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# Tom Allen: Pull an all-nighter? Ain’t happening.
- URL: https://www.richmonder.org/tom-allen-all-nighter/
- Published: 2026-09-24T23:31:55.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-24T23:31:55.000Z
- Description: If we’re doing it right, we spend about a third of our time on this planet asleep.
- Author: Tom Allen
- Tags: Voices of Richmonders

In a high school history class one day, our teacher explained how some prisoners of war have been badly treated by their captors and tortured by, among other things, sleep deprivation. 

I remember thinking that losing sleep didn’t really sound like torture to me and that if I ever got to pick the method by which I’d be tortured, I’d opt for that. Years later, we had kids and I gained a whole new respect for sleep deprivation. It is, most certainly, torture.

We had regular episodes of walking the halls in the wee hours, a bellowing infant in our arms, softly singing sweet lullabies whose lyrics prominently featured mild obscenities. (That wasn’t in any of the parenting books we read but, in those moments, presentation was paramount and we didn’t quibble about vocabulary.)

I complained loudly and often, usually to the offending child him or herself, and felt quite justified in doing so. And why not? If we’re doing it right, we spend about a third of our time on this planet asleep. We were, most definitely, *not* doing it right during those days – and while our kids are all now in their 30s, I still hold a bit of a grudge. I’m attempting to make up for this harmful deficit by taking frequent daily naps, which I attempt to sync with my phone conversations with our kids.

What follows are some important things I learned about how much we need sleep, from no less an authority than the Cleveland Clinic (CC), usually ranked among the top 5 hospitals in the world and holding the distinction of having done the “first near-total face transplant in the United States.” 

I learned this, obviously, on the internet, which also told me, quote: “One of our biggest sleep distractions is 24-hour internet access.” Well, I can’t remember ever being online for 24 hours, so this clearly is not one of my issues.

We are, according to CC, the only mammals that sometimes delay sleep on purpose. Now, I wholeheartedly support this policy if you’re, say, behind the wheel, but can see just about no other circumstances where this is necessary. And even driving is a bit suspect, as being awake for 16 hours straight decreases your performance as much as if you’d had enough to drink to make your blood alcohol level .05% (the legal limit in Virginia is .08%). I’ve shared the road with some drivers who would actually have been *better* at it if they were asleep.

Sea otters hold hands while sleeping to make sure they don’t get carried away from each other by currents, tsunamis, cyclones, killer whales, and the like. I may suggest this to my wife, Cathy, as I have awakened some mornings to find that she’s left the state. 

Further, not getting enough sleep could land me on the fast track to obesity. The CC says that less-than-proper sleep can make you hungry by lowering your levels of something called leptin, which it claims is an “appetite-regulating hormone.” My insatiable need for brownies seems to me now to be plainly the result of too many sleepless nights.

Another bit of possible advice from CC: It may be helpful to develop a reputation at work for being super-committed and super-productive. And then maybe move to Japan: Being asleep on the job there is sometimes seen as almost a badge of honor, viewed as legitimate exhaustion from working too hard. The occasional snoring coming from my office here in the U.S., however, did little to boost my career.

In the 1600s, apparently it was normal to sleep in two phases at night, reserving an hour or two in the middle for things like reading and socializing. This is likely why those people had a life expectancy of “maybe living shortly beyond their teen years before they intentionally contracted the bubonic plague.”

But enough from the medical experts. I’ll cast my lot with the real wisdom-dealers in this world: fiction writers. One of the most famous of them all, Ernest Hemingway, may have nailed the real value of shut-eye when he said, “I love sleep. My life has a tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?"

📝

Tom Allen previously wrote a "Faith and Values" column for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. He is the retired editor of the Virginia Journal of Education and the author of two books, "Grace Happens" and "Roll With It." Contact him at tomed1@hotmail.com.