Get More Sleep

Arianna Huffington – co-founder, president and editor-in-chief of Huffington Post Media Group, cultural phenomenon, and author of Thrive, Third World America, On Becoming Fearless and Pigs at the Trough – showed that she’s an excellent editor-in-chief in her years building the Huffington Post. With this book, she rings the alarm about a “sleep-deprivation crisis.” Few people get enough; almost everyone needs more. Sleep, it turns out, is crucial to your mental and physical health.

When Huffington collapsed due to lack of sleep, she was surprised, at first, and then she got to work doing in-depth research and applying her findings to change her own habits and to write this book. 

We’re in the middle of a cultural shift, one in which more and more of us are taking steps to reclaim sleep.Arianna Huffington

​​​​​In her previous bestseller, Thrive, she argued that everyone should work less and spend more time and energy on mindful activities that reduce stress. She urged readers to lessen their workload and spend an hour a day meditating. She argues for changing your priorities and getting more rest to improve your health and well-being. If you can, she promises, the brief break from work will improve your ability to accomplish it.

Breakdown

Huffington begins by candidly describing the physical breakdown she suffered in 2007. She attributes her collapse to her go-go lifestyle and her refusal to miss any opportunities. She learned from that illness that sleep is “a fundamental human need.” And when she began to explore the subject, she found nearly 5,000 apps cataloged under “sleep” in Apple’s app store, more than 15 million photographs tagged “#sleep” on Instagram and more than 24 million images tagged “#tired.”

Sleep deficiencies can undermine important forms of leadership behavior. Harvard Business Review

Huffington points a finger at technology – perhaps even sleep-inducing technology – as a culprit in widespread sleeplessness and warns of a “collective delusion” about overwork and burnout. She blames ambition and misplaced priorities as the reasons many people work too hard to get the sack time they need. 

She recognizes that many sleepless people – some holding multiple jobs – couldn’t survive if they worked less and slept more. In fact, she notes in empathy, that the Japanese, Chinese and Korean languages all have words for “death from overwork.” For good reason: These societies tend to drive their sleepless workers without little mercy.

The Journey

Huffington raises the issue of sleep in mythology and fairy tales. She posits that in today’s world, Sleeping Beauty – and you and everybody else – must be her or his “own Prince Charming.” She urges you to look away from outward distractions to consider your inner life and how you nourish it.

She reminds readers that sleep is a time of rejuvenation and, through dreams, of portals into the working of your subconscious mind, which is not open at any other time.

Family Sleep Habits

Huffington cites research suggesting that good or poor sleep habits develop quite early. People are more likely to behave healthfully if those around them do the same. Huffington’s mother often stayed up all night “cooking, reading and organizing” and slept during the day, setting a pattern for her two daughters’ sleep habits for most of their lives. Most likely, your “sleep tribe” is your family. The sleep habits of your mother, father and siblings served as models for your adult sleep habits.

I’d fire up the computer…responding to all the ‘urgent’ emails and attempting to squeeze a full day’s work into what should have been my sleep time. This would go on until about 3 am, when I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer.Arianna Huffington

Of course, the author warns, parents make sleep – not to mention vegetables – much less desirable when they issue such threats as, “If you don’t eat your vegetables…you’re going straight to bed.”

The National Sleep Foundation publishes sleep guidelines for kids, and Huffington supports them: Out of every 24 hours, a newborn should get 14 to 17 hours of sleep; toddlers need 11 to 14 hours; preschoolers should have 10 to 13 hours, children ages six to thirteen need nine to 11 hours; and teens need eight to ten hours.

The guidelines suggest seven to nine hours of sleep for adults up to age 65, and seven to eight hours for seniors. Those who claim they do fine on three to five hours of sleep are mostly lying, Huffington suspects, and they are certainly undermining their health.

Improving Your Sleep

Huffington provides several unique and extremely helpful appendices. One entry is her Sleep-Quality Questionnaire. This tool asks how long it takes you to fall asleep, how long you might be awake in the middle of the night, how many nights a week you have a hard time falling asleep, and more. Its nine questions illuminate the severity – or lack thereof – of your issues with going to sleep and staying asleep.

Following that, Huffington provides perhaps the most useful section of her book for the true insomniac. Appendix B offers links or downloads for “guided meditations” to help you fall asleep and remain sleeping. These meditations go to the core of Huffington’s theme: that your subconscious and, if you will, your spiritual self, emerge during sleep. These fundamental but often-ignored aspects of the self need sleep for nourishment, and they reveal themselves to you only through the medium of sleep.

Feeling that there aren’t enough hours in the day, we look for something to cut. And sleep is an easy target.Arianna Huffington

Huffington offers a long prose recounting of what you should think about prior to sleep, including breathing exercises and visualizations. One meditation suggests envisioning a white mist that envelops you, then a red mist, then orange, then yellow, then green and blue. Then, picture the mist turning white once more. 

Three pages of links to downloadable sleep-inducing meditations follow. They highlight breath control and conscious body relaxation. One suggests a medley (available on Amazon) of “psychoacoustically rearranged” melodies from Schubert, Chopin and others, chosen by Dr. Andrew Weil, a holistic health expert, and Joshua Leeds, a sound researcher.

Leave the Sword Outside

Huffington offers some stirring, memorable metaphors. She discusses how prior to a Japanese tea ceremony, samurai warriors would take off their swords so as not to bring them into the house. Huffington presents the samurai shedding his sword as a metaphor for the effort you need to make to leave your daytime troubles and worries outside your bedroom.

While Huffington insists that sleep alone can grant the perspective that reveals life’s true values, she also candidly admits that deciding to get more sleep represented a significant change of heart and habit for her.

She writes of her former fears that she was never doing enough. Her ambition and ferocious work schedule led her to lose sight of “the mystery” of life, although she believes she still would have accomplished her many achievements if she’d gotten enough sleep in her earlier years. Huffington now regards her former refusal to sleep as a dangerous, even self-destructive delusion she has now escaped.

The salient quality of modern life is the seduction and relentlessness of the distractions surrounding you. To “lay down our swords” means evading those distractions and inviting sleep. And when you finally dismiss the waking life’s web of distraction and fall asleep, your dreams and the workings of your sleeping brain can provide better health, more effective waking hours and even “a gateway to the sacred.”