SLEEP ESSENTIAL FOR HEALTH

To achieve good health, you must maintain a regular sleep schedule, and be able to get back to sleep once you are awake.

- IAN FRAZIER

At least eight hours of sleep—or nine hours, or even more, if you include the time you spend awake, trying to get back to sleep—is essential. Scientists who study sleep patterns stress the significance of stress, which makes it hard not only to get to sleep but to get back to sleep if you wake up in the night. They advise you to just go back to sleep.

Every night, sunrise is approaching at speeds of up to a thousand miles an hour, depending on how far you are from the equator. Try to get back to sleep faster than that, by clenching your eyes tightly shut and going back to sleep in a hurry. If that doesn’t work, unclench your eyes, re-close them in the regular way, and then go back to sleep at a normal speed. Since you’ve started thinking about this, the dawn, glinting pink on the cold, endless waves of the ocean, has reached the point in the Atlantic where the Titanic sank. In terms of getting back to sleep, nothing is to be gained by imagining this.