Turns Out All You Need to Sleep Soundly Is to Have A Sense Of Purpose

Science, today, bringing the fire, this time with this:

From the journal Sleep Science and Practice, comes a study by Arlener D. Turner, Christine E. Smith and Jason C. Ong, a study which has found that – amongst (and it says here) “non-demented” older adults, having “purpose in life” can make you sleep better. Listen here’s the abstract, you can figure out most of it from here:

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Basically, if you go to bed with a fulfilled sense of your purpose in the world, you’ll sleep soundly.

Caveats to the above: although the study was mainly looking at elderly-ass, purpose-in-life-having old people, the “PURPOSE = RESTFUL SLEEP” formula supposedly fits all genders and all ages, may you rest in peace amen. It’s official, whoever you are, the only way to get a good night’s sleep is to find meaning in the mess of your lived existence.

However, I suppose I for one, a foolish mook, can see at least a couple of flaws in this study, so I guess I have some questions, some follow-up points, some minor critiques:

It’s hard to describe a greater discomfort than sustained sleep deprivation or insomnia, because your body at once wants to sleep and does not want to sleep, and so your mind is just sitting there, buzzing like a fluorescent lightbulb in a cheap motel, and any attempts to shut it off counterintuitively make you more awake, and so it’s this horrible snake-biting-tail situation only you have work in the morning. This is akin to torture where you are both the inflictor and the inflicted: given a long unexpected spool of time (the hours between midnight and 7am when you should be asleep) and a mind that won’t shut off (and so drives to high maximum revs in the idleness), you will essentially sit and run every possible routine and subroutine your mind will let you, for like eight hours in a row, just constantly thinking and unthinking about why you are awake and what could have led to you being awake, and why you can’t go to sleep and if you ever will go to sleep. In that eight-hour period, time becomes a trap – it runs both quickly and slowly, and any attempts to gauge the precise time (the beep of an alarm clock, looking at your phone) confirms the exact amount of time you have spent not sleeping when you should have be sleeping, and so the longer you spend not sleeping but also knowing how long you have spent not sleeping becomes more time you will not sleep because you are worrying about the time you have not slept, and so suddenly one hour of insomnia becomes this recursive all-night loop and all you can think over and over again is that time in lower sixth when a person you fancied waved to you and you waved back, but actually it turned out they were waving to their two friends, assembled a couple of yards behind you, and they all laughed at you, every single one.
So we have a small handle on what insomnia is now. But then also you get this thing with insomnia where, after a few sustained nights of it, you will try every possible suggested action to make the torture end. So you will take long baths before bedtime, for instance, or buy prohibitively priced lavender pillow spray, or you will “clean up your sleep routine” and banish phones and laptops from your bedroom for an hour before sleep, and you will become this sort of serene sober, pre-bed routine having, angel person, with silk pillowcases, and a number of vitamins, and a cool bedroom temperature specifically calculated to induce sleep, and then you will stay up all night, back rigid with your eyes open staring at the ceiling locked in a silent scream.
So okay, okay: we have established now that every previous suggestion re: restful sleep was hokum and bullshit, and now the one true path to the light is having a purpose in life. Let’s just take that now for read. And so you enter into the sweet, cool pool of those little fluttering pre-sleep moments and you feel you body go heavy in the middle and your shoulders begin to relax and you think: hey, shit, maybe I’ll actually sleep tonight, maybe I’ll fall asleep! and no just thinking about it has fucked it see you again tomorrow night—
Okay so 24 very long hours have gone by let’s try again: so you are sort of feeling heavy, that heavy feeling in your limbs, they sort of sing with the numb feeling of all your nerves clenching up within them and going dull, and your eyes feel tired and your neck feels tired and your head feels tired, you are slowly swinging in an invisible mental hammock, rocking to sleep, quietly, just slowly gently rocking to sleep nearly there, and then you think: the science study told me the only way I would sleep is if I had purpose in life—
And then you sit bolt upright because you realise you have no purpose in life, and there it goes again.
So this I suppose is where the study might be flawed, because (and there’s not really any galvanised statistic about it, but one here at the “Life on Purpose Institute” reckons somewhere between 1 percent and 5 percent of the people on the planet have purpose in life, which seems pretty low) not really everyone has purpose in life, in fact not everyone is even approaching not having purpose in life, so you have a lot of people with anxiety re: not having purpose in life and now they are all up all night staring into the inky-blue of their bedroom, looking at the ceiling, unchanging, wondering where it all went wrong—
Because you were such a promising student at school, weren’t you? Far ahead of the reading curve, always patted on the head by your Year 5 teacher and told you were good. Aced all the exams, those KS2 SATs, with barely any revision. “Gifted,” teachers would say about you, in giddy whispered voices, “and talented.” Started to go off the rails a bit when puberty really hit like a truck and round about 13–14 or so suddenly homework got difficult, but you were still smart, in theory, weren’t you? You were still okay—
But then now you’re in adulthood or early stage adulthood and that bright shine of a gilded future promised to you from youth has sort of worn off a bit, especially after you had to resit a whole entire A-Level and just about scraped a 2:1 in your degree and now I suppose you are muddling along – smarter than the average bear, sure, smart enough, but not smart-smart, not like doctor-smart. They always sort of thought you were going to be doctor-smart.
So there’s that to worry about.
I’m not sure I really have any purpose either really, so I tried to learn how to have one and Google, my friend, was not ready for that question:

Anyway let’s try again:

Okay so quite a cheery opener, feeling quite upbeat. What’s first on the list?

“Do stuff,” okay. Well let’s… let’s at least see what the next piece of advice is, get some life purpose really cooking here:

“Think less,” ah. Hmm. Seems counterintuitive advice but let’s—

Ahhh that doesn’t really mean anything. That doesn’t mean anything at all. Let’s just… let’s just check this one out, again:

Anyway so I suppose the takeaway from all of this is: if you cannot sleep, it’s not just a simple psychosomatic issue, or anything about your sleep routine, or essentially anything that can be fixed with calming aromatics or nice bedding or clean sleep practices. Instead you fundamentally need to Sort Your Life Out, becoming one of the one-to-five-percent of people who have ever done that, ever in history, and that is the only way you will ever sleep again, ever. So that’s the good news. We’ve figured it out. Science has figured it out.

Sleep tight!

@joelgolby