AND ANOTHER THING…
Shut-eye Time to stop bragging about how well you sleep
‘Sleep is a skill to be honed and cultivated – and a measure of your success’
How’s your sleep hygiene? Fair, medium, superlative? Not what it once was or should be? Or do you not have the faintest idea what I’m on about? Well, you’re going to have to make peace with this revolting new term because, right now, “good sleep hygiene” – or “a good night’s sleep” as it used to be known – is the lifestyle accessory du jour.
It’s the new limitededition Birkin, the Ferrari Portofino convertible and Jimmy Choo Minerva boot (in bottle green). It’s the 24-inch waist, V-cut abs and young supermodel lover; the perfect work/life balance, superfood and orgasmically mindful existence. It’s “having it all”. So although it sounds like something unpalatable involving pre-teen boys with fluffy top lips and grubby bed sheets, you’re going to need to brag about your sleep-hygiene levels to friends, colleagues and casual acquaintances; puff out your chest and tell everyone about the eight to 12 hours’ shut-eye you got last night, and how physically and neurologically superior you are as a result.
Oh, and probably very fertile, too. Because sleep is no longer an inactive muscular and nervous state most of us just can’t get enough of, but a skill to be honed and cultivated – and a measure of your success.
In order to compete with the sleep snobs and Zzzmasters, you’re going to have to devote a yawnsome amount of time to preaching about how you achieved your optimum sleep hygiene. And it’s imperative you keep any mention of psychoactive drugs out of the equation – these are to sleep snobs what anabolic steroids are to athletes, and the only doping you admit to is the vitamin-rich kind: magnesium-based “sleep snacks” like spinach and almonds to calm your anxiety in the afternoon, and raw jícama washed down with dandelion tea to soothe your gastrointestinal system.
The tone should be similar to that used by Victoria’s Secret models and A-listers detailing their beauty secrets – and the wackier and less easy to emulate the better.
So whether it’s recordings of Icelandic fairy tales, nocturnal swaddling in heated and weighted blankets, the obscure online sleep programme you’re following or the sleep pod and virtual headband you had imported from a lab in Nova Scotia while it was still in development, let them have it.
They need to walk away feeling chronically insecure about the state of their slumber, lie awake all night Googling “memory foam mattresses” (incidentally, one of the least comfortable sleep aids I have ever tried – like being slowly cooked from the bottom up in one of those clay-based Italian pizza ovens), and wake up both stupider and fatter with a nixed libido and a compromised immune system. That’s when you swoop in, nicking both their promotion and their spouse.
As with all status symbols, sleep hygiene is all about wealth. Like the fatties in their time or the size-zeros in ours, the It Bags and It Shoes, supercars and super-foods, you’re effectively shaking a great wad of notes in everyone’s faces.
The night-shift workers in NHS hospitals, 24-hour supermarkets, National Rail and the police force probably don’t spend a huge amount of time expounding the somniferous benefits of the chicory root and downloading from Spotify’s Sleep Sound library, but I bet the quality of those 20-minute naps snatched in brightly lit staff rooms, at drizzly bus-stops and standing up on the Tube is second to none.