You Snooze, You Lose?

You Snooze, You Lose?

In peace I will lie down and sleep, for you alone, O LORD, will keep me safe.

Psalm 4:8

We were having dinner with another couple, a very busy couple in the middle of launching their own business, when the subject of sleep came up. They were burning the proverbial candle at both ends. “We just don’t have time to sleep,” the husband said.

Wow! That’s quite a claim, don’t you think? After all, we all need our sleep—we can’t function without it. But his statement got us thinking. As a busy couple ourselves, we’ve had plenty of late nights followed by early mornings. It seems every couple has a season or two when sleep suffers, and we’re all in search of a secret for getting more done while remaining rested. In fact, the search for that elusive balance has been going on for centuries.

Leonardo da Vinci would bite his tongue to fend off fatigue, and he would sleep fifteen minutes every four hours for a grand total of an hour and a half a day. The painter Salvador Dalí napped sitting with a spoon in his hand and a tin plate at his feet so that the moment he was overtaken by deep slumber, the spoon would fall, clatter, and awaken him refreshed. Dustin Hoffman used to jump rope for twenty minutes whenever his eyelids sagged. Charles Lindbergh said he spoke with ghosts over the Atlantic in order to make his historic thirty-three-hour solo flight between New York and Paris.

Did these accomplished men find the secret to wringing more life out of life? Cornell psychology professor James Maas is among a growing number of sleep experts who worry that most of us spend our days desperately in need of a good night’s sleep. In his book Power Sleep, Maas claims sleep deprivation has become a crisis. Here’s how he says you can tell if you’re sleep deprived: If you need an alarm clock to wake up, if you fall asleep during the day, and if you fall asleep soon after your head hits the pillow (it should take you at least fifteen minutes).

But here’s the good news. It turns out that married couples can help one another have a better night’s rest. How? By incorporating two simple rituals into their pillow talk: a tender touch and a kind word. It seems these two behaviors will set your minds for emotional safety and sweet slumber. And while the researchers didn’t explore it, we have a pretty good hunch that a little prayer between husband and wife wouldn’t hurt either.

You may want to pose a simple question to one another right now: how rested do you feel most mornings on a scale of one to ten? Then talk about what you can do for each other to create more restful nights in the future.

I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night.

—When Harry Met Sally