- So, what happens if you try and live your life
without an alarm clock?
Well, I tried it and it didn't go well.
Yeah, I've missed the train.
Wahoo!
Make it make sense.
I'm sorry for all the meetings I'm about to miss.
And, if you're my boss, no, I didn't.
Everything's fine.
Don't fire me.
Thank you to MEL Science
for sponsoring a portion of this video.
(alarm clock beeping)
So, I hate alarm clocks.
In fact, I don't know anyone
who has a strong preference towards alarm clock,
but if you do, please get help.
What is wrong with you?
I've been thinking about alarm clocks recently
because it's the first sound that I hear every day.
And, it's a pretty influential one.
I mean, I just played the iPhone alarm for you
and for a lot of people,
that is gonna have a strong negative reaction.
And I hate that sound,
but, it seems like something that no one can live without.
Or can we?
So, my question is why does it be like that?
Does it have to be like that?
And, if it doesn't,
how else can it be like?
So, I started reading about sleep
and its relationship to society,
and I discovered something interesting
about our current sleep habits
and how they came to be.
It turns out that the notion of a good night's sleep
is more of a symptom of industrial capitalism
than it is a natural way of life.
In his book,
Matthew Wolf Meyer explores how sleep was organized
and crammed into the night.
- What is a good night's sleep
is weirdly a kind of controversial question.
That eight hours of nightly sleep
is really structured around our school days
and our work days,
so, in order to do all of the things that we need to do,
as productive members of society, right,
we organize our sleep
so that it's consolidated at night
with the industrial work day.
There's a real demand on shaping our experience of sleep
to meet those industrial needs.
- So, it turns out that industrial capitalism
fundamentally changed the way we organize our sleep.
While previously,
our sleep needs were fulfilled through a series of naps
and longer chunks of sleep at night,
the industrial revolution meant that workers had to work
from dawn to dusk, optimizing for daylight.
This meant that our sleep was crammed
into an uninterrupted period at night.
We would work and fulfill our responsibilities in the day
and arrive exhausted to our beds at dusk.
While improvements in workers' rights
have given us the nine to five,
our sleep habits remain an artifact of that reorganization.
That brings us to our experiment.
I'm gonna try and live my life without alarm clocks.
Basically, I'm gonna try and police my sleep
as little as possible.
I'm gonna let my body just straight vibe.
Live its best life.
Go to sleep for as long as it wants.
Wake up when it wants and see what happens.
Unfortunately, I do have a part-time job
and other responsibilities that I can't ignore,
which means I probably won't be able to nap in the day.
But, I think that not using alarms is a pretty good step
in not policing my sleep.
So, I think this week is gonna go pretty decently.
I think that, basically,
I'm gonna have some days where I'm gonna miss stuff
and that's gonna be stressful,
but, generally, I'm gonna get really good sleep
and I'm not gonna be tired, which will be really nice.
And, hopefully, that'll just reduce my stress in general.
And, yeah, I mean, I think it's gonna be a great week,
so, let's see what happens.
Hello.
It is currently 5:00 am,
and I have been awake multiple times throughout the night
because I'm worried that I'm going to oversleep.
So, I am sleeping really badly
because I'm allowed to sleep for as long as I want.
Make it make sense.
It's currently 10:47.
I've just woken up.
I've missed many things.
Amongst which was an Apple appointment to fix my phone
that took me a week to book.
I have 13 minutes before I have to be in a meeting.
This is gonna be a long week.
Hello!
It's 8:30 in the morning.
I slept like a baby
and I woke up naturally
and I missed nothing.
This is so good!
Wahoo!
I feel like Casey Neistat.
I am going to London today.
I'm gonna be taking this book.
It's called "The Politics of Sleep."
It was written by a lecturer at the university
that I just graduated from,
so, I'm hoping to learn a little bit more
about what happens when you don't police your sleep,
or something like that.
I don't really know yet.
I'm gonna read the book first.
All right, I got to catch my train now,
so, I'm gonna go.
Bye!
Today, I'm gonna be sleeping on this couch right here.
Thanks to my friend, Mr. Ali Abdaal,
who is very out of focus.
- You mean Dr. Ali Abdaal.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, Dr. Ali Abdaal.
Tomorrow, we are going to a YouTube thing.
We have to take the train very early.
So, potentially, we're gonna miss a bunch of stuff tomorrow.
So, I wrote Ali Abdaal into this.
But, for one day only.
(keyboards clacking)
Yeah.
Morning!
We have missed the train,
but, I don't think we're gonna miss anything too important.
Nice.
(gentle upbeat music)
Welcome to the hotel.
It is a hotel room.
I am now at the aforementioned YouTube event.
I am going to sleep in this bed.
But, what I'm truly finding out about this challenge
is it's really not as fun as I thought it was gonna be.
I thought I was gonna have a great week of sleeping in.
And now, what I'm realizing,
is it has been a week of terrible sleep
because I'm worried about missing stuff.
It is dark,
but, my phone is telling me that it is eight,
which is good, because I haven't missed anything,
but I feel very tired, even though I slept at about one.
So, I got a good seven hours of sleep,
but I am just exhausted.
I think all of these worries about, you know,
waking up on time and things like that,
that they're all sort of a symptom of,
there's a structural process
that's also policing my sleep, you know?
I have all of these consequences
that come with missing a bunch of stuff,
because they're scheduled in a way
that isn't sort of friendly
to everyone's natural body rhythm.
Hello.
So, contrary to popular belief,
and also what I thought was gonna happen,
I do need to wake up early tomorrow.
But, I feel more comfortable
and I have actually been waking up naturally
at appropriate times,
which I didn't usually do.
I feel better about it.
Hello.
It's super bright and I woke up in a panic.
Turns out it's 9:00 am,
and I miss my train.
(Taha grunting)
This is a very inside moment, I think.
Still wrong.
Okay, so this challenge just became,
Taha Gets Stressed Over His Own Sleep For A Week,
The Challenge.
I thought I was gonna be sleeping like a baby every night
and missing a couple of things in the morning,
but, it would be fine because I'd be so well rested.
What ended up actually happening
is that I ended up waking up multiple times a night
to check my phone
and check what the time was
'cause I really didn't wanna oversleep.
It meant that throughout the challenge,
I got way worse sleep than when I used alarm clocks.
The same factors that made me use an alarm clock
in the first place,
i.e. my workday and obligations to employment
and other things,
were the same factors that were keeping me up at night
when I wasn't using an alarm clock.
It was the fear and consequences of missing stuff
and not being punctual,
or missing an important meeting
that really screwed up the experiment for me.
The alarm clock was basically emblematic
of how much of my sleep was actually policed
by a wider societal pressures.
Okay, but it's not all bad,
because when I talked to an expert about sleep
and told him about my experiment,
it turns out that I was on the right track.
There's a similar experiment
that's sometimes used in sleep clinics.
So, before we talk about that,
let's talk about this video's sponsor, MEL Science.
MEL Science is a subscription service
that offers monthly science boxes
that have little experiments in them.
I've actually set up one right here
and I'm gonna try to do it in the middle of this ad read,
which is gonna be exciting.
The reason I'm excited to work with MEL Science
is because they're breaking the stereotype
that science has to be boring, difficult,
and only accessible to certain types of people.
And monthly subscription boxes make science interesting,
interactive, and accessible,
because science is all about exploration and discovery.
And, it's all about getting people to ask questions,
something that comes naturally to kids.
The subscription boxes
are designed to nurture kid's natural curiosity.
And they do that through interesting, engaging experiments
with serious and detailed explanations
of what's going on and the science behind it
combined with AR and VR technologies to dive deeper.
The monthly subscription boxes include 18 sets
of exciting experiments
with two to three of them arriving at your doorstep
every month.
When I was a kid,
there was a science festival every year in the city center
and me and my dad and my siblings used to go
and do all of the interactive experiments.
To this day, it's one of the funnest ways to learn science.
And, these little experiments, remind me of that experience
and kind of make me feel like a kid again.
So, I'm kinda excited to actually do this experiment,
which I'm gonna try and do right now.
Read the little booklet.
Ooh, look at that.
Look at that, guys, look at that.
Right, you're gonna miss it.
So, I got so distracted by the experiment
that I forgot to finish the ad read.
So, follow the link in the description
and use code Answer50 for 50% off your first box
of any of the monthly subscriptions.
That's half price on your first box
if you use code Answer50.
Thanks again to MEL Science
for sponsoring this segment of the video.
And now back to the rest of the video.
While my experiment was a disaster
in terms of not trying to police my sleep,
turns out I wasn't that far off.
- You know, one of the experiments
that they sometimes ask people in sleep clinics to do
is to just live without an alarm clock for two weeks
and keep track of how you're sleeping.
You kind of have to do it over vacation
so that you have no work or school obligations.
And then you can see, like,
how much sleep do you actually wanna get?
- Yeah, no, definitely.
I feel like, you know,
I tried to do the experiment
while trying to live my normal life
and it was a complete disaster
because, you know,
I would be going to sleep and, you know,
I'd be exhausted when I was going to sleep
and then I would sort of come out of a slumber in a panic,
and now I'm late for everything.
- The way to actually pull it off, right,
is to first kind of come to understand how you would sleep.
You know, how would you sleep in a 24-hour period
and over the course of a week,
if you could just sleep the way that you wanted to sleep.
And then, once you've got that schedule,
then, figure out when you could schedule everything else
so that you were waking up without the alarm clock
with enough time and work and do the things
that you need to do, right?
- Yeah, I mean,
I think that's the reason why my experiment really failed
was I didn't really get any data of what it'd be like
to sleep naturally.
All I got was the constraints of my life,
interrupting my sleep.
And it turns out, you know,
now that I'm using my alarm clock again,
the constraints in my life
have always been interrupting my sleep.
And so, yeah,
it's been a really sort of regulatory experience.
But I think there are even more ways
that our sleep has been affected by our work culture.
If we look at how sleep is talked about nowadays,
like the glamorization of sleep is so common.
I mean, I see it all the time
in terms of these hustle culture posts,
and, especially when I was at university,
people would talk about how little sleep they've got
because they were up working on essays
or revising for exams.
It seems like famous leaders and CEOs
are always glamorized about how little sleep they've got.
They're always grinding
and on this Sigma Grindset, go, go, go, you know?
Live a grind, don't stop.
Get it done!
Hustle! (grunting)
You know what I mean?
- Like you're saying, there's both a tendency
to kind of think about people's lack of sleep
and the ability to short themselves in sleep
in order to get stuff done
is something that's kind of admirable, right?
And there's the long list of historical figures,
not just Margaret Thatcher,
who talk about their lack of sleep, right?
- However, poor sleep is also given
the opposite association for service workers
and factory workers.
Yawning or appearing tired in front of customers
is seen as rude and unwelcoming.
And driving or working in warehouses while tired
can be seen as irresponsible and dangerous.
And, in some cases, it can make you liable
in the same way that drinking and driving can.
- So, you know, the other parallel you can think there
are truck drivers.
And, similarly, there are kinds of messages
from their employers that are like,
you need to get enough sleep.
You know, your decision-making is impaired
if you're not sleeping well.
And yet, you know,
they're paid in order to make deliveries
as quickly as they can possibly do it.
In some states in the U.S.,
there are what are called drowsy driving laws.
A lot like drunk driving laws,
if you're pulled over and you're impaired
because of lack of sleep,
there are penalties associated.
In some cases,
they can be even more strict than drunk driving.
- But it seems like the pandemic and remote work
has really woken people up to how valuable sleep
and napping is.
During the pandemic,
so much of the conversation around sleep and work
was about how nice it was to be able to work from home,
nap in the middle of the workday,
and generally be more attentive to people's sleep needs.
And, it seems like in the post-pandemic world,
there's been a lot of resistance
to returning back to the office.
Perhaps, one of the reasons
is the really unfriendly sleep schedules
that don't allow for naps
or sleep that reflects our body clocks.
- I will be interested in the context of,
like, post-pandemic world
to see how much employees advocate
for more ability to sleep in relationship to work, right?
So, whether it's flexible work hours
so that they can sleep in every once in a while,
or the ability to take naps at work.
There is way more attention to sleep
in the course of the pandemic
than there has been for awhile.
Like, the interruption has allowed people
to really think about what they need.
- Are you hopeful of this new sort of
post-pandemic sleep revolution
or this napping revolution
that we're potentially able to have?
- Am I hopeful about that post-pandemic sleep revolution?
I, in a very tempered way, I think,
it will kind of exacerbate
already existing inequities, right?
That there will be people
who will be able to have more flexible schedules
and be able to take naps and that kind of thing.
And then there will be everybody else
who doesn't have the same access, right?
There really needs to be
like, broad social support for it, right?
That's where my hope is really tempered,
right where it's like, capitalists are still capitalists,
so, at the end of the day,
so, unless they can really be convinced
that it's gonna make 'em more money in one way or another,
it's just not gonna happen.
- Okay, so, turns out that we live in a society.
Who knew?
And the way that society is structured,
isn't very friendly to our natural sleep needs.
It's actually quite brutal.
I mean, the afternoon slump is very real.
And if we had flexible work hours and the ability to nap,
we wouldn't have such a grueling work day.
It kinda seems impossible
to talk about structuring our lives
in a way that is friendly to sleep
without talking about our work lives.
And, while it seems like in the past,
many of the structural factors
that kept us in these grueling work days
couldn't really be changed,
due to the pandemic, remote work and workers' rights,
it seems like that could be changing.
We could be at the cusp of a napping revolution
where workers are allowed to nap during the workday
and have more flexible work hours
that fit with their health and sleep needs.
But, at the same time,
whenever there's a technological advancement
in the world of work to make us more productive,
that productivity is immediately used
to increase our output.
While remote work technologies
could make our work lives better
by encouraging napping during the workday,
and generally having a more flexible work-life,
it could also make them worse.
With the ability to work from anywhere,
it could also mean that we work from everywhere
and all of the time.
We could have our work lives
spill out into the rest of our whole life.
And that's something we're in danger of doing
if we don't really have these conversations around work,
sleep, and health.
To be honest,
I really didn't think this is where the video would end up,
but, here we are.
As people start to return to work,
I think it's important to have conversations
around what we want our work lives to look like,
particularly how it affects our sleep.
While I'm hopeful that some people will see work lives
that are kinder to their sleep,
I'm also not optimistic
that that will trickle down to everyone.
I think we might be seeing
a napping revolution for some people,
people who can work remotely
and are at companies that are receptive to that.
However, there's gonna be so many people
who have service jobs
or have jobs that require you to work unfriendly hours.
I think it's important for us to talk about sleep
when we have conversations around work, but who knows?
I'm just a dude making a YouTube video.
I did some research,
I chatted to an expert,
and I slept terribly for a week.
What do you think?
Let me know down in the comments below,
and if you like this type of video,
you can check out the playlist on screen right now.
We also have a free newsletter with bonuses
and a Patreon where you can support us.
Anyway, thank you for watching.
See you next time.
(gentle music)