Please shut up about sleep
Are you getting enough sleep? No? No one is! Everyone is tired. All the time. If you’re searching for the answer on how to get more sleep this column won’t help you.
No column will – unless it’s so boring it helps lull you to sleep. Or, in my case, lols you to sleep. I’m sorry for that joke, I would delete it but I need to make the word count so I can get some sleep.
We’ve become witness to an entirely new category in journalism, sleep. If we still had newspapers, sleep would be its own section: Local News, National News, Sport, then Sleep.
(To people still reading this in a newspaper, thank you, you are one of the good ones.)
We’ve all read the articles: ‘‘How to get more sleep’’, ‘‘How much sleep should you be getting’’ and ‘‘How lack of sleep will lead to an early death’’. Do you know what will cause a lack of sleep/early death? All these articles about lack of sleep causing early death!
I’ve never met one person who is getting enough sleep. Apparently, they’re out there. The internet will spread rumours about people who don’t need much sleep – normally important people who like to brag.
‘‘Silvio Berlusconi only slept two to four hours a night while he was in office!’’ Yeah, exactly!
I shudder to think how little sleep Trump is getting. Maybe his life would be a bit easier if he slept a bit more?
We’ve become obsessed with sleep. Three years ago, top scientists discovered that looking at a phone wasn’t conducive to sleep. Who could have predicted that staring at a powerfully-lit retina display, reading dramatic gossip about friends, family and the end of the world would not help you doze off?
But the evil phones weren’t going to be beaten that easily, as soon as people started taking their phone out of the bedroom ‘‘sleep apps’’ became all the rage. That was a genuine trend! Like Pokemon Go, or big commercial taps in residential kitchens that bend like a candy cane and extend with a hose. You know the ones I’m talking about.
People brought their phones back to ‘‘monitor’’ their sleep and rate how good it was out of 10. There’s no better example of modern technological insanity than waking up and being told by your phone that you slept wrong.
If you missed the sleep app craze, don’t worry, there’s heaps of other crap you can waste your money on, or ‘‘invest’’ in, as they say in the industry. ‘‘Orthopaedic’’ mattresses that are, amazingly, one size fits all, and pillows developed by Nasa, because that’s what Nasa spends most of its time doing these days, faking moon landings and working on pillow technology.
Who looks at Nasa and thinks ‘‘those guys know sleep’’? I Googled ‘‘astronauts sleeping’’ and it turns out they sleep standing up and strapped to the wall!
My favourite sleep ad is the one with Suzanne Paul and the ‘‘Bambillo Pillow’’. When I see Suzanne Paul, I think: ‘‘There’s a person who gets a lot of sleep!’’ Probably too much sleep, based on the amount of energy she seems to have.
She’s always bouncing around selling stuff that always needs to be paid for with ‘‘three easy payments’’, for some reason. What’s ‘‘easy’’ about three payments? If you’re buying pillows with multiple payments, you’re in financial strife and that is something that will keep you up at night.
I’m suspicious of the whole pillow industry now. I read a sleep article recently that said we should replace our pillows every two years. Two years! I’ve got pillows in my house that are older than me. My biggest fear in life is that people will find out what my pillows look like without pillowcases on them. They’re bright yellow.
I can’t help but feel like people are trying to scare us. There are a lot of companies now invested in trying to tell you that you’re sleeping wrong when chances are most of us are doing just fine.
If you ever wake up in the morning more tired than when you went to sleep, that’s probably normal. If you ever stay up at night stressing you’re not getting enough sleep, relax, it might help you sleep better.
Guy Williams is touring the greater Wellington region this week. Full details at guywilliams.co.nz