4. We wake up before our devices do, and they “go to bed” before we do.
4
Waking and Sleeping
4. We wake up before our devices do, and they “go to bed” before we do.
If there is one thing that sums up the difference between human beings and our technological devices—and, just as importantly, between us and our Creator—it is this: we need sleep. Lots of sleep. We are meant to be still, quiet, unconscious, and vulnerable for roughly a third of every day, and more when we are young.
Devices do not need this kind of rest. While anything with moving parts requires periodic maintenance, and even fully electronic devices will eventually wear out and fail, most of our technology can function for days, months, or even years without anything like sleep.
But we are not devices; we are persons. And while we are made in the image of God, in this respect we are not like God at all. God “never slumbers or sleeps” (Ps. 121:4 NLT) but is continually present and available to all creation. God’s unsleeping care is good news: we sleepy creatures can trust that our needs will be provided for while we can do nothing on our own behalf.
Why exactly sleep is so fundamental is still largely a mystery. But we know that at least part of the puzzle is our brains’ need to maintain the complex and delicate neural connections that allow us to build memory and skill. While we are apparently dead to the world, our brains are in fact buzzing with activity, recording memories, consolidating what we’ve learned and experienced, and cleaning up the biochemical residue of each day. It is not just visual or verbal memories that are encoded during these nightly sessions but physical ones as well. Athletic and musical skill, which require sophisticated neuromuscular coordination, advance dramatically with a good night’s sleep. Sleep seems, in a strange way, to be where the learning required to be accomplished human beings actually happens. It is the way our bodies deal with the immense complexity and demands of growth of all kinds—intellectual, physical, emotional, and even spiritual. Heart, mind, soul, and strength all are nurtured while we sleep.1
And thus sleep is absolutely essential to human flourishing. Depriving someone entirely of sleep is one of the cruelest forms of torture and leads rapidly to physical, mental, and emotional breakdown. Even simply fighting off our own bodies’ urge to fully rest for a few nights incurs what psychologists call “sleep debt.” Sleep debt cannot be written off or powered through—it eventually must be repaid, and while it remains outstanding, it has dramatic effects on our cognitive and physical capacities.
Perhaps all this is in the background of the ancient Jewish and Near Eastern practice of considering sunset the start of the day, instead of sunrise. The Jewish people’s psalms included this heartening admonition: “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives sleep to his beloved” (Ps. 127:2). A Jewish day begins in the quietness of dusk, sharing the evening meal as the world settles in to rest, lying down to practice the “quietness and confidence” that Isaiah said was the source of true strength (Isa. 30:15 NLT). And then in the morning (neither anxiously early nor slothfully late) we rise to our work. Rather than resting to recover from a hard day’s work, this way of seeing time suggests that we work out of the abundance of a good night’s rest.
Bright Nights
Providing an environment for sleep—a place where we can rest, ideally undisturbed and unafraid—is one of the most basic functions of home. Work, meals, entertainment, social life—all these can happen outside our home. But almost all of us settle into our own beds at night (and those of us who travel rarely sleep as well anywhere else).
One of the early and most demanding tasks of parenting is helping children sleep, beginning with the rocking, walking, singing, and even vacuuming (the only thing that worked for my own parents when I was an infant!) that help calm babies who haven’t yet learned to calm themselves. For many years to come, parents settle down next to their children’s beds, reading stories or saying prayers or singing lullabies. And then we turn to our own beds. Some nights we collapse quickly in exhaustion (especially in the early, sleep-deprived days of parenthood); other nights we try to quiet our own rehearsing of the day that is past and anxieties about the day to come.
But nothing about our lives at home has been so thoroughly disrupted by technology as sleep. The disruption began with the first wave of technology, widespread electrification that allowed lights to burn steadily and brightly in our homes well after it was dark. The expression “burning the midnight oil” comes from a pretechnological time when keeping a lamp lit was a costly and unusual practice. Even with a lamp lit, earlier generations would be prepared consciously and unconsciously for bed and rest, with the circle of light reduced to a small space in the wider darkness. But now, a flip of a switch allows us to flood our homes with light.
Like almost all technology, illumination on demand—with technology’s signature qualities, easy and everywhere—is in many ways a gift. But it is also a powerful nudge in the wrong direction, and as a result many of us are chronically deprived of sleep and its benefits. And the problem is compounded by the portable communication devices—laptops, tablets, and above all cell phones—which are now within reach day and night.
It may also turn out to be true, as some studies seem to show, that the bright blue light given off by most device screens is especially bad for sleep, fooling our bodies into thinking that it is still daylight.2 (I use third-party programs like f.lux and Apple’s own settings to make sure my devices glow yellow rather than blue at night.) Either way, screens also interrupt our sleep by bringing before us the constant stream of entertainment, titillation, communication, and demands of our daytime lives.
Bedtime Rituals
What is usually the last thing you do before bedtime?
n = 1,021 US parents of children ages 4 to 17; due to rounding, numbers do not add up to 100
The problem is especially acute for the emerging generation—our kids—who depend on messaging apps for most social engagement. The messages stream in day and night and deep into the wee hours of the morning. (Somebody liked my Instagram photo! I have a message from a friend! Someone commented on my post! I was added to a group text!) These messages are full of the positive reinforcement we all crave, whatever our age, and the social signals of disapproval and shame we all fear.
The nighttime bedroom also lends itself to disinhibition and foolish choices—such as consuming images with sexual content and, disturbingly often for teens, especially teen girls, making those images for the satisfaction of others. (Even the most robust internet filter on a home network or a child’s phone does nothing to filter pictures sent via messaging applications.) In person and with a good night’s sleep, almost all of us would be far more careful with our own bodies and would exercise better judgment over the flights of our own imaginations than we do late at night. Fatigue and isolation compound our immaturity and susceptibility to temptation—especially for teenagers but also for adults. (This is why it’s so alarming that more than eight in ten parents say their teenagers have their phones with them when they sleep; among the parents themselves, seven in ten sleep with their phones next to the bed.)3
And even at their best, social media, like all media, substitute distant relationships for close ones. A fifteen-year-old overcome by anxiety late at night might once have had no choice but to turn to her parents, down the hall from her bedroom, for help and counsel. Now she can send out a blizzard of text messages to friends who, completely understandably, feel obligated to respond—and feel gratified by the sense of being needed by a friend. But this text- and emoji-mediated social support is thin, an echo chamber of teenagers with their limited perspective. It keeps a whole circle of friends awake late into the night and robs that fifteen-year-old and her parents (or even older siblings) of an in-person conversation, one that could be painful, challenging, reassuring, or even transformative.
Under the covers, as alerts light up the night, anxieties and fantasies are fed as often as they are allayed—for parents as much as children. And we lose out on what we were really made for: the deep rest that would make us more cognitively, emotionally, physically, and spiritually fit for the challenges the next day will bring. The lilies of the field close up their blooms at night and rest patiently for the next day, but we, cloaked in ghostly light, make tomorrow’s troubles today’s and tonight’s instead. The devices we carry to bed to make us feel connected and safe actually prevent us from trusting in the One who knows our needs and who alone can protect us through the dangers and sorrows of any night.
Sweet Dreams, Little Smartphone
So, we need a simple discipline: our devices should “go to bed” before we do. And to add a nudge to that discipline, it’s by far the best if their “bedroom” is as far from ours as possible. It may be that one adult, at least, needs a phone nearby at night in case of emergency, but most children and teenagers (and, um, dads) lack the self-discipline to turn their smartphones to “Do Not Disturb” and put them facedown on the bedside table for a solid eight or nine hours.
So find a central place in the home, far from the bedrooms, and park the screens there before bedtime. (All this applies, a thousand times over, to the glowing overstimulation of television—surely the single least helpful thing, short of a jackhammer, you could ever put in a place where someone is trying to fall asleep. In fact, most television programming, designed to catch and keep the attention of a distracted public, is the visual equivalent of a jackhammer.) Buy a cheap alarm clock so you don’t have to rely on a smartphone to wake you up. Sleep specialists widely recommend that, once night comes, the bedroom should be reserved for just one thing: sleep (and, for the parents, romance). Make it so.
In the interval between putting the devices to bed and laying your own head on the pillow, spend a few minutes in the darkening quiet talking, praying, or reading by the calming reflected light from a page.
And then, in the morning, rather than rolling over to check for whatever flotsam and jetsam arrived in the night, get up and do something—anything—before plugging in. Stretch. Shower. Open the front door for a moment and breathe the morning’s air, humid or frigid as it may be. Make coffee or tea and wait for the brew to finish. There is something for you to discover in these moments just after waking that you will never know if you rush past it—an almost-forgotten dream, a secret fear, a spark of something creative. You’ll have the rest of the day tethered to the impatient wider world; let that wait a moment. Give your devices one more minute in their “beds.” Practice the grateful breath of someone who slept and awakened, given the gift of one more day.
The Morning Routine
Do you do any of these things within the first hour of the morning on a typical weekday?
Select all that apply.
n = 1,021 US parents of children ages 4 to 17
Which of the following do you do on a device in the morning?
(% among those who spend time on electronic devices in the morning)
n = 927 US parents of children ages 4 to 17
You slept and allowed God to be enough. Now, for at least a moment, wake and be still, letting him be enough for this day. Then you can say good morning to whatever the day brings.
Crouch Family
Reality Check
We’ve been wildly inconsistent here. Our attempts to enforce the common bedtime (and “bedroom”) for devices have been met with stubborn resistance from our teenagers. And it’s easy for the parents to carry our little screens with us up to bed, letting them entertain us during the routine of flossing and brushing and face washing. Our children swear they set their devices on “Do Not Disturb” and sleep undisturbed—maybe they are even telling us the truth.
As for the mornings—oh, how far many of my mornings are from the best kind of beginning to the day. I scroll through notifications while the tea is still brewing. Before I’ve even fully woken up, I submit myself to whatever random acts of outrage have been catalogued and stored up for me overnight. Catherine and our kids are better at this than I am, less likely to download a full day’s worth of detritus before the day has even started.
So this chapter is one that the Crouches are far from fulfilling. But I happen to have friends who keep every single word of this chapter as a married couple and as a family, after some harrowing encounters with the dangers of constant access to screens and all their temptations. Their devices sleep long and do so far from their beds. They are the sanest people I know—far saner and healthier than we are. We need what they have.