It’s four in the morning, and you just can’t get back to sleep. You toss and turn, miserable in the knowledge that you have to get up in two hours to go to work. If only you could get one more hour of sleep!
Sleeping to Succeed
For a lot of people, job performance is a big motivator to sleep well. Some researchers have even called sleep a “strategic resource” for employers. This “resource” (getting enough sleep) may make people more ethical in the workplace and helps people make better decisions.
A lot of popular advice on sleep promotes sleep hygiene or personal discipline as a means to succeed — or at least survive — within the current socioeconomic system.
If the majority of people have regular sleep patterns and fixed hours of employment, it’s easier for business owners and managers to maximise profits. They can balance operating costs with expected revenues according to foreseeable consumption patterns based on daily cycles. This applies to their employees and to their customers or clients.
The Economy Depends on Sleep
In other words, economic processes depend directly on sleep habits. Most obviously, without sleep, workers would lose the ability to participate effectively at work. But some workplaces depend on everyone being there at the same time.
Imagine a school where teachers and students showed up whenever they felt like it. Or a bookshop that only opened at erratic hours, and the customers didn’t know when that might happen. (I’m not arguing we couldn’t build such things, but under our current cultural conditions, these seem challenging, if not totally implausible.)
Sleep Depends on the Economy
Of course, sleep and daily routines reflect and affect one another. As cultural anthropologist Matthew Wolf-Meyer wrote in his book The Slumbering Masses, “the presence and rhythms of sleeping structure our everyday lives. Simultaneously, the structure of our everyday lives impacts our sleep.”
In other words, belonging to a society based around a shared economic system (like capitalism or communism) shapes our sleep. Meanwhile, sleep shapes the way we organise our time within that system.
Naturally, this relationship applies to all of our social obligations, like eating or spending time with family. Anything that involves being together with other people has to occur in real time, which means that presumably everyone should be awake then (unless it’s a sleepover).
Should We All Sleep at the Same Time?
So why is it so hard for you to get up in the morning, even when you’re motivated to do well at work?
Some people are wired to get up early, while others are wired to get up late. There’s an evolutionary advantage to this. As long ago as 1966, Frederick Snyder suggested that having someone awake at all times benefits the group.
Lions hunt at night. It’s a good idea to have someone alert to stand watch. Older adults in their 50s and 60s tended to sleep earlier, while younger adults in the 20s and 30s slept later.
A more recent study investigated this theory further. They found that the members of hunter-gatherer groups in Tanzania were only all asleep at the same time for a total of eighteen minutes in twenty whole days. At pretty much any given time, someone was awake to protect the group. (Parents might also consider how natural night owls could take care of babies’ needs in the night.)
Changing Relations
The COVID-19 pandemic changed our work habits. Many more people work from home than previously. Before that, the internet had already enhanced our ability to work asynchronously with people all over the world. You can teach an online seminar in Seattle while living in Paris, which might work perfectly with your night-owl tendencies.
Despite this, for millions of people, regular obligatory work hours create a daily window for potential sleep. The economy and an individual’s rest remain closely intertwined. Those dreaded six o’clock alarms are not going away anytime soon.