Family

The Promise of Sleep

All wakefulness is sleep deprivation; You build up sleep debt over the course of the day, and then pay it off as you sleep that night

Published

2 years ago

November 18, 2021

Jeff Davidson

Notes and excerpts from The Promise of Sleep: A Pioneer in Sleep Medicine Explores the Vital Connection Between Health, Happiness, and a Good Night’s Sleep by William C. Dement, PhD., Stanford University

This is the definitive book on sleep! It is loaded with gems: Your sleep drive keeps an exact tally of accumulated waking hours. Like bricks in a backpack, accumulated sleep drive is a burden that weighs down on you. Every hour that you are awake adds another brick to the pack. The brain’s sleep load increases until you go to sleep when the load starts to lighten.

The author emphasizes that your brain keeps an exact accounting of how much sleep it is owed. Each successive night of partial sleep loss is carried over and the end effect appears to accumulate in a precisely additive fashion. Accumulated lost sleep is like a monetary debt: “It must be paid back.”

Overthrowing Our Biological Clocks

In just a few decades of technological innovation we have managed to totally overthrow our magnificently evolved biological clocks and the complex biorhythms they regulate.

Our loss of sleep time and natural rhythms is the tragic legacy of a single and profound advance-the light bulb. Electric lights not only let people stay up longer, they also were bright enough to mimic the light and significantly shift people’s internal biological clocks. When bedtime shifted to 10 or 11 p.m. instead of 8 or 9 p.m., midnight was no longer the middle of the night.

The incandescent bulb marked the beginning of the modern era of sleeplessness, and Edison was by no means ignorant of the implications of his breakthrough. A restless genius and experimenter, Edison believed that too much sleep was bad for you. Edison thought that people got twice as much sleep as they needed and the extra sleep made them “unhealthy and inefficient.”

Sunlight Had Been the Standard

Edison’s invention of bright electric lights threw a wrench into the human clockworks. Over millions of years, our bodies and minds had evolved using sunlight as a Universal Standard Time (UST), as the infallible index against which we set our internal clock.

We have grown so accustomed to living year round in an artificial summer of light, with long days and short nights, that it is difficult to image life before electric lights and contemporary work schedules. Our bodies, however, have not forgotten. Can we believe that in 100 years our bodies can so easily change needs buried deep within the workings of each cell?

Many people work long hard hours throughout the week hoping to catch up on sleep over the weekend. They collapse in the bed on Friday night and sleep deeply until late in the morning. Even though they have paid back several hours of sleep debt, they walk around like zombies all day Saturday, barely able to stay awake. The reason is obvious: you cannot pay back a weeks worth of sleep debt in one night. Less obvious: the stressful arousal of the weekday work place is no longer masking sleep debt on Saturday. As people tend to drink and eat more on weekends, their sleep fighting arousal is further suppressed.

Deprivation

All wakefulness is sleep deprivation. You build up sleep debt over the course of the day, and then pay it off as you sleep that night. If you get an hour less than you need, you carry an hour of sleep debt into the next day, and your drive for sleep becomes stronger. Sleep debt accumulates in an additive fashion, so that if you get one hour less sleep than you need for each of eight nights your brain will then tend toward sleep as strongly as if you had stayed up all night.

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Family

Honoring All Mothers on Mother’s Day

Attacks on motherhood and Mother’s Day are no less than the attempted repudiation of all that we hold dear

Published

2 weeks ago

May 14, 2023

Jeff Davidson

Despite the continuing theatrics of the Left, I can state with 100% confidence that you had a mother and were born as a result of your mother, a biological human female, being pregnant and bringing you to term. I can further claim that at birth, you were either a boy or a girl. Your mother was impregnated by a male. So, you had both a mother and a father and your birth was able to occur.

Rightful Acknowledgment

Held on the second Sunday of May, Mother’s Day has long been a holiday revered by most people. It is a celebration that acknowledges mothers everywhere, whether they have had one child or more, and whether they bore or raised a child.

Although we’re familiar with the American version of Mother’s Day, many countries designate a day to acknowledge mothers, generally in March, April, or May.

Some nations have been celebrating Mother’s Day long before the U.S. – we are new to the tradition, having started early in the 20th century. Ms. Anne Jarvis organized what is recognized as the first American Mother’s Day “service of worship” in Grafton, West Virginia at the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church.

Gripers Gonna Gripe

Some people have lamented that Mother’s Day, as with most holidays, has become commercialized. Sure, greeting cards, gift baskets, chocolates, and promotions are advertised, urging offspring to offer a gift to their mother on this special day.

A distinct few within America — Leftists — loath the basic concept of Mother’s Day. They object to the word “mother.” They insist on obtuse nomenclature such as “birthing person” which implies that someone other than a biological female can give birth. Sure thing.

In 2020, a unique hospital opened on New York’s Upper East Side, focusing on labor and delivery. Three cheers for the Alexandra Cohen Hospital for Women and Newborns. Leftists railed against this institution because, they scream, nonbinary and transgender individuals who don’t “identify as women” are able to become pregnant and bear children. So “pregnant people” should supersede the term “pregnant women?” They are all still mothers, right?

The Sheer Lunacy of the Left

Does Mother’s Day join the gargantuan list of traditions the Left fervently longs to destroy? “When we talk about ‘birthing people,’ we’re being inclusive. It’s that simple,” proclaims NARAL (originally, the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws). Fortunately, a majority of our population frown on terms such as “pregnant people” and “birthing person.”

With the Left, every institution, holiday, tradition, celebration, acknowledgment, or recognition is subject to disparagement. In their quest for complete social anarchy or some vaulted notion of a one-world government, they seek to bulldoze everything in their path. Society crumbling in total chaos? They relish the thought.

If you succeed at diminishing the notion of motherhood and Mother’s Day, what else is vulnerable? Namely everything — fatherhood, families, communities, governing bodies, and the United States of America itself.

Attacking on All Issues

An attack on motherhood and Mother’s Day is no less than the attempted repudiation of all that we hold dear, of world history, and of human history. These are the same people who seek to sexualize six- and eight-year-olds, and to convince them that they were born into the wrong type of body.

These are the people who would deny Christians and Jews the right to worship, if they could, while giving Muslims a free pass. These are the same people who ignore the irrefutable data that show black on white violence is overwhelming compared to white on black violence.

These are the same people who will gaslight every observation you can make about their destructive policies and then do it again with vigor. And why not? Look who’s on their side: the mainstream media owned by a handful of woke corporations that cave on cue; academia filled with over-educated, irrational professors; book and magazine publishers; TV producers; and rock stars and rappers.

The Vital Role

On May 14th, to our heart’s content, let us celebrate mothers and those who have raised children. Let us look forward to an unending stream of Mother’s Days, when we celebrate, honor, and remember those very special people: our mothers – all mothers – who have done the vital job which keeps society intact and provides the cohesion for our civilization to continue.

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Family

Recollections of My Father

Some say that one of the wisest things you can do in life is to choose your parents well

Published

2 weeks ago

May 13, 2023

Jeff Davidson

My father, Emanuel Davidson, whose birthday is today, passed away 46 years ago, long before ubiquitous smart phone and video recorders. Like many children, I often recall my overall memory of him, while not reflecting on the specifics of what made him, him.

As time passes, it is all too comforting to fixate on a general notion of how a loved one was, but recalling the habits, personality tidbits, and other idiosyncrasies that made the person unique, is more endearing and enduring.

My father was a member of the generation that had experienced the Great Depression, won World War II, and, by the late 1940s, fueled an ever-expanding economy. He was from the generation that expected to, and indeed proceeded to, exceed the educational level and material wealth of their parents and, in turn, expected the same for their children.

He bought his first house, in Hartford, on Cambridge Street in 1949, and two years following the birth of his twin son and daughter in 1953, made the decision with my mother to move to Bloomfield, Connecticut to a four-bedroom, two-bathroom house in the up-and-coming suburb of Hartford.

Always Striving

My father had long been a teacher in English and history, and when needed, he also taught math. After many years, he became vice principal at the Dominic Burns Junior High School. Like so many parents, he wanted more for his children, and his teacher’s salary simply wasn’t enough. So, for the duration of his adult life, he worked at least one additional job, often a second, and sometimes a third.

Emanuel Davidson, my father, graduated from Weaver High School in 1934 and then Connecticut Teacher’s College, later known as Central Connecticut State University in 1938. At Central, he was their first baseman in varsity baseball for three years, and their starting offensive varsity guard in football for two years. He went on to get a master’s in education at Columbia University and, after WWII, a 6th year degree at University of Connecticut , with one year to go for a Ph.D. which he did not pursue.

My father was a veteran of World War II. He served in Germany, France, and the Netherlands. As a soldier, he first trained in Paris TX where he also married my mother. He also took math and physics courses as part of his U.S. Army assignments at VMI. He was shipped to and stationed in France, primarily in logistics, rising to the level of sergeant. He was involved in some limited combat and suffered a partial loss of hearing in his left ear from a grenade explosion. Yet, remarkably, he would sometimes hear a whisper when he didn’t otherwise hear anything. He recalled, and somewhat regretted, having to kill a German soldier in close combat.

After the war, he worked some more in carpentry with his father for a brief time while advancing his education and then started teaching at Canton High. For most of his career, he taught English and history at Northeast Junior High in Hartford.

If you’ve read this far, the rest of the story (6 pages!) is here. Some say that one of the wisest things you can do in life is to choose your parents well. In my case, I hit the jackpot.

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