‘Today, 40 percent of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived’ – Stolen Focus, Chapter 3 Notes

Posted on: June 4, 2022

Last Updated on: June 20th, 2022

Post Category: Book Notes

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About #onepageonepoint

#onepageonepoint aims to summarise new ideas from books on personal and professional development – with (approximately) one point for each page. Read more about this project here.

Today for #onepageonepoint, we have summary notes for Stolen Focus – for chapter 3: ‘Cause 3: The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion’.

If you are interested in getting yourself a copy or learn more about the book, click here.

Chapter 3: ‘Cause Three: The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion’

• During Hari’s detox, atypical from his normal sleeping routine (which would have involved thinking about the day that was, watching a show, researching and then taking melatonin pills before passing out), he woke up refreshed without needing coffee and his dreams became more vivid.

• When Charles Czeisler assisted with an investigation on the release of specific hormones in the human body, which involved keeping the participants awake, he couldn’t help but notice those who got less sleep had greater difficulty focussing their attention and underperformed when he gave them basic tasks.

• Czeisler observed in his study: ‘if you stay awake for nineteen hours straight, you become as cognitively impaired… as if you had got drunk. He [also] found that when they were kept awake for one whole night and continued walking about the next day, instead of taking a quarter of a second to respond to the prompt, the participants in his experiment were taking four, five, six seconds’ (Hari 2022, p. 62).

• Today, 40 percent of Americans are chronically sleep-deprived and, according to the National Sleep Foundation, the amount of sleep we are getting has dropped by 20 percent over the past one hundred years.

• Czeisler explains that when you are tired, you start to experience ‘attentional blinks’: even when your eyes are open, you lapse into a ‘local sleep’ where parts of your brain are awake and parts are asleep; your attention blinks out and people, in this state, would tend to believe they are alert and mentally competent when they are not.

• In 2004, Roxanne Prichard (professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of Minneapolis) performed a study on her students’ sleep. She discovered on average, a typical student had sleep quality like an active-duty soldier or a parent of a new-born baby – ‘they’ve been accustomed to that since puberty, basically… they’ve grown up being accustomed to being exhausted and trying to medicate that away [with caffeine or other stimulants] as a state of normal’ (Hari 2022, p. 64).

• This doesn’t just apply for people who are really exhausted; Czeisler explained that missing a couple of hours of sleep every night for a week or two will make you as impaired as someone who has stayed up all night.

• Missing sleep signals to your body that there is an emergency; this results in higher blood pressure, wanting more sugar (for quick energy), and cutting off short-term and longer-term forms of focus (thereby disrupting memory, creativity and retention/encoding of newly learnt content into long-term memory).

• Sandra Kooij, leading expert on adult ADHD in Europe, stated ‘Our western society is a bit ADHD-ish because we are all sleep deprived… we’re all in a hurry, we’re all impulsive, we’re easily irritated in traffic… you think you’re thinking clearly but you’re not’ (Hari 2022, p. 66).

• Kooij adds onto this: ‘when we sleep better, a lot of problems get less – like mood-disorders, like obesity, like concentration problems… it repairs a lot of damage’ (Hari 2022, p. 66)

• When you sleep, your brain uses cerebrospinal fluid to clean itself of waste (containing toxic proteins or “brain-cell poop”) that has accumulated during the day – and this improves focus.

• When you miss out on sleep, your prefrontal cortex (responsible for judgement) stops utilising its main source of energy (glucose). When you sleep, you renew the brain’s source of energy, so you feel restored and replenished afterwards.

• Some scientists who study dreaming also believe that sleeping allows you to revisit stressful moments without stress hormones flooding your system, which helps with stress management and thus focus.

• With chemical-induced sleep (e.g. with melatonin pills), your body doesn’t rest, clean, refresh and dream the same way (and as effectively) as natural sleep.

• Czeisler explains that we are getting less sleep despite this research because of our relationship with physical light: after sunset (or turning off the lights), we have evolved to get a surge of energy as if we need to set up a tent before it is too dark. ‘a major contributing factor to this epidemic of sleep deficiency [is] because we’re exposing ourselves to light later and later’ (Hari 2022, p. 71) – ’90 percent of Americans look at a glowing device in the hour before they go to bed’ (Hari 2022, p. 71).

• Czeisler also explains that this is also a result of a society dominated by values of consumer capitalism: ‘[In a society dominated by consumer capitalism] sleep is a big problem… if you’re asleep, you’re not spending money, so you’re not consuming anything… you’re not producing any products.’ (Hari 2022, p. 72).

• It is important to limit exposure to light before going to sleep – have no artificial light sources in your bedroom, and avoid the blue light of screens at least two hours before going to bed.

• Your phone should be recharged in another room where you can’t see or hear it, and the temperature of your room needs to be cool enough to lower your body temperature for sleep.

• There solutions are well-known but aren’t enough for people – more is discovered in later chapters.

If you are interested in getting yourself a copy or learn more about the book, click here.

Interested in reading more? See my notes for Chapter 4.