Sleep ethics

Sleep is not a moral issue

The sleep ethics that is dominant in our contemporary western culture is one of the more bizarre and damaging attitudes that we hold as society. Sleep is a biological need that is governed by natural biological signals and mechanisms, such as the feeling of tiredness and of feeling awake. Unless we suspect some widespread systemic sleep disturbance, there is no reason to distrust those biological signals that signal to us when to go to sleep, how much to sleep, and when to wake up. Yet we systematically intervene and work against those natural biological signals. We legislate to kids when they should go to sleep and when to wake up, often against their biological needs and wishes. The very idea of ‘putting’ a child to sleep and of interrupting someone’s sleep artificially either, in person or through an alarm clock, should on the face of it be counterintuitive and suspect.

In addition to our systematic interference with our kids’ natural biological needs and sleep cycles, a morality of sleep developed which denounces certain sleep patterns as morally suspect or inadequate. In particular , going to sleep ‘late’ and waking up ‘late’ are deemed to be signs of laziness or worse, and therefore morally deficient. The use of the word ‘late’ in this context comes very natural to us, but we need to ask ourselves: ‘late’ relative to what? It’s not exactly relative to sunrise and sunset since the culturally accepted sleep pattern does not prescribe going to sleep at sunset and rising at dawn or at sunrise. In nature, the lives of many animals do tend to follow patterns that are influenced by the natural sunrise/sunset cycle, however most mammals are actually nocturnal, and they do not tend to sleep in long stretches.

In fact, research (as well as commonsense for those who pay attention to it) indicates that different people have different circadian rhythms and also that the same person’s circadian rhythm goes through significant changes throughout life. Babies, as we know, sleep most of the day, and children tend to go to sleep relatively early and sleep long (if allowed). Teenagers also tend to sleep a lot but their circadian rhythm changes to a ‘late’ to sleep and ‘late’ to rise pattern. These are all built in biological changes that no amount of habituation is able to prevent or change, since they are biologically built in. By the time we grow into our 30's and 40’s most of us settle into the circadian rhythm that is the culturally dominant one, and this natural circadian rhythm is the binding norm. As we grow old we commonly revert to an early and shorter sleep pattern, early to go to sleep and early to rise.

There must have been good evolutionary reasons for all these patterns and changes. It is possible that there were tribal benefits for coexisting and overlapping different circadian rhythms. The main point is however that different people, and at different stages, differ widely in their inbuilt biological sleep rhythms. The imposition of one morally preferred sleep pattern is in the last analysis a type of oppression by a dominant group in society attempting to goad the rest of the community to conform to their biologically preferred sleep rhythm regardless of what the biology of the others demands.

It is astonishing, when you come to think about it, that the sleep cycle that is prescribed by the overwhelming majority of primary and secondary schools in the world is the one favored by the teachers and staff, rather than the one that is suitable to the biological needs of the kids. This results in untold damage to the kids’ health over many years, as well as, paradoxically, their ability to learn.

Sleep is not a moral issue, it is a biological one; and the research is pretty clear. We should not be interrupting our children's sleep and wake them up to sleepily drag themselves to school. There is no moral preference to waking up ‘early’, and no circadian rhythm is morally or otherwise superior to any other. It is all a matter of biology, and it is futile to fight it. In addition to a systemic harm to our kids’ biological health, our misguided sleep ethics also creates unnecessary psychological problems in the form of misplaced shame and guilt over sleep patterns.

In general, the world would be better off recognizing that not everyone has to show up all at once for things to work, and that everyone may be better off if there would be more flexibility and respect for diverse circadian rhythms, and more freedom to live one’s biological needs. Recognizing that our current sleep ethics is in fact a form of oppression, and that our shame and guilt over sleep are misplaced will go a long way towards the necessary societal changes in this regard.

Another area that is affected by misguided sleep ethics is the question of where kids should be sleeping. The most natural place for kids to sleep is together with their parents. This is the way all mammals sleep, it’s the way many humans still sleep all over the world, and it’s also the way humans used to sleep for all their history except the last hundred or hundred and fifty years in the case of the western and the developed world. It is incumbent on us to be very careful in discarding this important aspect of our children's lives and throw it out the window without understanding the full implications, because we have an extra room to spare. Sleeping together with their parents provides kids with a potentially invaluable natural sense of warmth, togetherness and security during their early years, especially at night time, which is intuitively experienced as a more dangerous time.

I would venture to suggest that without the norms and expectations of our contemporary culture, most mothers’ intuitive instincts would be to have their kids sleep together with them. This is definitely the natural instincts and wishes of the kids themselves, to sleep together with their parents, and this fact alone should give us a very hard pause. It is interesting to try to understand what aspects of our culture and ethics steer us towards isolating our kids during night time. To bring a child into the world and then condemn them to dark isolation for half of their day seems to be a practice that requires much more thought than our culture acknowledges or even allows.