I’m a cognitive neuroscientist in the department of Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine. I would like to tell you a personal story that illustrates both the central theme of my research, which is to understand the importance of sleep, and one of the critical health problems that we face in our culture today, namely that medical science is in “sleep denial”.

When my son was one year old he had emergency brain surgery to fix an arachnoid cyst at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA). I am very grateful to the staff, nurses, and doctors who expertly discovered and then mended this major obstruction in my son’s development. They saved his life, and today he is a happy healthy kid. I remember the moment he emerged from the operating room and the brain surgeon gave us the thumbs up, I felt such a crashing wave of relief realizing we had somehow survived a horrible disaster.

My story really begins when he was admitted to the ICU and later to the regular wards due to a secondary meningitis infection. But this isn’t a story about his harrowing baby bravery, or my mama bear bedside vigilance, or the crippling medical costs that took one year of patient negotiation between my then-husband, Will, and the insurance company to pay. Despite the excellent treatment we experienced at CHLA in all other areas, I’m going to describe the hospital’s complete and total disregard for my child’s sleep and the institutionalized denial of this most vital, natural healing resource that is completely free of charge, more powerful than many remedies that come in a pill, but bafflingly ignored by medical science.

During my one month stint as a Children’s Hospital parent, I learned that hospital sleep blockers can be categorized into three groups: 1) noise polluters, encompassing all the beeping and hissing medical monitors in every hospital room; 2) light polluters, including the non-adjustable, unvarying light levels during the day and night; and 3) sleep ignorance, evinced by the casual indifference for my son’s nap and nighttime sleep schedule by doctors, nurses and hospital staff.

Let’s start with the noise polluters. During our four-night vigil in the ICU, my baby was wired to the hilt with medical recording devices strapped, taped, and plunged into every possible orifice or patch of naked skin. This made sense, since he and the other unfortunate kids on the ward were recovering from trauma and this all-hands-on-deck effort includes checking vitals every four hours at least. What doesn’t make sense, however, was that all these wires were connected to stand alone monitors that surrounded his crib with bright, flashing lights and constant boisterous beeping.

The beeps fell into two categories. The first was a systematic, high-pitched, moderately loud tone alerting the reluctant listener that everything was A-OK. Thanks, pal. The second alarm would occasionally pierce the atmosphere so robustly that anyone within a distant radius would feel the hairs stand up on the backs of their necks as their fight-or-flight autonomic nervous system was put on guard. This tone informed the listener that something was drastically wrong with one of the vitals or alternatively that the medicine pump was just empty. Same alarm, different meaning, no rest.

As I sat staring at this feisty little honey-badger-of-a-baby for four long days, I asked myself time and again the same questions: Why were either of these alarms designed to ring inside his room, instead of at the nurse’s station? What could my son possibly do with this information? How did it benefit him that every time he began to relax his seriously injured brain into sleep, he would be jolted awake by an auditory intrusion?

Of course, these alarms are not meant for the patient or caretaker, but for his nurse sitting at his station a considerable distance away with a closed door between himself and the demanding calls. Perhaps the nurse’s station was equipped with other flashing lights and annoying beeps that kept him abreast of my son’s condition, but it appeared to me that the nurse only responded when the alarm volume in our room was turned up to 11, Spinal Tap style. After much trial and error, Will and I figured out which secret code of buttons allowed us to hack the system in order to turn down the volume control and then physically go get the nurse when neededd. But, these devices have no mute, so we could never get rid of the sound completely, and hence nobody ever really got any sleep or rest.

The second sleep antagonist pervasive in the hospital setting is light pollution. Your body and mind follow biological rhythms that are regulated by light. The presence of light, blue light specifically, sends signals to your brain to rev up the sympathetic nervous system, increase the stress hormone cortisol to boost arousal, go out in the world and forage for food, learn something new, meet a possible friend or foe, defend yourself and your cave mates, and possibly, buy a new car. All these Upstate activities make life exciting and meaningful, but they also drain your batteries. To stay balanced, you need an equal and opposite force of rest and restoration that happens in periods called Downstates. While the dawn and high noon sunshine radiates alerting blue light, the evening sunset is a natural bath of fiery red and orange, similarly the warm glow of fire light by candle or campfire. Even old-fashioned tungsten light bulbs emit warm, long wavelength light that mirror fire light and don’t mess with your biological rhythm. These evening colors shift your mind and body to the low power mode of the Downstate when your autonomic nervous system amplifies rest-and-digest RESTORE functions that calm down your cardiovascular and metabolic systems, clean out the toxins that build up from a day of activity, initiate the consolidation and integration of your recent experiences into long-term memories, and promote dreams that help solve your most creative quandaries.

I’m a cognitive neuroscientist in the department of Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine. I would like to tell you a personal story that illustrates both the central theme of my research, which is to understand the importance of sleep, and one of the critical health problems that we face in our culture today, namely that medical science is in “sleep denial”.

When my son was one year old he had emergency brain surgery to fix an arachnoid cyst at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA). I am very grateful to the staff, nurses, and doctors who expertly discovered and then mended this major obstruction in my son’s development. They saved his life, and today he is a happy healthy kid. I remember the moment he emerged from the operating room and the brain surgeon gave us the thumbs up, I felt such a crashing wave of relief realizing we had somehow survived a horrible disaster.

My story really begins when he was admitted to the ICU and later to the regular wards due to a secondary meningitis infection. But this isn’t a story about his harrowing baby bravery, or my mama bear bedside vigilance, or the crippling medical costs that took one year of patient negotiation between my then-husband, Will, and the insurance company to pay. Despite the excellent treatment we experienced at CHLA in all other areas, I’m going to describe the hospital’s complete and total disregard for my child’s sleep and the institutionalized denial of this most vital, natural healing resource that is completely free of charge, more powerful than many remedies that come in a pill, but bafflingly ignored by medical science.

During my one month stint as a Children’s Hospital parent, I learned that hospital sleep blockers can be categorized into three groups: 1) noise polluters, encompassing all the beeping and hissing medical monitors in every hospital room; 2) light polluters, including the non-adjustable, unvarying light levels during the day and night; and 3) sleep ignorance, evinced by the casual indifference for my son’s nap and nighttime sleep schedule by doctors, nurses and hospital staff.

Let’s start with the noise polluters. During our four-night vigil in the ICU, my baby was wired to the hilt with medical recording devices strapped, taped, and plunged into every possible orifice or patch of naked skin. This made sense, since he and the other unfortunate kids on the ward were recovering from trauma and this all-hands-on-deck effort includes checking vitals every four hours at least. What doesn’t make sense, however, was that all these wires were connected to stand alone monitors that surrounded his crib with bright, flashing lights and constant boisterous beeping.

The beeps fell into two categories. The first was a systematic, high-pitched, moderately loud tone alerting the reluctant listener that everything was A-OK. Thanks, pal. The second alarm would occasionally pierce the atmosphere so robustly that anyone within a distant radius would feel the hairs stand up on the backs of their necks as their fight-or-flight autonomic nervous system was put on guard. This tone informed the listener that something was drastically wrong with one of the vitals or alternatively that the medicine pump was just empty. Same alarm, different meaning, no rest.

As I sat staring at this feisty little honey-badger-of-a-baby for four long days, I asked myself time and again the same questions: Why were either of these alarms designed to ring inside his room, instead of at the nurse’s station? What could my son possibly do with this information? How did it benefit him that every time he began to relax his seriously injured brain into sleep, he would be jolted awake by an auditory intrusion?

Of course, these alarms are not meant for the patient or caretaker, but for his nurse sitting at his station a considerable distance away with a closed door between himself and the demanding calls. Perhaps the nurse’s station was equipped with other flashing lights and annoying beeps that kept him abreast of my son’s condition, but it appeared to me that the nurse only responded when the alarm volume in our room was turned up to 11, Spinal Tap style. After much trial and error, Will and I figured out which secret code of buttons allowed us to hack the system in order to turn down the volume control and then physically go get the nurse when neededd. But, these devices have no mute, so we could never get rid of the sound completely, and hence nobody ever really got any sleep or rest.

The second sleep antagonist pervasive in the hospital setting is light pollution. Your body and mind follow biological rhythms that are regulated by light. The presence of light, blue light specifically, sends signals to your brain to rev up the sympathetic nervous system, increase the stress hormone cortisol to boost arousal, go out in the world and forage for food, learn something new, meet a possible friend or foe, defend yourself and your cave mates, and possibly, buy a new car. All these Upstate activities make life exciting and meaningful, but they also drain your batteries. To stay balanced, you need an equal and opposite force of rest and restoration that happens in periods called Downstates. While the dawn and high noon sunshine radiates alerting blue light, the evening sunset is a natural bath of fiery red and orange, similarly the warm glow of fire light by candle or campfire. Even old-fashioned tungsten light bulbs emit warm, long wavelength light that mirror fire light and don’t mess with your biological rhythm. These evening colors shift your mind and body to the low power mode of the Downstate when your autonomic nervous system amplifies rest-and-digest RESTORE functions that calm down your cardiovascular and metabolic systems, clean out the toxins that build up from a day of activity, initiate the consolidation and integration of your recent experiences into long-term memories, and promote dreams that help solve your most creative quandaries.