Among my friends, many of them complain of problems with sleep, either falling asleep or getting up after sleeping for a short while and then being stubbornly awake for long periods. Given that we are repeatedly told that people need to get about eight hours sleep a night and that lack of adequate sleep can lead to various adverse health issues, they worry about their lack of sleep and exchange the many different strategies that are out there to combat this problem. But these have various levels of success in that some techniques work for some and not for others, and the same technique that worked for a while may stop being effective. Older people and post-menopausal women seem to be more prone to lack of adequate sleep.

During these discussions, I remain quiet. This is because I have never had any problems with sleep and it seems insensitive to tell others this when they are clearly concerned about their problem. I have a regular night time routine and I usually fall asleep within a few minutes. Now that I am older I do get up about once a night but can go back to sleep fairly quickly, waking up at around 7:30 the next day. I then luxuriate in bed for about 30 minutes before getting up. I even usually take a nap during the day, which some sleep-deprived people are recommended to not do, and it does not affect my night time sleep. Neither does taking caffeine before bedtime. I also enjoy a brief liminal period after waking, where one drifts in and out of short periods of sleep.

While sleep experts recommend this kind of steady routine for everyone, I only started this after retirement. During my working life and when my children were little I had to get up earlier for work and to get them ready for school and my routine varied from day to day but I still did not have any trouble falling asleep at night.

Many working people, especially single parents, are sleep deprived through necessity because they are forced to work irregular hours or need to hold two or more jobs while taking care of families. But in some countries like the US and Japan, there is a cult of work that denigrates sleep even among people who need not deprive themselves of it. Going with very little sleep is seen as a badge of honor and boasted about as a sign of how hard-working one is. The new prime minister of Japan, the first woman to hold that post, has taken this to the extreme, reportedly sleeping just two hours a night.

Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, has said she gets by on just two to four hours sleep a night – prompting concern over her commitment to a better work-life balance among the country’s fatigued employees.

Pointing to the bags beneath her eyes, Takaichi told MPs that she survives on minimal sleep – a habit she shares with her political hero Margaret Thatcher – after being asked how she would tackle Japan’s notoriously long working hours.

Takaichi caused a stir last week after she summoned aides to her office for a 3am meeting to prepare for a budget committee hearing that was due to start six hours later, weeks after she celebrated becoming Japan’s first female leader by promising to “work, work, work, work and work”.

“I sleep about two hours now, four hours at the longest,” she told MPs at a legislative committee meeting this week. “It’s probably bad for my skin,”

Japan has struggled to change a corporate culture that expects employees to work long hours, and often socialise with colleagues in the evening.

Punishing hours have been blamed for a rise in karoshi, or death from overwork, and for making it harder for exhausted couples to do their bit to raise the country’s low birthrate.

I do suffer from a slight sense of guilt about my sleeping, though. It is not because I can sleep so easily while others can’t (since I do not tell them about it) but because it is drummed into us that anything more than the minimum amount of sleep is to be slothful, that we should be doing something productive during that time. Afternoon naps are seen as beyond the pale. So I was pleased to come across this article where the author seems to be just like me in really enjoying sleeping, saying that we should look on it as a delicious pleasure, not something to be furtive about.

But why do some of us love to sleep?

Years ago, one of my philosophy professors declared that sleeping was a waste of time, and that, if there were a pill that could make us skip sleeping, he would take it in a heartbeat. I responded: ‘But I love sleeping!’ He replied that, surely, what I loved must be the rest that sleep brings, but how could I love sleeping itself?! We are unconscious when we sleep, after all.
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If I’m unconscious, am I really enjoying anything at all? And if not, does that make sleep worthless? I’ve come to believe the opposite: sleep has a value that reaches far beyond health – it is woven into what makes a life feel rich, grounded and fully lived.
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There is also aesthetic pleasure in the moments before and after we fall asleep: several people have told me they deeply enjoy the sensation of slipping out of consciousness – that interstitial space between wakefulness and sleep, with its peculiar perceptual phenomena – the fleeting images, sounds and dreamlike fragments that appear in the moments just before sleep. Others revel in the aesthetic experience of waking up, of re-emerging into the world, such as opening one’s eyes to the familiar contours of a bedroom, appreciating the texture and warmth of a blanket, or smelling the coffee brewing in the pot.
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Sleeping’s underlying biological need is not a weakness to be remedied, or a limitation to overcome, but a fact of our nature that gives rise to valuable interpersonal and aesthetic activities and is also valuable in itself.

Sleep is often viewed as merely a way to recharge our bodies so that we can be more effective when we are awake, whether it is for work or other activities. The idea that sleep is pleasurable for its own sake seems somehow sinful. But there is no reason why we should view it that way. If you are lucky enough to be able to sleep easily and long, you should enjoy it and not feel guilty.