Sweet Dreams?
Rose Jones considers the effects of sleep deprivation
Feeling Sleepy? You are not alone. The British like to skimp on sleep; we have mottos of “work hard play hard” and a macho attitude to late nights and long hours. Phrases like 'play while I'm living and sleep when I'm dead!' and 'burn the candle at both ends' are familiar and accepted descriptions of a lifestyle thought cool and exciting.
Ha. Having become parents, for the first time a couple of years ago, my fella and I have a crystal clear understanding of how hugely under rated sleep is, how precious, how wonderful, how undeservedly neglected. Sleep is the rain that let's life's desert bloom, the lifeboat that keeps us bobbing and buoyant on life's tumultuous ocean wave, the anti-aging, sanity-restoring, humour-renewing, fantastic cure-all that makes life worth living! Do I sound a bit lyrical? Or just hysterical? You don't get much sleep with a baby in the house. And what have we gone and done now? Just when the first was beginning to get the idea of being diurnal, we getting another one!
Stop laughing; it's not funny! Of course, we knew this would happen – it's just one of those things – like double parking and VAT – with a baby, along with baby-clothes and lots of good wishes and endless chores and dirty nappies and heart-melting smiles comes sleepless nights. Happily we can take comfort (while propping our eyelids up with pencils and café americano) in the fact that we are not alone.
The British don't sleep enough. It's part of the national character: we regard sleep as feeble and
lazy. Anyway it's there in the statistics: apparently today's Brits average only seven hours kip a night – less by at least an hour than the rest of Europe and less by two hours than our grandparents got.
But, believe me, sleep deprivation is no fun. Your motor skills go (that means you spill your coffee); your decision-making gets muddled (you can't decide what to do next); your concentration is kaput (you miss the turn off driving to El Ingenio) and your memory confused (at El Ingenio you forget to buy half the stuff you came for). As for your mood – you're snappy, crabby, inconsiderate, intolerant, stubborn, stupid and difficult. At least that's what they tell me.
Here in Spain we expect to be all sorted for sleep. The pace of life is so slow, after all; the Spanish are so laid back. But…when on earth do they sleep? The siesta? Forty minutes between squeezing in lunch and heading back out? At night? Young Spaniards I know start their evenings out about midnight and think nothing of getting back around three or four in the morning. That's would be round about the time my new baby will decided to get Mummy and Daddy up…again. Maybe I should ask the Spanish teenagers to baby-sit. Here comes another couple years of sleep deprivation.
Oh, I'm getting old. I can't keep up with the English anymore, never mind the Spanish. So when the fiestas come around this summer – from Nerja's Virgin of the Sea to Cómpeta's Night of the Wine I'll follow a simple rule. No Fiesta without Siesta! Must go – the baby's crying…
