Establish Better Sleep Hygiene During COVID-19

The Connecticut Bar Association Lawyer Wellbeing Committee asked me for examples of ways that our membership could stay healthy and sane in these interesting and trying times.  I decided that I would sleep on it.

We all know, on some level, that sleep is crucial to our health.  Nevertheless, almost all of us seem to believe that we have no choice but to sacrifice sleep for the modern pressures of the legal profession, for our families, and for the 21st century’s 24-7 lifestyle.  The problem is that we are sacrificing far more than we realize in pursuit of a fallacy – that we can still offer our best to our profession and our loved ones while operating at a fraction of our functionality.  

By way of very brief overview, sleep has been scientifically proven to:

1. Make you live longer.
2. Enhance your memory.
3. Make you more creative.
4. Make you look more attractive.
5. Assist with weight loss.
6. Protect from cancer and dementia.
7. Protect from cold and flu.
8. Reduce risk of heart attacks, stroke, and diabetes.
9. Make you feel happier, less depressed and less anxious. ¹

Thousands of pages of studies and ink have been spilled on this subject, but the extent to which we collectively remain utterly ignorant or in denial of our need to sleep is difficult to overemphasize. 

One of the most easily scientifically quantifiable effects of sleep deprivation is the science on driving.  Being awake for eighteen straight hours (or the average day for many lawyers) has been proven to have the equivalent effect of a BAC of .05, and twenty-four hours is the equivalent of going over the legal limit to a .10 BAC.²  Most of us would react in horror at the notion of driving drunk but think nothing of our regular routine of sleep-deprivation.

And yet, one of the most insidious aspects of sleep deprivation is that it is cumulative and robs us of the ability to realize that we are impaired.

After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours.  Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping.  Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep deprived. ³

Add those statistics and facts together: if you average seven hours of sleep per night through your productive years, you are functioning most of your life on the constant brain dysfunction level of having just pulled an all-nighter and you don’t even know it because you are physiologically incapable of sensing that terrifying fact.  When you step behind the wheel you are as physiologically compromised and accident-prone as if you were legally drunk and you don’t know it.

When was the last time you got more than seven hours of sleep a night for a week straight?  When was the last time you experienced what life is like when fully vibrant, when you are truly not-tired as opposed to caffeinated or powering through?  Odds are that you are not special, and that these scientific facts apply to you as much as the test subjects in the thousands of studies on the subject.

On top of this, countless articles have been written on the negative impact of other aspects of our lifestyle on sleep quality.  Caffeine has a half-life of 3-5 hours and keeps affecting you long after your last cup.⁴  Alcohol substantially interferes with your ability to benefit from sleep – two servings a day for men decreased sleep quality by 24%.⁵ Thus, even if you slept eight hours after a couple beers, you really only benefited from less than six.  Watching the ubiquitous screens in our lives interferes with our ability to fall asleep in a far bigger way than most of us realize.⁶

I took the awful world of COVID-19 as an opportunity to shake things up.  I am no longer on the road to bar association meetings multiple nights a week and save a lot of time in the car by having hearings in virtual court.  Instead of letting that time disappear into doom-scrolling the twilight of our democracy and collapse of the rule of law, I opted to establish better sleep hygiene.  It took about a week to cut my caffeine intake from hero-to-zero (I found some delicious decaf beans for my grinder and make a mean caffeine-free cold-brew now).  I set a bed-time alarm on my phone every night with a do-not-disturb mode on early.  I go cold turkey on the news and phone every night at 9:00 p.m. (even on election night).

My children are two and four and I am partner at a boutique family law firm.  Suffice it to say, it had been long enough since I was truly not-tired that I had forgotten what being truly not-tired really felt like.  Take it from me – waking up and feeling awake, not wishing to lay my head back down on the pillow, not fantasizing of taking a nap if I weren’t so caffeinated, just… awake… all the time… is both possible and feels really GOOD.  I am more productive and focused at work, I am more present with my family when I am with them, I am more patient, I doom-scroll the twilight of our democracy less frequently, I feel better, and my immune system is more prepared for COVID-19.  

I strongly suspect my investment in sleep likely returns more time-dividends to my life in terms of focus and productivity than the extra hour or two of sleep a night takes up in the first place.  Science also tells me I will live longer and stave off dementia longer, so I’ll buy some time back there too.  This is one habit I plan to keep when the world goes back to normal.