Tierd as What? My Homage to Sleep Deprivation

I decided to leave that truly unintentional misspelling of "tired" up there as a testament to its own self-evidence. God that sentence was exhausting to write.

Expecting a treatise on insomnia? Here it is: try to get enough sleep. Consistently. People will tell you you can acclimate to six or seven hours a night but studies tell a different story. (Though it may be true a consistent six hours for five days and the inevitable deficit reduction over the weekend is more healthy than a 72 hour bender followed by three consecutive nights of twelve hours.)

To me nothing reveals the fragility of the human sleep cycle as vividly as jet lag. Think you can adapt your patterns on a whim? Try traveling halfway around the world. You'll lose weight because you've got no appetite at the times your body thinks it's supposed to be asleep. For the first few days 3 or 4 in the afternoon will roll around and you'll feel a fatigue comparable to completing a 16-hour shift at the coalmine and half a bottle of Robitussin. You adjust after a week or so, but only partly. Your body's need to rejuvenate has joined forces with the hormone-generating effects of sunlight to give you something resembling a sleep cycle. But you'll still feel inexplicably groggy mid-afternoon and have zero appetite between 9am and 6 all the while visibly losing weight.

Those are the effects to those of us with the luxury to sit back and observe them-that is those of us on leisure travel. To business people and diplomats such physical phenomena are par for the course. Studies have shown that people deprived of deep sleep (but otherwise sleeping a healthy amount of time per night) for a week can end up in a pre-diabetic state. But those guys are doing it for a living.

Today I have no such excuses. Last night I got to bed at a reasonable hour. Our bedroom was a comfortable temperature. Sheets changed recently, giving off the comforting detergent scent I remember from childhood. Dark. There was no caffeine buzz working its way through my system giving rise to racing heartbeat even as eyes grew heavy. There was just utter indifference to sleep.

Lately I feel like I'm navigating the workaday world in a half-conscious haze. One of the most interesting things about sleep deprivation is that anything requiring more rumination than a yes/no decision becomes a daunting mental puzzle. And any physical task more demanding than walking down the street without falling over may as well be jumping hurdles in roller skates. Deft ascension of the escalators in the 53rd St E train station wearing a bag and carrying a paper and your lunch? Throw in a corps of other commuters whose desire to get in front of you by any means necessary apparently exceeds by orders of magnitude their need to continue their quick pace once they do. The funniest part is they're all giving you about the same look you're giving them. Something like, "I just made it up 13 steps in this sticky heat before colliding with you and now I'm supposed to summon the energy to say 'sorry?'"

To make matters still more entertaining sleep dep apparently affects my warm-weather practice of street jogging in much the way it affects wary drivers. I collided this morning with a bald man in a black polo shirt who had been taking a tight tack around a blind corner. He managed to push me away and glare-I managed a mumbled "sorry." I sometimes wonder about the cost/benefit of urban jogging-It probably exercises your heart but with the fight-or-flight stress responses flaring up every time a baby carriage gets in your way at a bottleneck its effect on stress reduction is debatable. The only reason I started street running again in the first place was that I was falling asleep on the treadmill and needed motivation-like changing scenery and the compelling need to avoid being hit by a bus-to stay awake and finish the run.

Finally, two truisms about sleep dep that are always helpful to remember the next time you're getting zombie eyes waiting for your computer to retrieve a file or...finish...booting up (hee hee). One--those mind-bending effects of the four hours you got Thursday night--the fatigue that had you drifting off in the boardroom--seems to melt precipitously away with the arrival of happy hour. Which may suggest the mind's ability to subvert the body is greater than we realise. Second...I can't remember second.