Sleep Always Wins

Sleep is such a funny thing. It’s constantly haunting you, but when it finally catches you – it heals.

I mean, think about hunger. If you don’t eat for a long time and you collapse from hunger, the next stage is hunger killing you. Same with thirst, or vitamin deficiency, or what have you. All these basic human needs kill you if you don’t get them.

But if you don’t get enough sleep and you collapse – the collapsing makes you better.

I mean, physically better. It might have done plenty of inconvenient damage to your life as you miss work or fall asleep at your cousin’s wedding or whatever, but your body is healing the very resource you didn’t give it.

Sleep is such a weird thing to think about. Food, I get. Machines require energy. Food is fuel. But what is it about the processes of regeneration and recuperation that require we be unconscious for them? Sure, you can’t run a marathon every day – but why the specific process of dropping into a wild hallucination combined with total obliviousness and vulnerability to predators?

Oh well. The body will take it when it wants it. Sleep always wins.