Live Life With No Regrets!

Quality. Quantity.

I was talking to with some classmates and mentioned that human beings are getting less sleep than 100 years ago when people normally slept 10 hours a day.

Someone then interjected, it's not the quantity of sleep but the quality that's important.

Yes, however, 6 hours of quality sleep is still insufficient for a human being. That's like 40% less sleep than usual.

That's like saying a person needs 8 glasses of water a day and someone saying it's not the quantity but the quality that's important. Whether you drink tap water or swiss alpine mineral water, you still need 8 glasses of water. You can survive on 6 or 4 glasses of water a day, but the consequences accumulate over your lifetime. You are less energetic, your metabolism slows down, toxins accumulate in your body, your body is less supple, and your body deteriorates more rapidly.

Getting less sleep means that your body may compensate with micro-sleep. 4-5 minutes of sleep during the day. Less concentration. Your mind is also focused at the end of the day to getting to bed or longing for rest. Slower responses.

In France, fatigue causes 1 in 3 accidents while drug/alcohol affected driving only causes 1 in 5! (link).

"Drivers averaging less than 7 hours of sleep per night increased their odds of being in a sleep-related crash versus a non-sleep related crash nearly 2-fold." Driving While Sleepy Should Be A Criminal Offense Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine

If you saw your friend intending to drink an extra 5 drinks in bar would you stop him? Yes. But if he said he is going to get 2 hours less sleep? Yet 1 drink on 6 hours of sleep is equivalent of 6 drinks on 8 hours of sleep. (link) Taking 3 drinks would already get you arrested for drunk driving!

Yet, workaholic societies like Singapore applaud "sacrificing sleep" as virtues rather than as liabilities.

Quantity does equate to quality in this instance.

The problem perhaps lies in our language. Because we have two different words to describe the benefit of an object, we think that they are separate issues.

Our language doesn't imply that there is an interconnection between issues. When we use language to analyze issues, in our "scientifically trained" education, we think that certain factors are independant of one another.

(The scientific method works by taking various conditions, changing one factor and leaving the others constant. Doing this on each element or method one-by-one, by process of elimination we can arrive at source of the problem/solution.)

What other clashes of words lead us to believe that they are independent of one another?

How about:

Humility and confidence.
Flexibility and consistency.
Simplicity and profoundness.
Meek and powerful.
Task oriented and people oriented.

Seemingly opposed words, yet true leaders and wise men know that in life both combine together.

I wonder really then, the language, words and grammar of angels. The language of humans need to evolve even further.