Music & Sleep: What wind instruments can teach us about our sleep habits.
While sleep is crucial for the rejuvenation of our health each day, it’s obviously the quality of our rest that matters more than the length. So while the impractical notion of condensing 8 hours of sleep into 1 would be attractive for overachievers, there’s still a decent amount of wiggle room for us all to move the needle ever so slightly towards this end.
Depending upon who you are, you may not know that the sole purpose of a tuning slide on a brass instrument, or mouth piece on a wood wind instrument, is to simply get you within a range where you can comfortably blow your horn without having to overcompensate with your embouchure to keep a note in tune. However, the stronger your embouchure and air support is (think force of air against a door frame), the easier it’ll be to keep a note in tune, regardless of the number of mechanical defects a horn has. Case in point, when a friend of mine let me borrow his soprano sax years ago, I didn’t realize until I sat in on someone’s gig that the ENTIRE upper register of his horn was a ½ step flat! Luckily I figured it out quickly, and was able to adjust on the fly. But had I not had the strength of my embouchure to keep notes half way in tune, it would have turned out much worse.
Now as an advanced society, it’s clear that we’re always seeking ways to maximize our effectiveness without sacrificing sustainability. So just like a musician who has to toy around with figuring out where the sweet spot is between maximum sound and control of said sound, I also believe that we have to toy around with finding where the sweet spot is between the least number of hours we can afford to sleep without sacrificing our alertness throughout the day. Therefore, if the position of our tuning slides and mouth pieces are like the duration of our sleep, then our embouchure and air support would be analogous to the blood flow needed to function properly throughout the day. And having tested this theory on myself over the past 20 years, I have found that the results are still consistent, in that when I personally get 5 to 6 hours of sleep, coupled with my morning routine of:
1) Drink one bottle of water
2) Full body stretch (30 minutes)
3) 100 sit ups, 100 oblique crunches (both sides), 100 flutter kicks, 100 standing twists, 50 side leg raises (for lower back support), and 50 push ups.
I can still stay awake for the rest of the day, even if on a rare occasion it involves me getting as little as one hour of sleep over a 24+ hour stretch. That said, filling my nutritional gaps with supplements for the past 18 years has been critical to my ability to maintain this kind of pace. So again, while the amount of sleep you get just gets you within firing range for being functional on a given day, it’s ultimately a mixture of diet and exercise (blood flow) that will carry you through your day with the alertness you want.
Suggested Takeaways…
a) It’s not the amount of sleep you get, it’s the quality of sleep you get. So after you’ve ruled out that your nutrition, exercise, and bed are on point, it’ll become much easier to draw a bullseye around the number of hours you can realistically afford to get by on for your body to repair itself.
b) The number of hours you sleep are to your mouth piece or tuning slide position, what adequate blood flow and nutrition is to your embouchure and air support.
c) To dial in your exercise, nutrition, sleep, and bed situation is truly a forward failing proposition. But the number of insights you’ll learn along the way about yourself and why your tendencies are what they are, will yield dividends for years to come.