We hear the sleep advice from other people.
Sleep eight hours a night.
Don't use your phone or look at blue light before sleeping.
Don't exercise too close to asleep.
Avoid caffeine after 3 p.m.
All of this is sound advice for us getting a. good night's sleep. Sleep is essential to our daily functioning and presence in daily events and activities. I, like you, notice a sizable difference in my ability to flourish and excel through my day and get through it more easily when I get eight hours of sleep as opposed to five hours of sleep. Getting sleep is very important. It can make or break our day.
That belief is what a lot of marketers want us to believe.
To their credit, researchers and gadgets like smart mattresses and aural headbands are seizing our buying into the need to get good and enough sleep. Matteo Franceschetti created Eight Sleep, a company that creates smart mattresses that individualizes a bed to a person's sleep preferences to maximize sleep efficiency and effectiveness.
Franceschetti and Eight Sleep charge $2,295 for a queen size mattress that thermoregulates a mattress that warms and cools according to your needs. And Eight Sleep is not alone: companies like Dreem Band and Phillips SmartSleep, monitor brain waves and make dream music to help us sleep. Fitbit includes a "sleep efficiency" score. Quietly and rapid, sleep tech has grown to a $76 billion industry, an industry many of us have brought into.
Sleep is a very simple thing: when you're tired, close your eyes and go to sleep. It doesn't need aural headbands, Apple Watches, or smart mattresses. We don't need to spend copious amounts of money to sleep well: many of us have slept perfectly fine on a couch. However, at the core of this obsession with sleep gadgets and sleep technology is the culture around sleep in the first place.
I will admit that my life has improved since I started prioritizing getting eight or nine hours of sleep, as opposed to the usual five or six hours I got in college. But we're also starting to see sleep as a panacea to everything that's wrong with our lives and in life. If I go to bed at 10 p.m. and can't fall asleep for the foreseeable future, I start to feel guilty. I start to feel guilty if I watch TV or go on YouTube before sleeping. I start to blame every shortcoming I have at work the following day as attributed to the fact that I simply did not get enough or good enough sleep.
Ariana Huffington once said that the key to success was to get more sleep. But I'm starting to wonder: am I getting it all wrong? Even though psychologist Matt Walker tells us that "sleep is your superpower" and that "sleep is a non-negotiable biological necessity," is the stress over it productive and good?
What happens when I become a young parent and I'm barely sleeping? What happens when I have an emergency.
"Sleep may be a biological necessity," writes Sara Harrison of WIRED. "But stress over it is a choice."
Maybe our obsession with how much sleep we're getting isn't a good thing. The pendulum for the right mindset on sleep is right in the middle. While we can't completely neglect it, by no means should we obsess about it.
Do you ever notice that when you focus way too much on something, it suddenly gets harder? That's exactly the same thing with sleep. We actually fall asleep at the times we're not thinking so much about sleep. The relatively new medical condition, orthosomnia, describes a new condition where "patients are preoccupied or concerned with improving or perfecting their wearable sleep data," a play on orthorexia, a condition that describes a preoccupation with healthy eating.
As a serious runner, I relate to the fact that a lot of my friends just getting into running will obsess over what shoes to get, what shoes will help them run faster and avoid injury.
The answer I give them is probably something they don't want to hear: it doesn't matter that much. I went through a stage where I spent all my money on running shoes and was nitpicky over which ones to get that best suited my pronation, cadence, and stride. I even went through the phase a lot of runners go through after reading Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, where I wore barefoot shoes. But I have come to realize that most shoes serve me more or less the same. I'll use lighter shoes for races and more bulky shoes for easy runs and training -- but that's about the only distinction I make now, and I'm doing fine and barely getting injured.
A large part of that might be simply being a lucky, athletic, and healthy 22-year old man. But the lessons I've learned from running also apply to sleep. Running is just putting one foot in front of the other. Sleep is just closing your eyes. Anyone who tells you differently is making it overcomplicated and might be harming your progression rather than helping it. Don't overthink something as natural as running or sleep.
"If you ask a normal sleeper what they do to sleep, they will tell you nothing," says sleep doctor Dr. Guy Meadows, Co-Founder of The Sleep School.
It seems obvious to say, but stop obsessing over sleep if you are. The worst thing you can feel when you're tossing and turning, not being able to get to sleep, is that your emotions and experience aren't normal.
Paradoxically, Holly Royce comments that the easiest time she has sleeping is when she's trying to stay awake. I experience the same thing. Obsession is sometimes as bad as neglect, as we might know from the parent who was too controlling or overbearing.
Sleep is just closing your eyes and dozing off. We need to strike a fine balance between prioritizing sleep and not obsessing over it. Don't let sleep control your life, because sleep is just sleep.