Hello again lovely email friends, I hope all is well with you. This week I’ve had cause to take a couple of long-haul flights, I’m pretty good at flying east, but westbound flights can really mess with me. So I’ve been doing all those things you do to manage jet-lag, and fool my body into ignoring weird ripples in its circadian rhythm.
Sleep: I ponder the act of sleeping quite regularly. As a young adult, I was terrible at it. After a particularly gruelling bout of acute insomnia I sought help, although all the advice you get from a doctor can be pretty bewildering. Anyway since that time I’ve been ‘good’ at maintaining a regular pattern of sleep but, if you asked me to explain what I now do differently, I’d find it hard to pin down. What’s clear is the science: the more we know about the brain, the more we realise how vital sleep actually is.
Probably only a few of us are getting enough, but getting good at sleeping isn’t like getting good at tennis, or playing the cello. Practice, as in methodically chipping away at it, just doesn’t seem to work. In fact, trying to sleep can be counterproductive. Sleeping aids might knock you out but usually exacerbate the problem. In my case the realisation, as obvious as it now seems, that healthy sleep is a whole-day cycle was the breakthrough. I started thinking about how to create the conditions for good sleep not only at night but in the morning and throughout the day.
You can read up on how sleep works but this doesn’t make you any good at it. But while it’s not like learning to be good at a sport, it’s analogous to training for success at the very top: identifying every possible factor that could hamper success, no matter how small, and eliminate each one. So I suppose you don’t get ‘good’ at going to sleep; you create the conditions whereby sleep is inevitable.
There’s a strong connection between how we sleep and how we work. Sleep deprivation is common enough in Japan for some companies to tackle the problem directly, while elsewhere companies seeking heightened productivity have experimented designing work around when employees are most awake. It might sound Orwellian but it’s not all one-way: sleep can be good for your salary. 🛌
🦏 New embryo made of nearly extinct rhino species: with only two northern white rhino remaining, both female, researchers are working to create viable embryos inseminated with frozen sperm from dead males
🕸 Word Webs is a visual thesaurus of sorts, intended to help stimulate new ideas.
🤠 Sexism In Country Music: even though women have been highly present in the genre for decades, country radio stations have purposely underplayed female artists.
💨 Use ‘Roadside Wildflowers at Full Speed’ to Identify Plants Without Leaving Your Car: want to identify flowers by the road but don’t have time to stop and look? Chris Helzer has put together a guide for those who want to know a little bit more about the wildflowers they see along the roadside but don’t want to leave their moving vehicles.
📬 Letter Monster: when is the last time you got a nice letter in the mail? Letter Monster wants to write you a actual letter.
📚 Why Do So Many Book Covers Look the Same? Blame Getty Images: a handful of stock photos turn up again and again, from the mysterious ‘man in fog’ to the enigmatic ‘bird cage lady’.
😭 Why are pop songs getting sadder than they used to be? An interesting piece of data analysis looking at the sentiment of lyrics over five decades.
Both ends burning: The demands of modern life can reap merry havoc upon our bodies’ demands for sleep. We all respond differently to internal factors, such as our own biology and its impact on our sleep propensity, and external factors such as stress and bright light. Insomnia, by contrast, steps beyond.
It may start with impatient sheep-counting but insomnia can develop into a haunting, otherworldly and all-consuming plateau. Sleepless nights become near-infinite, as beautifully recalled by novelist Samantha Harvey, and every unsuccessful remedy somehow adds to the burden.
Some people turn to technology in search of a solution but, no matter what gadgets suggest, worrying about sleep is about the most counterproductive thing you can do. 😴
Finally: Armslist is a website that has become a major destination for firearm buyers and sellers. The site can be used legally, but critics say it takes a hands-off approach to moderating the content on their platform that fuels violence and allows private sellers to bypass getting a federal firearms license. Inside the crime-friendly Craigslist of guns. 🎯