sleep: the answer to almost everything

It can help you lose weight, look younger and make smarter decisions. So why has not getting enough shut-eye become something to boast about?

Hit the snooze button. A radical new movement helmed by firebrand Arianna Huffington is set to change your perception of sleep forever. Self-confessed insomniac Meg Mason heeds the call for a seismic shift in how we view shut-eye

It’s 3.17am and I’m awake. It’s always 3.17am, and I’m always awake. Or so it feels, after however many nights in a row of not sleeping. I lost count somewhere around the five-year mark, but it’s enough that I’ve come to dread night-time. Thirty-eight years old, and afraid of the dark. Because no matter how tired I am, no matter how many sleep-inducing rituals I’ve performed involving lavender mist and free-writing and child’s pose, no matter how rigorous I’ve been about avoiding caffeine after 10am, screens after dark and alcohol altogether, by 3.17am I will be awake. And worrying.

“Lying in bed putting out imaginary fires is one of the most draining things we can do,” says Arianna Huffington in her new book The Sleep Revolution, written in response to what she calls the global sleep crisis. Exhaustion, she says, is epidemic. “Why am I so tired?” is “the existential cry of the modern age”, “the global zeitgeist captured in five words”, and one of the first options offered by Google’s autocomplete when you begin typing: “Why am I…” So tired.

Huffington arrived at the subject by way of personal experience. “It started with my own painful wake-up call,” she tells ELLE. After years of heading a start-up, single parenting, book writing, media punditry and being an all-round Top-something Media Influencer, on scant or no sleep, her body gave up, and “on the morning of April 6, 2007, I was lying on the floor of my home office in a pool of blood. On my way down, my head had hit the corner of my desk, cutting my eye and breaking my cheekbone. I had collapsed from exhaustion and lack of sleep.”

A series of medical tests ended in a diagnosis of burnout, and Huffington says, “doctors’ waiting rooms, it turns out, were good places for me to ask myself a lot of questions about the kind of life I was living”. Because she was part of what

The Atlantic magazine has called the “cult of sleep deprivation”. The UK’S Sunday Times dubbed it the “Wide-awake Club”, and one of its writers, an insomniac herself, began the piece with Dorothy Parker’s famous missive, “How do people go to sleep? I’m afraid I’ve lost the knack.”

It’s cold comfort, at 3.17am, to know that, even if I’d rather be asleep, at least I’m on trend. Apparently, we have all lost the knack. “There is that level of tiredness where you don’t actually even notice you’re tired because you no longer remember how

not being tired feels,” says Huffington.

“Basically, everyone I know is knackered, me included,” wrote Gwyneth Paltrow in one of her many Goops on the topic of tiredness. During an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! earlier this year, actress Leslie Mann extolled the virtues of a pomegranate-and-medicalmarijuana juice as a cure for her chronic insomnia. And comedian Amy Poehler called a good night’s sleep her “white whale”, devoting a chapter of her memoir

Yes Please to her battle with bed: “Like Ahab, I am also a total drama queen about it. I love to talk about how little sleep I get… as if it is a true indication of how hard I work. But I truly suffer at night.”

Among us non-famous people, serial sleep deprivation is no less prevalent. According to a 2013 study, up to a third of Australian adults experience regular bouts of insomnia. In the US, 40 per cent of the population manages less than the recommended minimum of seven hours’ sleep per night. No wonder the sleep industry – offering every solution from sleeptracking apps to hardcore pharmaceuticals, Newagey sleep retreats to rehab-style sleep clinics, medi-mattresses to luxury sleep hotels – is booming. One estimate puts the value of the “sleep assistance industry” at $42.3 billion last year in the US alone.

Exactly how much sleep we need remains the subject of debate. Choose a number between six and eight, google it, and you will find a study to back it up. And although one landmark report from the University of Oxford said the average adult now gets one to two hours less sleep per night than 60 years ago, the real issue with our sleep may not be about quantity, or even quality – so much as perception. Namely, our perception that, at best, sleep is an optional lifestyle accessory; at worst, a waste of time. That going without it is somehow heroic, and that the world will cease turning if we don’t read a work email at three in the morning. Huffington says it’s a collective delusion “that overwork and burnout are the price we must pay in order to succeed”. Although, she could hardly blame us for buying into it – she did, too, after all. And even after her hard-won epiphany, she admits to still being susceptible, “because this narrative remains deeply embedded in our culture. Everywhere you turn, sleep deprivation is glamorised and celebrated, from ‘you snooze, you lose’ to highly burned-out people boasting, ‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead.’” The Atlantic similarly reported: “For some, sleep loss is a badge of honour, a sign that they don’t require the eight-hour biological rest that the rest of us softies do.”

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer supposedly thrives on as little as four hours’ sleep (six hours tops). A look

inside designer Tom Ford’s schedule reveals his 4.30am start time, after turning in at midnight. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey still claims to spend 18 hours a day at work, fitting the rest of his life, including sleep, into the leftover six. Even beneath the executive stratosphere, how little sleep we’ve had is a routine and familiar humble-brag. Students boast of their all-nighters, new mothers of how many times they were up in the night. Medics in the UK allegedly refer to colleagues working multiple, continuous shifts as “Jack Bauers”, after the always-awake hero of 24. Even in my own graduate job, working in the UK at the Financial

Times during the first tech boom, each day began with an office-wide round of Rock’n’roll Bedtime: whoever had gone to bed the latest won. We were on about £13,000 a year. Which is to say, not exactly a corner office.

“We are the supremely arrogant species,” circadian neuroscientist and Oxford professor Russell Foster told the BBC. “We feel we can abandon four billion years of evolution and ignore the fact that we have evolved under a light-dark cycle.” Especially since there are so many biological functions we know occur during sleep. Short-term memories are consolidated and shifted to long-term storage, toxins are metabolised and cleared out, cells repair and different parts of the brain are activated to help prepare us for critical problem-solving during waking hours.

“Even if as a society we’re starting to recognise that sleep is important, we’re still trying to manage it so we can get by on less than we actually need,” says Dr Maree Barnes, sleep specialist with The University of Melbourne. “You can’t squeeze eight hours’ sleep into four hours.”

But what if we’re not being arrogant or even choosing to go without? What if we’re just being… women? More specifically, the working kind with dependent children or ageing parents, neglected partners, half-finished masters and a Pap smear reminder notice from 2012 topping out a rolling to-do list – arguably, we’re the demographic most prone to sleep deprivation that’s not by choice. “I don’t know whether it’s true or not,” says Barnes, “but it certainly does feel that way.”

Biology is definitely against us. Female hormones, pregnancy, stress responses and child-rearing have been linked to poor sleeping patterns in women, inevitably making us the sex more susceptible to sleep issues. This is despite recent research suggesting women need more sleep than men based on our greater tendency to multitask. Life stages and traumatic events such as a marriage or relationship breakdown also contribute heftily to sleep issues, with 60 per cent of insomniacs reporting their sleep problems were first brought on by stressful situations. Unsurprisingly, single mothers fare the worst compared to any other demographic, according to US statistics released this year. It’s a fact that’s equal parts depressing and self-evident to Erin Hayley, a 38-year-old Melbourne fashion marketing manager who has not slept properly for, she estimates, two years prior to becoming a single mother this year. “I used to be a great sleeper,” Hayley says. “I love sleep. I loved going to bed. But it’s become worse and worse in the past few weeks until, Sunday night, I didn’t sleep at all. I ended up being awake for two days. It’s definitely getting to a little bit of a crisis point.”

The vicious cycle of “sleep striving”, that is, sleeping badly, worrying about it and doing all you can to address your sleep issues (sometimes to no avail), is now established. “I lie there and over-process everything,” Hayley says. “Every email, every conversation, stupid stuff – and the more I stress about it, the worse it gets. It’s so lonely, and once I hear birds it’s like, ‘Oh God, panic,’ because there’s a whole day ahead and I’m going to be wrecked.”

Holistic sleep coach Elina Winnel has a client list “heavily weighted towards women” at her Sydney and Melbourne clinics. Women unified, above all, by desperation. “I have everyone from people who’ve had to quit their jobs as doctors and lawyers, to others who’ve tried everything, sometimes becoming extremely reliant on sleeping tablets when all else has failed. Others may be sleeping to a degree, but still feel as if they’re dragging through life in survival mode, rather than thriving.”

Considering sleep deprivation has a direct bearing on professional performance, long before burnout point, there’s an argument that sleep is a feminist issue – the new wage gap, or as New York magazine’s The Cut called it, “the sleep gap”. To blame, the “second shift” – the 21 or so hours of domestic work women put in after actual work each week, still almost double what men clock up over the same period – combined with a lingering superwoman mythology.

This idea was exemplified by venture capitalist Juliet de Baubigny’s “A Day In The Life”, which ran in Goop almost six years ago and remains the high point of the form. “I’m an early bird,” de Baubigny wrote, “so I try to seize ‘Juliet time’ first thing in the morning – I get up between 5.30 and 6am.” Before 7.45am she had already handled her work email, “curated” her social media, worked out with her trainer and was onto breakfast, which is “super important and always super rushed!”. After doing the school run – she makes a point of it! – her workday is “a blur”. She also makes time for creating spreadsheets for holiday-packing, evening conference calls, giving her children “100 per cent attention” and getting to bed by 10.30pm (“if I can!”). As a working mother, I would like not to be suckered into believing that kind of day is real or sustainable, let alone aspirational. But I was suckered then. I remain suckered now.

“WE NEED TO REJECT THE ASSUMPTION THAT OVERWORK AND BURNOUT ARE THE PRICE WE MUST PAY TO SUCCEED. UP AGAINST THIS UNFORGIVING DEFINITION OF SUCCESS, SLEEP DOESN’T STAND A CHANCE”

However, as Huffington says, “we need to start by rejecting the cultural assumption that overwork and burnout are the price we must pay in order to succeed. Because up against this unforgiving definition of success, sleep doesn’t stand a chance. And since this misguided notion was put in place by men, in a workplace culture dominated by men, we need women to lead the way.” The last time I saw de Baubigny’s name, in a more recent how-does-she-do-it piece from Fast Company, she at least admitted to “her share of angst-ridden moments that kept her awake at night”. Perhaps all these years later, de Baubigny’s trying to throw her tired sisters a bone. We need one. Especially when you begin to consider the physical, mental and emotional impact of a lifestyle in which sleep is routinely outranked by… curating our social media.

That inadequate sleep increases your risk of certain cancers, heart disease and Alzheimer’s are concepts so remote that most of us wouldn’t be motivated to get more shut-eye on those grounds alone. But the fact that chronic sleep loss can lead to weight gain? Depression? Or that Swedish researchers found fatigue makes people appear “sad” and “unattractive” to others? With more wrinkles! Those are menacing threats most of us will probably get behind.

Then there’s existing in a continual state of “hyper-arousal”, a feature of insomnia also known as “tired and wired”, and very likely contributing to the modern curse that is continual partial attention. Its too-familiar symptoms include weepiness, loss of libido, rapid speaking, social withdrawal, memory loss, being easily distracted, loss of appetite or an erratic appetite, fearing serious illness or obsessing over tiredness. Winnel, the sleep coach, sees that suite of symptoms so often, she considers it a more common response than “fight or flight” to the constant overproduction of the stress hormone cortisol. She calls it “freeze”. “All the nervous energy that’s built up in the body and isn’t expended in any way – it just sits there, and women spend so much time in that mode that it becomes their normal.”

Unsurprisingly, being permanently tired and wired creates and feeds that cycle of broken sleep. The “sleep anxiety” that develops from lying awake not only keeps you feeling alert, but certainly doesn’t help to balance cortisol levels, which have been found to be increased in insomniacs. “And then you have your feedback loop,” says Delwyn Bartlett, clinical associate professor at The Woolcock Institute of Medical Research and The University of Sydney. Beyond every available cure – banning tech in the bedroom, meditation, cognitive behaviour therapy, all of which offer varying proof of efficacy, and in the case of pills, may cause additional problems – regaining confidence in our ability to sleep is the real key to correcting sleep issues. “You can’t make yourself sleep. You can only let yourself sleep,” Bartlett explains. The executive summary? Quit struggling.

If basic sleep hygiene is in place – which means a cool, dark room, no blue light from electronics, no caffeine or alcohol after sundown, exercising daily, eating properly, getting up at the same time on weekdays – “and you’re still wide awake and worried, sit up,” Bartlett advises. “Straighten your back, pull your tummy in. Keep your eyes wide open, think, ‘Stay awake, stay awake, stay awake,’ and you’re more likely to be asleep in 10 minutes when you next lie back on your bed. In the end, the main difference between someone who sleeps well and someone who doesn’t is that they know everything else can wait until morning. It’s about setting boundaries and demarcations, and then letting go – letting sleep just happen.”

It’s about doing less. And very often, nothing at all. (Yes, the world will keep turning even if you don’t reply to that work email at 3am.) “Everybody needs to take a big breath and recognise that this catchcry of work-life balance actually has some validity,” Barnes agrees. “We have to change the popular perception that sleep is just a waste of time.”

But would we, or our careers, suffer if we did this? Huffington doesn’t think so. “Not only would I have achieved whatever I’ve achieved” with more sleep, she says, at the end of her story, “I would have done it with more joy, more aliveness and with less of a cost to my health and my relationships.” If the revolution she is calling for comes about – and so many women will be hoping it does – perhaps one day we won’t boast about how tired we are and how few hours we’re surviving on. If sleep itself becomes a status symbol of the healthier, happier and more productive, we’ll humble-brag about how much of the good stuff we’re getting. As Huffington concludes, “Exhaustion is a sign of chaos, not a badge of honour.”