Sleep, you must…

We spend a significant amount of our lives sleeping. To put it down in numbers, if we live up to 90 years old we will sleep approximately 32 years. The figures are intimidating and so is the attitude of many, often historically important, people towards sleep.

Margaret Thatcher famously stated that “sleep is for wimps”, herself sleeping only a mere 4 hours a day. Before her, Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, quoted that “sleep is a criminal waste of time, inherited from our cage days”. Still, their beliefs about sleep come to a complete contrast with what Einstein did; he slept for 10 hours a day.

If we follow Thatcher’s and Edison’s belief then many of us either oversleep or are just about right on sleeping times, whereas if we follow Einstein’s then we are not sleeping enough. Where does the truth lie though?

It is obvious that many of us, myself included, treat sleep like an enemy. Something that stops us from the endless list of our daily tasks. Stop for a while and think, how many times have you thought the extra hours a day you would gain if you didn’t have to go to bed? If your body and mind could stay awake for, well, ever?

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