| Issue #32, November 3, 2006 |
Staying Awake
The Secret of Living and Enjoying a Long Life is Revealed
By Dan Rattiner
As you know, scientists have no idea why some people die of natural causes at 55 and others die at 105. Those who have lived a long time get interviewed and they say they eat an apple a day, or they have a shot of whiskey every night before they go to bed, or they exercise twice a day, or they just sit in a comfortable chair all the time and have never exercised a day in their lives. It’s totally baffling.
I did think, for a long time, that if you stayed calm and serene all the time you would achieve long life because you would not be stressing your system.
People would say to me — when they saw something was bothering me — calm down, you’re going to kill yourself, and it wouldn’t help any, but it did make me think there was some truth to this.
In fact, it was quite clear to me that people in their 90s and above had this kind of take-it-easy personality that could lead to this. Keeping calm is what did it, right?
But then I ran into a woman who was 97 who I had known when she was younger and at that time she yelled and screamed and terrified people and chewed her nails and paced around and now when I saw her she was just all mellow and quiet because she had gotten old. And then I noticed EVERYONE mellows when they get old. So there goes that theory.
In light of this, I’ve decided to take a different tack toward longevity. I am going to live a long time by staying awake. It is not, as a matter of fact, how long you live, but how awake you are during the time you live that determines how much of life you get to experience.
The volcano explodes and if you sleep through it, you don’t know a thing about it. But if you’re awake all the time that it’s going off, then you get the full experience of being alive at that time.
So my plan is to stay up until 3 in the morning every night and wake up at 7. Nothing’s going to happen on my watch I don’t know about.
Do the math. If someone lives to be 75 and during all that time gets eight good hours of sleep every night, how does that compare to someone who is also 75 years old but gets four hours a night?
The person who gets eight hours of sleep is awake sixteen hours a day. But the person who gets four hours of sleep gets 20 hours of being awake a day. That’s 25% more.
I CAN LIVE TO BE 75 BUT GET THE EQUIVALENT OF 100. AND I DON’T EVEN HAVE TO DO ALL THAT EXTRA LIVING.
Many creative people sleep only four hours a night. Perhaps the most famous of them was Thomas Edison who said he got by with only four hours of sleep a night and lived to do all his inventions and enjoy everything that was going on right up into his eighties, which, when he died, was the equivalent of being 110 by my calculations.
One of the most famous sleepers, on the other hand, was actor Ronald Reagan, who became President but spent his entire life making speeches written by somebody else. He was a friendly fellow, it is true, and he got along. But that was about it. Between his naps and his long nights in the sack, he might have lived to be 93, which he did, but according to the math, he really died having lived only 54 years.
Lots happens late at night or very early in the morning. The Allies landed a half a million men on the French coast at Normandy during World War II, at 5 o’clock in the morning, and Adolph Hitler slept through it and his staff refused all requests to wake him because he had told them he did not want to be disturbed.
Captain Smith was asleep in his quarters when the Titanic hit the iceberg in the North Atlantic in 1911. They had to wake him up.
And Lindbergh landed in Paris while almost everybody in America slept, and everybody had to learn about it second-hand when they woke up in the morning in 1926. It was the night owls who got to jump up and down and clap and high five one another.
And consider prize fighters. They get knocked out by one punch and when they wake up they don’t even know what all the excitement had been about.
The gurus say live in the present, and be here now. Don’t sleep your life away. And what’s the big deal about sleep? Mostly it’s about being chased by a monster or trapped in a building or lost in a strange city you never even knew existed. So it’s not pleasant. They even have a word for it. Nightmares. And of course when you wake up, you realize it wasn’t even you. Sleep is very overrated.
And sleep is not safe. When you are asleep, somebody could come along and bash you in the head. That’s not the case when you are awake. When you are awake you can defend yourself. There’s a lot to be said about lying there just resting up and enjoying the experience — the rain on the windows, the dog on the floor besides your sofa thumping away scratching himself, the TV droning on and reporting right there on-the-spot that they’ve got a cure for cancer — and you absorbing it all as you recharge your batteries after a long day of doing things.
Beats the hell out of being asleep. And you get to live to be the equivalent of 100 by my calculations.
I need to write a whole book about this.
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