Tag Archives: Efficiency

Anxiety Dream

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By Miya Tokumitsu

A 1636 Dutch print depicts a tender domestic scene: a father in his nightdress walks to and fro, soothing a wakeful baby while mom gets some well-deserved sleep. The accompanying verse is equally sweet, assuring us that God, like this kindly father, will comfort us when we become gripped with anxiety and cry out in the night.

But when we wake today, heart pounding at the recollection that we have a big presentation in six hours, many of us might find a last-minute cancellation more conducive to recovering sleep than the idea of a loving God who cradles and sings to us. Adding to our anxiety is the knowledge that the loss of every minute is setting us back. There seems hardly to be sleep enough to go around, much less to share with our loved ones. We know the stats: most Americans sleep a paltry 6.8 hours per night, less than the recommended eight hours. The litany of sleep deprivation consequences is also familiar: obesity, depression, anxiety, loss of libido, and heart disease, among others.

We also instinctively understand that we have a stake in each other’s sleep. In addition to immediate hazards, like overtired drivers taking the wheel or bleary-eyed colleagues gumming up our beautiful spreadsheets, we know that widespread depression and worn-out immune systems affect society broadly, and over the long term. And yet we often understand our sleep in terms of pure individual choice.

For that reason, wilful sleep deprivation remains a cultural ideal. This you-snooze-you-lose mindset was recently captured by internet-marketplace Fiverr’s advertisement poster, which, alarm-like, blared “SLEEP DEPRIVATION IS YOUR DRUG OF CHOICE . . . YOU MIGHT BE A DOER.” After all, what is the condition of sleep, if not an absence of motivation to chase the $5 gigs the company peddles? In this same vein, a 2012 Business Insider slideshow fawned over “19 Successful People Who Barely Sleep.” Marissa Mayer, Yahoo! CEO, got pride of place as slide number one. Slide number three was Donald Trump.

An equally individualistic pro-sleep discourse does exist, primarily in click-bait articles nestled within chum boxes, which limply scold us for watching Netflix in bed. Entering this soporific terrain, sleep-evangelist Arianna Huffington urges readers of her book, The Sleep Revolution, to sleep more, prescribing rituals to maximize its quality, including pre-bedtime soaks with Epsom salts, and counting one’s blessings.

As with our wakefulness, our slumber too is motivated and shaped by anxiety. Those who do protect their eight hours often do so because it helps them perform better at work. It’s no wonder that Huffington, a boss, approves of this motivation for sleep, writing, “It would actually be better for business if employees called in tired, got a little more sleep, and then came in a bit late, rather than call in sick a few days later or, worse, show up sick, dragging themselves through the day while infecting others.”

It may appear that as a society we have conflicting sleep ideals, but really, we’re not so much of two minds as we are fumbling around, trying to work out the role that sleep plays in a prosperous life. We want to get sleep right because we know that doing so is essential to thriving individually—indeed, Thrive is the name Huffington chose for her wellness company—but we fret over the quantity, preparatory rites, and timing of our sleep because sleep lies at the juncture between the private and the social, the biological, and the cultural.

Sleep is intensely private: where, when, with (and without) whom, and how we dress and prepare for sleep are intimate and emotional decisions. But sleep is also social: we modify our behavior and expectations on the assumption that those beyond our immediate domiciles—neighbors, colleagues both local and time zones away—are slumbering at certain hours. And although sleep is private, we do want social reassurance that we are sleeping the right way and look down upon those who choose other arrangements. Just mosey over to the comment section of any website discussing infant sleep, and you’ll find accusations of “baby torture,” and remarks like, “You may think you are fine, but no. You did hurt your baby.” Just as eating habits often come with a moral or ethical motivations that imply—or outright state—the absence of such morals and ethics of those who eat differently, sleep helps constitute our identity, something we generally like to have affirmed.

Enter the market. There are seemingly endless ways to buy yourself some sleep—books like Huffington’s, herbal teas, white noise machines, Ambien, melatonin, ear plugs tucked into earplug cases, therapy. And if you want to put sleep off—stimulants from espresso to cocaine, late night TV, alarms, gyms that open at 5 am.

Contrary to Huffington’s claim to revolutionary momentousness, it seems someone’s always been around to sell sleep optimization. Historian Sasha Handley writes in her book Sleep in Early Modern England that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the panoply of goods deemed ideal for proper sleep by Brits counted breathable bed linens, thermometers to help maintain ideal room temperatures, bedclothes including nightcaps and nightcap liners, even ventilators. “No other daily activity was so heavily governed by principles of good health,” Handley writes, “nor consumed as much time, money, and labour as did sleep.” Yesterday’s silver-gilt ventilator has today become a whole range of electronic devices to track your sleep and analyze which components of your psyche and environment need correction.

We may scream at each other over the “correct” way to sleep, but the truth is that where we come down on these questions—and, indeed, whether we even have a choice at all—is largely a matter of our financial resources and anxieties. As with parenting, there are multitudinous dictums competing over how to do sleep right, but few resources to actually achieve our cultural ideals. For well-to-do families, whether to co-sleep with babies may be a considered choice. No such luck for households that cannot afford a bassinet or crib. Coffee-fuelled all-nighters are technically a choice, but usually one coerced by negative economic consequences for missing a deadline. And what can Huffington say to readers who don’t have a bathtub or even a private bedroom from which to banish their phone?

 

The Clock Inside Us

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By Eman Shahata

Source: The New Inquiry

Once a weapon to combat idleness, the clock has become a prosthesis, augmenting the human body to override its need for rest

IF time is money, then sleep is theft. Today’s cult of busyness regards sleep as a defect that threatens to render people competitively unfit. In a recent article for the Guardian, Lucy Rock wrote about CEOs’ “competitive sleep deprivation,” with top executives sleeping for a mere three to four hours, mimicking Margaret Thatcher’s four-hour sleep cycle when she was in office. Similarly, Angela Ahrendts, head of retail at Apple and former CEO of Burberry, has claimed she “gets a headache when she sleeps for more than six hours.”

Such enthusiasm for sleeplessness seems to make an executive virtue out of a capitalistic necessity. But it has deep epistemological roots. In the wake of Enlightenment and in tandem with the emergence of capitalism, humans began to view nature as a pool of resources to be tamed, mastered, owned, and directed toward fulfilling human desires. It wasn’t long before this conquest of nature was redirected toward the intransigencies of human nature. Despite all the technological advances that positivistic science yielded, humans were still faced with their own physical limitations. They could build skyscrapers of glass and steel that defied gravity in the name of human reason, yet they could not tame the unreasonable demands of their own body for rest.

The attempt to tame the body of its unprofitable tendency to tire began as an effort to make “saving time” a moral issue. Sixteenth-century moralist and mercantilist discourses already regarded punctuality as a prerequisite for the conception of a modern man, the pinnacle of social development in an imagined context of linear progress. British historian E.P. Thompson points out in “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism” that toward the end of the 17th century, as wage labor relations began to become more prevalent, time began to be conceived as a precious commodity to be spent rather than merely passed. “Those who are employed experience a distinction between their employer’s time and their ‘own’ time,” Thompson notes. “And the employer must use the time of his labor, and see that it is not wasted.” Tolling bells and fines levied by employers taught students and workers that their time was being counted, that it was a regulated and regimented currency.

Moralists urged “time thrift,” and framed the waste of time as summoning divine punishment. As British nonconformist minister Oliver Heywood put it in the 17th century tract Meetness for Heaven, “This is our working day, our market time … O Sirs, sleep now, and awake in hell, whence there is no redemption.” Paternalist and colonialist discourses, whether in addressing the English poor or indigenous people from developing countries, represented idleness as a trait of those who are “naturally inferior.” For instance, as Thompson notes, clergyman John Clayton’s pamphlet “Friendly Advice to the Poor” urges the factory worker, whom he refers to as a “sluggard,” to use his time efficiently and refrain from “dulling his spirit by Indolence.” Similarly, where theories of social evolutionism gained prominence, time discipline was seen as essential for the transition to “mature societies.” Thompson notes how economic-growth theorists viewed Mexican mineworkers as “indolent and childlike people” because of their deficient time discipline.

Parallel to the rise of “time thrift” comes the monumental role of the clock. In 17th century Britain, clocks restructured work habits by materializing the ethic of time thrift, setting a clear demarcation between “work” and “life” and reminding workers of their tasks. The omnipresence of clocks was a guarantor of regulation, it ensured the institution of order in the workspace. The clock’s ubiquity legitimized time discipline and naturalized it, making it banal and commonsensical. It made sure that no one escaped the tempo.

One might say that the clock becomes a subject, with agency in its own right, shaping social customs and subjecting people to its rhythms. As anthropologist Bruno Latour has argued, technology and things are not simply animated by humans but also mediate human action. And as anthropologist Benjamin Snyder argues, clocks served the purpose of training and manipulating the body to accomplish set tasks, thereby “turning it into an inexhaustible source of energy.” The incessant sound of the ticking clock, the mounting anxiety it almost automatically evokes, has come to regulate the body and embed it within the culture of busyness.

If clocks are agents that shape human actions, is it valid to assume that clocks are an “other”? By making sure everyone maximizes their efficiency, clocks address the physical limitations of the human body, becoming a kind of prosthesis that pushes humans closer to reaching an “optimal” state of activity.

This is reflected in the late 19th century emergence of the idea of an “internal clock,” which exemplifies how biological processes can be redefined in terms of prominent material objects. By this means, the ideology of time discipline— inseparable from the clock—becomes seen as a natural imperative. In the wake of the clock’s ubiquity, positivist and scientific rhetoric began to depict the biological clock as an “endogenous” factor that operates according to “innate” biological rhythms, leading to medical advice shaped by the metaphors it employs: “how to reset your internal clock” and so on. Such advice points to the mechanization of the body, which now requires “daily maintenance.”

It may seem as if the presence of a master clock in our brains, which synchronizes and sets sleeping patterns on its own, means we no longer need an outside force to tame our bodies. Our bodies have internalized this systemic regulation, becoming in this sense, machinic. However, what implications arise from this? This mechanization of the body—a precursor and template for the ongoing reconceptualization of the self in terms of quantities alone—reflects how our bodies have become products, rather than agents, of a culture of busyness and rationality that glorifies productivity. Scientific discourses have succeeded in masking the way we’ve been clocked in and can no longer clock out.