The effects of modest sleep deprivation, such as staying up for 24 hours, mar your cognitive ability as much as being intoxicated. You can go longer without food than without sleep. While the pleasure value of sleep varies, scientists still don’t understand physiologically why sleep is required for human life-but it evidently is. If sleep is necessary for survival or if a person finds it pleasurable, it’s not waste. Is sleep wasted time? Only to the extent it is avoidable and is not considered pleasurable. Over an 80-year life, sleeping nine hours out of every 24 means we’re asleep for a total of 30 years. The average person sleeps, or tries to sleep, about nine hours a day. Although we all individually choose to spend that time differently, let’s look at how we collectively use those hours and try to sort through how much of that time may be wasted.Ī logical place to start is with sleep, the activity that takes more of our time than any other. One of the great equalizing facts of life is that everyone on the planet has exactly 24 hours in a day. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing.” They didn’t call him Buzzkill Seneca for nothing. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. Two millennia ago Seneca penned, “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Four centuries ago, in William Shakespeare’s Richard II, the eponymous monarch utters the line “I wasted time and now doth time waste me.”īut even Shakespeare was late arriving on the wasted-time bandwagon. And we’ve worried about this for quite a while. Our fascination with time reflects how much we value it, and by extension how we want to avoid wasting it. The folks over at the Oxford English Dictionary say that the word “time” is the most commonly used noun in the English language, with the word “year” third, while “day” and “week” both make a showing in the top 20.
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