Your body and brain have more potential than your fragile conscious takes advantage of.  There I said it.  I hope we can still be friends now that I’ve gotten that off my chest.  It’s just been weighing on me.  Oh you want some explanation?  God you are so needy!

The average life expectancy in the United States of America is roughly 77 years.  Now if you subtract the time you spend sleeping, assuming you slept an average of 7 hours a night, you would be left with 54 waking years of your life.  Seems like a long enough time right?  Wrong.

When I was in undergrad I was told by professor Dr. Michael Turvey, an award winning neuro-scientist, that the brain has the capacity to store 10,000 years of memories.  He said that was a conservative number. And here we are, caught with our proverbial dicks in our hands, sleeping away 22 years of our lives.

Now we may never be able to reach our full potential of 10,000 years of memories, at least any time soon,   but we are still wasting a lot of what we have been given… literally on our backs.

I was thinking about this and it led me to believe that maybe Insomnia is some sort of evolutionary development we are not appreciating for what it’s worth.  We’re all acting like a bunch of modern day creationists scoffing right in the face of evolution.

Let’s think for a moment, what are insomniacs really missing out on by not sleeping/dreaming?

~Running really slow
~Falling like a feather
~Punching people like an arthritic geriatric woman with osteoporosis
~Waking up in the middle of the night to pee
~Clocks
~Morning wood
~The opportunity to blame your mid night flagrant fondling of your girlfriend on sleeping or as some call it “Midnight Molesting”
~Sheet wrinkles
~Nocturnal Emissions

While there may be a few positives in there, such as daily raging erections, I think we would be better off giving up on sleep.

We live in a culture that is in so many ways fighting the losing battle against the ever encroaching hand of death but when given something as precious as an additional 22 years of life to live, we simply sit on our hands?

There is something called “Polyphasic Sleeping”.  This method allows you to train your body to fall into REM sleep faster by sleeping in 20-30 minute naps every 4 hours and still gain the same rejuvenating effects of a typical night sleep. For those arithmetically inclined readers, that time totals about 3 hours of sleep every day.  That equates to reclaiming 13 years in a typical lifespan.  If someone appeared before you and told you you could add years to your life, what would you say?  Unless your have been listening to a lot of old Dashboard Confessional CDs, I’m assuming you would say “yes”.

I want to get a group of people together to test this idea in a social experiment.  If a group of people started doing this, what could they get done with those extra 61 days in a single year?  With the extra year they would get back every six years?

Today, I am 24 years old and I’ve acquired a lot of experience in my life.  Today at 24 years old, if I started using “Polyphasic Sleep”, I would be able to live an almost full typical lifespan of waking years.  For all intents and purposes I could live a full life starting today, as if I were born now in this moment. I could have a full life ahead of me.  Why aren’t we doing this?  We’ve grown sleep fat, consuming countless hours of sleep we don’t need, sleep obesity has become an epidemic.

Think about it.

You Are Sleep Fat!, 5.0 out of 5 based on 1 rating

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