Sleep is the daily restoration of the physical instrument and the daily surrender of conscious control. The age has turned it into another domain of irregularity and of continuous compromise. Late hours, continuous stimulation before rest, the treatment of sleep as an obstacle to further activity: these are the norms. The differentiated individual recovers a different relation. Sleep is ordered so that the body and the attention are available for the demands of the following day.
The practical demand is regularity and the refusal of the final distractions that the evening offers. The man who consistently shortens or fragments his sleep in order to extend the hours of stimulation has already accepted a lower measure of the physical form. The effects appear in the quality of presence, in the capacity for sustained effort, and in the stability of mood. These effects are not minor. They determine the resources available for every other application.
Young men are formed in an environment that treats the sacrifice of sleep as a mark of intensity or of ambition. The higher type recognizes the sacrifice as a form of dissolution. Intensity that destroys the instrument is not intensity. It is waste. Ambition that leaves the man depleted for the ordinary work of the day is not ambition directed by a higher measure. It is the same horizontal drive that the age rewards in other forms.
Establish the hours of rest and protect them with the same seriousness applied to work and to physical discipline. The decision is small. The cumulative effect is the maintenance of the physical ground on which the type stands. Without that ground the higher claims become theoretical. With it the man remains capable of the continuous application that the intensification phase requires.