“He Gives to His Beloved Even in His Sleep”: Sleep as Gift

Psalm 127 opens with “Unless the LORD builds the house, they labor in vain who build it.” The psalm does not condemn work. It condemns anxious, sleepless overwork that acts as if everything depends on us. Sleep, in this psalm, is an act of trust: God keeps working while we rest. Ecclesiastes adds an observation. The laborer sleeps well, and the rich man’s abundance keeps him awake.

The paper’s Section 5 already covers how sleep processes emotional memories. This addition looks at what lost sleep does to the mind, and at what helps sleep.

The cost of “rising early and retiring late.” Van Dongen, Maislin, Mullington, and Dinges (2003) randomly assigned 48 healthy adults to 4, 6, or 8 hours in bed per night for 14 straight days, under close lab supervision. Others went without sleep for three nights. Six hours a night, which many men consider normal, produced steadily worsening deficits in attention and thinking. After two weeks, those deficits matched one to two full nights without sleep. The participants hardly noticed. Their ratings of their own sleepiness rose a little at first and then leveled off, even as their performance kept falling.

The working man’s sleep. A meta-analysis of 66 studies found that regular exercise has small to moderate benefits for sleep, with the largest effect on overall sleep quality. A single bout of exercise also produced small improvements (Kredlow et al., 2015). Ecclesiastes 5:12 says something similar about physical work.

What the studies cannot tell us. The sleep-restriction experiment was small, and lab conditions are not real life. Psalm 127 is about trust in God, not sleep hygiene. But the convergence is pointed. The man who “rises early and retires late” to keep up is likely more impaired than he knows, and the psalm tells him he can afford to rest.

Practice

Living it out

Five practices drawn from this passage. Each says how strong the research behind it is. What the labels mean.

1. 1

   Protect seven or more hours in bed

   Set a fixed bedtime and treat it like an appointment.

   StrongSix hours a night for two weeks produced deficits equal to one to two nights without sleep (Van Dongen et al., 2003).
2. 2

   Don’t trust your own sense of how tired you are

   Assume that a short-sleep week is costing you more than you feel.

   StrongStrong that people under chronic sleep restriction underestimated their impairment (Van Dongen et al., 2003).
3. 3

   Work your body during the day

   Get regular physical activity, especially if you work at a desk.

   StrongStrong that regular exercise improves sleep quality, with small to moderate effects (Kredlow et al., 2015).
4. 4

   End the day with a handoff prayer

   Before sleep, name to God the work you are leaving unfinished, and leave it with him.

   ObedienceObedience. Commended by Scripture (Ps. 127:2; Ps. 4:8). The paper’s worry-postponement research in Section 8 is related.
5. 5

   Keep a weekly day of real rest

   Overwork and short sleep often travel together.

   ModerateSee the paper’s Section 6 on the Sabbath.

Studies cited on this page2

1. ↗ Kredlow, M. A., Capozzoli, M. C., Hearon, B. A., Calkins, A. W., & Otto, M. W. (2015). The effects of physical activity on sleep: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 38(3), 427–449. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-015-9617-6
2. ↗ Van Dongen, H. P., Maislin, G., Mullington, J. M., & Dinges, D. F. (2003). The cumulative cost of additional wakefulness: Dose-response effects on neurobehavioral functions and sleep physiology from chronic sleep restriction and total sleep deprivation. Sleep, 26(2), 117–126. https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/26.2.117