On low alert
On melatonin gummies, "housing first" policies, and problems we don't like to address because they escape easy categorization
There is no shortage of sources looking to sell people on supplements, apps, and furnishings marketed to improve sleep. It’s a colossal industry. Yet it seems as if Americans have little to no appreciation of the central psychological value of sleep. (We remain mystified by its physiological purpose, but we can intuitively grasp more about the psychological merits.)
■ Sleep is the one time during every 24-hour cycle when a person can escape the conscious concerns of waking life and go unbothered by others. Sleep is nature’s “do not disturb” setting.
■ This has obvious effects on stress. Everyone has stress responses, driven by cortisol and other chemicals we cannot avoid. And having a basic escape function in the form of sleep, whatever else it does for us biologically, at the very least offers the theoretical opportunity to go for a few hours every day without new stressful inputs being applied.
■ The proof that we fail to take this seriously can be plainly seen in two places: One is with the omnipresence of smartphones, tagging along with us into bedrooms (often by necessity) but all too frequently following people literally into the bed itself.
■ By nature, the phone is a stimulant, and while it’s every adult’s right to make the ill-advised choice to let phones interfere with the psychological cordon of sleep, it is a tragedy that many adults let those phones into juvenile bedrooms at night. If anyone deserves the sanctuary of sleep, it is the child who needs escape from social pressures, adult-sized worries, or bullying. If a conduit of alarm is always present, how can the brain ever fully de-escalate from a state of anxiety?
■ The other case is that of homelessness. As a society, we can hardly expect rational behavior and good decisions out of people who aren’t able to safely let down their guard for a few hours every night. This is, at least in theory, the rationale behind the “housing first” approach to homeless assistance.
■ While we’re eager to work our way through a thousand pressing social, economic, and political concerns in our waking hours, someone needs to speak up for straightening out some of the errors we’re making that don’t fit neatly on the editorial page. Just because a problem doesn’t seem immediate doesn’t mean it’s unimportant.
