hours before bed. Slept well again.
And that’s the part that got me. Evolution decided sleep was worth being eaten for. And I’d been treating it as the first thing to sacrifice - borrowing against the one mechanism so vital that no animal on earth has been allowed to skip it, just to squeeze in a couple more hours of email. Work had quietly expanded to fill every waking minute, and then leaked past that, into the night, keeping my mind running while my body tried to shut down.
I’m still working on it; I haven’t solved it. But I’ve stopped treating sleep as a luxury I can borrow against. Evolution spent hundreds of millions of years deciding it wasn’t optional. The least I can do is stop scheduling work right up to the edge of it.