On Sleep Quotes

“It's been a long path to sleep recovery, including many short-lived 'fail-safe' soporifics like reading economics textbooks before bed, burning incense, wearing ear plugs and eye masks, installing block-out blinds and buying 'not-too-warm-but-not-too-cool' bedding. A daily dose of melatonin helps. But most critically, it's her realisation that no one can be 'on' all the time. 'Don't complain if you can't sleep' is no longer a career-ending threat. She's managing the hours, but now it's her heart that's calling the shots.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“My mum, her sister and my late grandmother were all nurses. Until fairly recently, nursing was one of the few occupations available to bright Australian women of modest means. Conditioned by years of night duty, sleep - and lack of sleep - was a constant topic of family conversation.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Alcohol, the drug of choice in professional life, puts us to sleep, but then we wake and can't get back to sleep. 'Do you take a nip of whisky or not? Or do you put up with it? There are penalty clauses to all of these sleep-inducers,' [Former Australian Greens Leader Bob Brown] says. I knew this from medical school. It turns on you in the middle of the night.'”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“For insomniacs, social media is a lifeline, a connection to the rest of the world during those solitary hours of non-sleep. Switching off? Hell, no.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“[Former Australian Greens Leader] Bob Brown, who spent much of his political life lying awake at night worrying about the ecological destruction of the planet, immediately leaps on the idea of 'curing sleep'. 'We are going into terrifying technologies which define our role as human beings on a beautiful finite planet and as far as we know is the only one that has got anything like us,' he says. 'We are in an age of unbridled technology for profit, and as people are spendin billions of dollars to avoid looking old, we'll have people spending billions of dollars if an answer comes along to avoid sleeping.' We are mortal beings with natural fears about existence and mortality. Sleep, he says, is part of that mortality and of being human. Sleep should be honoured, just as we should respect that we live and then we die. 'It's a little bit like winter; it's a grounding period for the exuberance of life which follows. The next round.' he says.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Back in Australia, the idea that the natural process of sleep could soon be tweaked, controlled or eliminated by technology seems ludicrous. [Former Prime Minister John Howard] chuckles when I ask whether democracy is up to the job of protecting our sleep. 'That really intrigues me. Imagine par-ing every hole at golf,' he says of the idea that we might be able to download new skills in our sleep. 'I'm sure democracy will find a way of handling that.'”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“[US futurist and trans-humanism advocate Zoltan Istvan] argues libertarian science advocates are needed in today's political environment, warning that technology-centric risk-takers are required as a reaction against the rise of ultra-conservative religious ideologies that threaten to stifle not just advances in AI, driverless cars, stem cell research, drones and genetic editing, but also immigration, women's rights and the environment.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“[US futurist and trans-humanism advocate Zoltan Istvan] argues libertarian cience advocates are needed in today's political environment, warning that technology-centric risk-takers are required as a reaction against the rise of ultra-conservative religious ideologies that threaten to stifle not just advances in AI, driverless cars, stem cell research, drones and genetic editing, but also immigration, women's rights and the environment. (p.112-3)”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“A really fun thing to do at 3 a.m. is to google 'the future of sleep' for a glimpse into the dystopian future awaiting us. Sheer horror will keep you awake, but at least you'll be prepared for the revolution when we are all transformed into mindless cyborgs who never sleep.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Some, like [Former Australian Greens Leader] Bob Brown, favour a greater overhaul of the political system, restricting sitting days to normal business hours, and compressing sitting weeks iinto longer blocks of time, allowing parliamentarians and their staff longer uninterrupted periods back in the electorate and at home with family. 'I think it would be better to have four or five full days a week and hav ethe evenings off - all of them,' Brown says. 'If peopel want to, they can have their party-room meetings and inevitable discussions after, but earlier, and have more sleep time at night.'”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“As a GP and former parliamentarian, [Former Australian Greens Leader Bob Brown]'s seen the costs of trying to artificially bring on that most basic of human functions. Brown was famously on duty at London's St Mary Abbot's Hospital on 18 September 1970 when Jimi Hendrix, aged twenty-seven, was brought in having died in his sleep after a cocktail of red wine and sleeping pills.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“[Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard] would not schedule any Cabinet meetings in the evening because he'd previously observed as a minister that any meeting after dinner and a couple of glasses of wine was an 'inefficient use of time'. ... Predictable? Most of the time, yes. But in Howard's view, a regular timetable was also a courtesy, as much for other people's benefit as his own. For his security detail, younger men and women who often had children. For his staff, who regularly had to be reminded to take a lunchbreak. And also for his ministers, obliged to attend endless public functions.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Over the years, putting his [former Australian Greens leader, Bob Brown] anxieties down on paper, and later on iPad, has helped put his sleep worries into context: the absurdity of worrying about the impact of one night without sleep on his performance in the day. On this particular night, 'It made me think about it, about people in the world with much worse situations for whatever reason, who can't sleep', he says. 'And in a way, how absurd, how silly it is that we find ourselves unable to sleep over some immediate discomfort ... [over] anxiety to perform, but that's how it is'.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Unable to sleep and in despair, [former Australian Greens Leader Bob Brown] reflected on previous generations who had lain awake at the witching hour - the soldiers in trenches, the women in the pains of childbirth. He chastises himself for lying awake worrying about being tired the next day, for being anxious about his ability to perform in a maiden speech.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Our smart devices can know more about the quality of our sleep than the people who share our beds.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Our sleeping hours are our most vulnerable time. Mouths open, drool spilling, involuntary farting, eyeballs darting under eyelids in the most disconcerting way. Then there's snoring. The horn blast of an ocean liner is nothing compared with me. Our sleeping selves are the opposite of what we wish people to see. Stay awake and stay in control.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“We expect our politicians and public figures to be just like us; that is, until they admit to being tired, run-down or - the very worst - bored. Perhaps it's a reflection of our nation's tall poppy syndrome, or maybe we simply want those who represent us to represent only the very best of us, not our day-to-day selves who also get tired or sick or cranky. None of us is perfect, but our representatives must be perfection personified: of unwavering good judgement and with a superhuman body and mind. They must also be capable of perfect restorative sleep, except when we demand them to work for us around the clock.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“So, in [former Australian Prime Minister] Rudd's words, the process is first to engage with the person who done you wrong, second to set the record straight, third to forgive, and then fourth to stick it in the Forgettory. If you don't, then all you are left with is 'a bucket of simmering hatreds' that stop you getting to sleep, he says.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“So how do we ease our subconscious mind, which inconveniently revives our old regrets, past grievances and midnight 'staircase wit'? "I think there is a discipline about going to sleep and I don't know if it works more generally for people, but for me, it's got two parts to it," [former Australian Prime Minister] Rudd says. The first is to distinguish the things you can and cannot control, to reconcile them and hopefully stop your mind returning automatically to those things that are, as Rudd says, "outside your purchase".”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“There's a lovely French phase to describe the regret of not saying the right thing at the right time: l'esprit de l'escalier - 'staircase wit', thinking of the reply too late, when we are already halfway down or up the staircase.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Humans tend to be beasts who favour biphasic sleep patterns: a long sleep of five to seven hours at night, followed by a fifteen-ninety-minute nap in the afternoon. By economic necessity, we've evolved to be monophasic - sleeping a long stretch at night, followed by a quick trip to the chocolate bar-vending machine at 3 p.m. in lieu of an afternoon nap.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“In the 1960s, a major study on the early indicators of cancer also found that adults were getting an average of 8.5 hours' sleep. Today, the average sleep for a working adult is 6.8 hours. ... We've become a society of the chronically overtired. So tired, we don't realise we're mentally impaired. So tired that we don't recognise risky decisions. So tired that we don't notice unethical behaviour in others or ourselves. So exhausted that we don't even realise there's a moral question in front of us.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Now let's consider the impact of sleep deprivation on our ability to distinguish right from wrong. A study of people in a raffle ticket competition found participants were more likely to cheat if they'd had as little as twenty-two minutes' less sleep than normal. Another study found we're less likely to search the internet for ethics-related queries the day we shift our clocks forward to daylight-saving time. Other studies found tired people are less likely to notice unethical behaviour in others, or even to recognise in the first place whether there is a moral or ethical question at stake.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“It turns out that about 3 per cent of the human population need on average two hours' less sleep a night than the rest of us. Let's call them the super-awake. And another 3 per cent of the population are the super-sleepers, who need an extra two hours' sleep to function normally. And the average person? We need about seven to nine hours a night to be at our superhero best.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Yet we need our elected representatives to remain connected to our everyday rhythms - of waking in the pale dawn to gently prod our children awake, the morning commute, the early evening conflict of a trip to the gym versus a wine or two, a late-night work email check, or the start of the late shift on a second job. Until technology intervenes to 'cure' our need for sleep, this is our life in the twenty-first century.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Parliament is the most visible and exaggerated example of how our societyis changing. It illustrates the blurring of our daytime work hours into night, the impact of technology on the 24/7 media cycle, and the slow twisting and shaping of our biological sleep patterns to fit our modern lives. In a democracy, parliament is our society's last line of defence, safeguarding our wellbeing, our pursuit of happiness. In some far-off future, it may be our democracy that decides what it means to be human.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Sleep is the most unambitious of pursuits.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep