Work schedules that recognize the importance of sleep and the constraints of the human body can also save lives. This was clear after an explosion occurred in Texas City, a suburb of Houston with a four-mile stretch that comprises one of the largest industrial sites in the world. Metal towers and giant vats are laid out in a long rectangle that extends to the water’s edge. In early March of 2005, a visitor to the center of Texas City would have found a refinery owned and operated by BP, the British oil giant, with a capacity of processing 460,000 barrels a day—the third largest refinery of its kind in the United States. Later that month, liquid began backing up in a section of the plant that was used to manufacture highly explosive jet fuel. Three hours after the malfunction began, the level of liquid in one of the refinery’s towers was at least twenty times higher than it should have been. It suddenly exploded. Fifteen workers were killed instantly. Another 170 were injured.
Investigators on the scene identified a number of reasons for the large number of fatalities, including the lack of an early-warning system and poor management policies that often overlooked posted safety rules. But Moore-Ede saw something else when he searched through work logs at the plant. The men and women on duty that day in Texas City were exhausted. Some operators were working a twelve-hour shift for the thirtieth day in a row, leaving them so sleep deprived that their brains were unable to recognize the signs that they were nearing a major catastrophe.
The explosion in Texas City was the accident that changed how the world’s oil companies approach sleep. “The industry said, ‘We have to get ahead of this curve or we’ll get some government regulation on this issue that we’re not going to want to live with,’” Moore-Ede, who served as the group’s scientific advisor, told me. In 2010, the giant international oil companies agreed to install a fatigue management system at every major plant that will reduce mandatory overtime, train supervisors to recognize when an employee is close to nodding off, and give employees a chance to admit fatigue without worrying that they will lose their jobs. Moore-Ede predicts that fatigue management officers will soon be a common position in human relations departments at multinational corporations around the world. If that happens, it will be the latest in the long string of fallouts from Edison’s invention.
There is little chance that we will go back to the way our bodies are meant to approach sleep. Even those who argue that re-creating ancient life would solve many contemporary health problems draw the line at attempting to replicate the first and second sleep. One December day I spoke with Loren Cordain, a professor at Colorado State University. Cordain is widely acknowledged as one of the creators of what is known as the Paleo Diet. By eating like humans did before the development of agriculture, Cordain believes that we can evade health issues such as obesity, diabetes, and degenerative diseases. His diet consists of meat, seafood, and eggs, but no potatoes or grains that require cultivation. Cordain thinks that modern lifestyles are leading us to disease and discomfort, but he stops short of changing his sleep habits and reverting to a world without artificial light. “We’re not hunter-gatherers anymore,” he told me. “We could never duplicate that world. Nor would we want to. It’s an absolutely awful experience with disease and insects and snakebites. We are people living in the Western world under Western conditions.”
Of course, figuring out how to sleep in the Western world, lights or no lights, is no picnic. In the next chapter, you will meet the professor who found himself on the evening news after he said that men shouldn’t sleep in the same bed as their wives. Who knew that was all it took to make a sleep scientist famous?
3
Between the Sheets
The British Science Festival is a pretty big deal in the world of European scientists. An event held annually since 1831, except during times of war, the festival’s history includes the first use of the term dinosaur, the first demonstration of wireless transmission, and an important early debate on Darwinism. One week in late September of 2009, thousands of researchers left their labs and set off for Guildford, the town about thirty miles outside of London where the festival was held that year, to present their latest findings and to gossip about faculty openings. It wasn’t the type of event—like, say, the Oscars, or the Cannes International Film Festival—that tabloid editors circle on their calendars because they expect something big to happen. Yet the minute Neil Stanley opened his mouth, the humble gathering of doctorates transformed into international news.
The kicker was the scientific suggestion that sharing a bed with someone you care about is great for sex, but not much else. Stanley, a well-regarded sleep researcher at the University of Surrey whose gray-thinning hair hinted at his more than two decades in the field, told his listeners that he didn’t sleep in the same bed as his wife and that they should probably think about getting their own beds, too, if they knew what was good for them. As proof, he pointed to research he conducted with a colleague which showed that someone who shared a bed was 50 percent more likely to be disturbed during the night than a person who slept alone. “Sleep is a selfish thing to do,” he said. “No one can share your sleep.”
There just wasn’t enough room, for one thing. “You have up to nine inches less per person in a double bed than a child has in a single bed,” Stanley said, grounding his argument in the can’t-argue-with-this logic of ratios. “Add to this another person who kicks, punches, snores and gets up to go to the loo and is it any wonder that we are not getting a good night’s sleep?” He wasn’t against sex, he assured his audience—only the most literal interpretation of sleeping together. “We all know what it’s like to have a cuddle and then say, ‘I’m going to sleep now,’ and go to the opposite side of the bed. So why not just toddle off down the landing?”
Stanley then turned to the effects of all of those poor nights of sleep, charting a sad lineup of outcomes ranging from divorce to depression to heart disease. But there was hope, he said. Because sleep is as important as diet and exercise, maximizing our rest meant that we would be fitter, smarter, healthier—the sort of people, in short, we would want to share a cuddle with. “Isn’t it much better when someone tiptoes across the corridor for a snuggle because they want to, rather than snoring, farting and kicking all through the night?” Stanley wondered.
The suggestion was eminently practical, but a social grenade. Newspapers begged him to write opinion pieces. Psychologists and marriage counselors debated on television what sleeping in separate beds said about the state of a relationship. From the response to his talk, it was clear that Stanley was not the only one who had had enough of ongoing nocturnal battles over snoring, blankets, temperature control, lighting, and every compromise that comes with lying next to another person every night. He became famous for daring to say what many had always thought: even the most lovely person in the world can turn into an enemy taking up space on a mattress once sleep is at stake.
This is far from romantic. The average person in a relationship is inclined to sleep next to his or her partner regardless of the drawbacks, a phenomenon that shows up in studies of sleep quality. In a test conducted by one of Stanley’s colleagues, researchers monitored couples over several nights of sleep. Pairs were split up and sent to sleep in separate rooms for half of the test, and then allowed to come back to the shared mattress for the rest. When asked to rate their sleep quality when they woke up, subjects tended to say that they had a better night’s sleep on the nights when their partner was next to them. But their brain waves suggested otherwise. Data collected from the experiment found that subjects not only were less likely to wake up during the night but also spent almost thirty additional minutes in the deeper stages of sleep on nights when they had a room to themselves.
Here was a case where the heart seemed to conflict with the brain and the body. Despite the benefits of better-quality sleep when given their own rooms, subjects in the test consistently chose sleeping next to their partners. The question was, why? Was there something innately satisfying about sleeping next to s
omeone else that couldn’t be found on a chart of brain waves? Or was it simply habit?
The answer to that question is more complicated than it first appears, in part because of the ever-changing conceptions of what constitutes a healthy relationship. Beds, as you may not be surprised to learn, played a large part in the history of monogamy. Before the start of the Industrial Age, a mattress and its frame were often the most expensive purchases made in a lifetime, and for good reason. The common bed was where the most significant events of life happened: sex, births, illnesses, and death. The mattress—whether stuffed with feathers, straw, or sawdust—was where one came into the world and was the last stop on the ride out. Within a family, who slept on what easily corresponded to the everyday hierarchy of family life. Parents would get the most comfortable spot, often the family’s only mattress, while children made do with whatever soft materials they could find. The nightly ritual of sleep meant rounding everyone up, checking the room for rats and bugs, and blowing out a candle. Few had their own rooms, but sleeping indoors rather than outside was considered a small luxury. Those who could afford otherwise were limited to the aristocracy, a class that often chose to have separate sleeping quarters for marriage partners because few unions were based on love in the first place.
This began to change in the Victorian era, a time we now recognize as the start of the modern age in which old habits were rapidly shed and reconstituted into a new way of life. In England and elsewhere, science took on a new air of professionalism, and culture put an emphasis on progress. Cities expanded, owing to the benefits of industrialization, and the emerging middle class gained the means to emphasize cleanliness and sanitation in response to the grime of urban life.
Hygiene became paramount. Science had yet to accept that germs spread disease, but demonstrations in the power of electricity and radio waves hinted at the power of an unseen world. As a result, influential public health figures believed that sickness was caused by so-called bad air, a theory called miasma. Edwin Chadwick, who was eventually knighted for his part in directing the cleanup of the sewer system while he was sanitary commissioner of London, believed until his death that the source of cholera was stench alone. “All smell is disease,” he wrote.
Those theories soon filtered into the bedroom. “The home, far from being a simple haven of safety and calm to which those tossed on the turbulent seas of public life could retreat, was seen as a place of actual and potential danger,” noted Hilary Hinds, a professor at Lancaster University who has studied the era. In 1880, for example, a self-proclaimed British health expert known as Dr. Richardson spent thousands of words in his influential international bestseller Good Words on the subject of keeping a bedroom sanitary. He advised his readers that sleeping next to someone else was a potential death trap. “At some time or other the breath of one of the sleepers must, in some degree, affect the other; the breath is heavy, disagreeable, it may be so intolerable that in waking hours, when the senses are alive to it, it would be sickening, soon after a short exposure to it,” Richardson wrote. “Here in bed with the senses locked up, the disagreeable odour may not be realised, but assuredly because it is not detected it is not less injurious.” Sleep, in other words, was when your partner’s bad breath could strike just when your defenses were down. Richardson believed that “the system of having beds in which two persons can sleep is always, to some extent, unhealthy.”
If bad air wasn’t enough, there was also a brimming fear that a spouse could unwittingly steal his or her partner’s invisible electrical charges. The health concerns of sleeping next to another person captivated a doctor named R. B. D. Wells, whose chief specialty was phrenology—a soon-to-be-discarded pseudoscience which held that the size of the head determined a person’s intelligence and personality traits. Wells conceded that it was possible for couples to share a bed successfully, but those cases were rare. “Two healthy persons may sleep together without injury when they are of nearly equal age, but it is not well for young and old to sleep together,” he wrote. “Married couples, between whom there is a natural affinity, and when one sex is of a positive and the other of a negative nature, will be benefited by the magnetism reciprocally imparted; but, unhappily, such cases of connubial compatibility are not common.” Differing magnetic natures in a couple would inadvertently lead to the drainage of the “vital forces” from one partner throughout the night, a silent health threat that would leave the weakened party “fretful, peevish, fault-finding and discouraged.” The clashing of electrical forces each night, over a lifetime, would be irreversible. “No two persons, no matter who they are, should habitually sleep together. One will thrive and the other will lose.”
But there was a remedy—what Dr. Richardson called the “single-bed system,” or what we would now recognize as a twin bed. These slender mattresses, built for one, gave a reassuring sense of distance from a spouse whose electrical charges or breath may be suspect. Each member of the couple was in a cleaner, less polluted environment, giving both an advantage in the daily battle of survival that Darwin had recently made so clear. Other experts readily joined Richardson’s cause. “Such a thing even as a double bed should not exist,” admonished one of his contemporaries. The public was convinced. Middle-class customers flocked to the new beds and their iron frames (wood, after all, was a building material whose hygiene was also suspect).
Dr. Richardson’s solution proved so popular that even the eventual rejection of the miasma theory didn’t stop the march of the twin beds. They were no longer necessary if the body’s bad air alone was not the cause of disease, but they had other things going for them. For one, these beds evoked a certain modern sensibility and taste on the part of the buyer. Department stores ran ads aimed at middle-class shoppers that put twin beds squarely in the middle of chic bedrooms. The end of the sanitary craze allowed furniture stores to boast of new mattresses and frames that “combine[d] all the hygienic advantages of the metal, with the artistic possibilities of the wooden bedstead.”
But no discussion of beds was ever about furniture alone. Sex was always a consideration as well. And for many who had enough money to furnish their homes with more than function in mind, their approach to sex constituted a big part of who they were. “One distinctive characteristic of the emerging middle class was its emphasis on its unique sexual morality,” Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family history at Evergreen State College, told me. “They constructed their class identity on the basis of their moral rectitude, in contrast to the ‘immoral’ poor and the ‘debauched’ aristocracy. Their insistence on sexual reticence, even outright prudery, was much stronger than that of either the working classes or the very wealthy.” After all, she said, this was the same group that began referring to parts of a chicken as either light or dark meat rather than saying the words breasts or legs.
Sleeping on twin beds was one way to paper over the fact that husbands and wives eventually gave in to their basic biological urges. “There was a sense—and I actually remember this from my taking an oral history of my own grandmother—that there was something mildly disreputable about essentially advertising, even to your kids, that you might be having sex together,” Coontz said. That prudery and squeamishness lasted well into the 1940s and 1950s. Despite the fact that Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were actually married at the same time that they portrayed a fictional husband and wife on television, viewers of I Love Lucy saw them nearly every week sitting and talking in their separate twin beds. The only program at the time to show a married couple sharing a double bed was The Flintstones. And it featured a yapping pet dinosaur.
Movies weren’t much different. In 1934, every major film studio voluntarily agreed to a list of rules that became known as the Hays Code in honor of Will H. Hays, a Presbyterian elder and former postmaster general who took on the role of president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. Hays wanted films to be proper moral influences. And under Hollywood’s self-censorship, directors had to comply with his code
in order to have their movies distributed to theaters across America. When a scene called for a couple to occupy the same bed at once, at least one actor had to keep one foot on the floor at all times to guard against the dire threat of horizontality.
The Hays Code was officially abandoned by the late 1960s, but attitudes toward sex in marriage changed well before that. What seemed modern at the turn of the twentieth century simply felt outdated by the middle of it, in part because baby boomers saw twin beds as something out of their parents’ generation. Sex became recognized as not only an obvious part of marriage but also an important part of maintaining a healthy one. Freudian-influenced marriage counselors started worrying about “frigid” wives, and magazines and self-help manuals urged women to become receptive to their husband’s sexual needs. Sleeping apart began to be seen as either a sign of a marital problem or something that would eventually lead to one. If a couple wasn’t enjoying every moment together—even when those moments conflicted with something as prosaic as sleep—then something was amiss. The pendulum swung back to the shared bed, and for many it took better sleep along with it. “I have taken oral histories of women who mentioned that they had really wanted a separate bed, because their husband snored or thrashed about, but were afraid to ask for fear he would ‘take it wrong’ or just felt there was something wrong with them for not being able to adjust,” Coontz told me.
Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep Page 4
