Back in my early days of my working, I routinely pulled all-nighters when we had to deliver a piece of software. Many times, I stayed up two nights in a row. I knew I wasn’t as sharp when I was operating mostly on caffeine, but I was obsessed with my work, and I felt that sleeping a lot was lazy.
Now that I’ve read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, I realize that my all-nighters, combined with almost never getting eight hours of sleep, took a big toll. Walker, the director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Human Sleep Science, explains how neglecting sleep undercuts your creativity, problem solving, decision-making, learning, memory, heart health, brain health, mental health, emotional well-being, immune system, and even your life span. “The decimation of sleep throughout industrialized nations is having a catastrophic impact,” Walker writes.
I don’t necessarily buy into all of Walker’s reporting, such as the strong link he claims between not getting enough sleep and developing Alzheimer’s. In an effort to wake us all up to the harm of sleeping too little, he sometimes reports as fact what science has not yet clearly demonstrated. But even if you apply a mild discount factor, Why We Sleep is an important and fascinating book.
I will take a small story from the book and put it here in this review blog. This is about Doctors lifestyle when they strenuously work for days together. I personally love John Hopkins University School of Medicine Baltimore because of their medical breakthroughs in transplant surgery. Let us get into the story:
Why did we ever force doctors to learn their profession in such an exhausting, sleepless way? The answer originates with the esteemed physician William Stewart Halsted, MD.
This is the story of how cocaine created the residency programs of today:
Halsted founded the surgical training program at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, in May 1889. As chief of the Department of Surgery, his influence was considerable, and his beliefs about how young doctors must apply themselves to medicine, formidable.
The term “residency” came from Halsted’s belief that doctors must live in the hospital for much of their training, allowing them to be truly committed in their learning of surgical skills and medical knowledge.
Halsted’s mentality was difficult to argue with, since he himself practiced what he preached, being renowned for a seemingly superhuman ability to stay awake for apparently days on end without any fatigue.
But Halsted had a dirty secret that only came to light years after his death, and helped explain both the maniacal structure of his residency program and his ability to forgo sleep. Halsted was a cocaine addict. Early in his career, Halsted was conducting research on the nerve-blocking abilities of drugs that could be used as anaesthetics to dull pain in surgical procedures.
One of those drugs was cocaine, which prevents electrical impulse waves from shooting down the length of the nerves in the body, including those that transmit pain.
Addicts of the drug know this all too well, as their nose, and often their entire face, will become numb after snorting several lines of the substance, almost like having been injected with too much anaesthetic by an overly enthusiastic dentist.
Working with cocaine in the laboratory, it didn’t take long before Halsted was experimenting on himself. If you read Halsted’s academic report of his research findings in the New York Medical Journal from September 12, 1885, you’d be hard pressed to comprehend it. Several medical historians have suggested that the writing is so discombobulated and frenetic that he undoubtedly wrote the piece when high on cocaine.
Colleagues noticed Halsted’s odd and disturbing behaviours in the years before and after his arrival at Johns Hopkins. This included excusing himself from the operating theatre while he was supervising residents during surgical procedures, leaving the young doctors to complete the operation on their own.
At other times, Halsted was not able to operate himself because his hands were shaking so much, the cause of which he tried to pass off as a cigarette addiction. Ashamed and nervous that his colleagues would discover the truth, he entered a rehabilitation clinic under his first and middle name, rather than using his surname.
It was the first of many unsuccessful attempts at kicking his habit. For one stay at Butler Psychiatric Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island, Halsted was given a rehabilitation program of exercise, a healthy diet, fresh air, and, to help with the pain and discomfort of cocaine withdrawal, morphine.
Halsted subsequently emerged from the “rehabilitation” program with both a cocaine addiction and a morphine addiction. Halsted inserted his cocaine-infused wakefulness into the heart of Johns Hopkins’s surgical program. The exhausting residency program, which persists in one form or another throughout all US medical schools to this day, has left countless patients hurt or dead in its wake—and likely residents, too.
Many medical schools used to require residents to work thirty hours. You may think that’s short, since I’m sure you work at least forty hours a week. But for residents, that was thirty hours all in one go. Worse, they often had to do two of these thirty-hour continuous shifts within a week, combined with several twelve-hour shifts scattered in between. This is what makes this crazy to me. A lack of sleep is detrimental to anyone, especially doctors who are saving lives. But this applies to anyone, whether you're a doctor, or starting your own business.
Being sleep-deprived can even affect the body the same way drinking alcohol does.
Being awake for:
17 hours is similar to having a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.05% (the level some countries use for drunk driving violations).
24 hours is similar to having a BAC of 0.10% (above the U.S. drunk driving level of 0.08.)
At the end of the day:
Don't sleep on the impact of sleep. Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day. It's Mother Nature's best effort yet at contra-death.
Professor Matthew Walker explores twenty years of cutting-edge research to solve the mystery of why sleep matters. Looking at creatures from across the animal kingdom as well as major human studies, Why We Sleep delves into everything from what really happens during REM sleep to how caffeine and alcohol affect sleep and why our sleep patterns change across a lifetime, transforming our appreciation of the extraordinary phenomenon that safeguards our existence.
It took me a little longer than usual to finish Why We Sleep—ironically, because I kept following Walker’s advice to put down the book I was reading a bit earlier than I was used to, so I could get a better night’s sleep. But Walker taught me a lot about this basic activity that every person on Earth needs. I suspect his book will do the same for you.
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