Even our sleep has to perform

Sleep is no longer something you just do; it’s something you must do well. It has increasingly become an extension of productivity, efficiency, and 'getting the best out of yourself'. We all know it: apps that track your sleep patterns, smartwatches that calculate your sleep score, mattresses that analyze your sleep behavior. Sleep has become a market.

Where a market emerges, pressure, competition, and guilt soon follow. It must be 'optimal', 'restorative', 'efficient'. If you sleep poorly, you fail. You need melatonin, valerian, to talk to sleep coaches like me ;-), go to therapy, or buy gadgets like sleep robots or weighted blankets. And if you still don't sleep well, it’s your fault.

For centuries (see a previous blog post), people slept in two phases: a first sleep, a period of wakefulness in the middle of the night, usually around 1 or 2 a.m., and then a second sleep. This interruption wasn’t seen as a problem. It was a time for silence, cooking, prayer, or sex. But since the industrial revolution, when clocks and work schedules became dominant, uninterrupted sleep became the norm—and everything outside of that was seen as a disorder.

Modern sleep science has adopted that norm. Sleep must be linear, eight hours long, deep, and uninterrupted. And thus, a new ideal emerged, a benchmark that is unattainable for many. And this is where the suffering begins.

Insomnia is a medical problem, but also a cultural and psychological signal. Perhaps we sleep poorly because we feel our sleep is being judged. Because we’re losers if we don’t succeed. Because we no longer find rest in a world that constantly demands something from us—even when we’re sleeping.

It’s time to reclaim sleep. Not as a productivity hack, but as a human experience.

Because sleep doesn't belong to your work. Sleep belongs to you.