Chronic insomnia, a condition that, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, currently afflicts some forty million Americans, is not really caused by coffee and Facebook, although it may certainly be aggravated by these things. Or try offering that advice to an insomniac. Try telling the lady at the food bank that she should tap into her resilience and sleep her way to the top. Pardiggle, in “Bleak House,” distributing improving literature to the slum-dwelling poor. Huffington does acknowledge, in passing, that “the vicious cycle of financial deprivation also feeds into the vicious cycle of sleep deprivation,” but she goes on to note, piously, that “the more challenging our circumstances, the more imperative it is to take whatever steps we can to tap into our resilience to help us withstand and overcome the challenges we face.” The tone here is reminiscent of Mrs. But the fact that some of the leading indicators for poor sleep and sleep loss are low household income, shift work, food insecurity, and being African-American or Hispanic suggests that the quest for rest is not so simple. It is a beguiling idea, that one might transform one’s sleep, and the rest of one’s life, with a few virtuous acts of renunciation-no electronics in the bedroom, no coffee after 2 P.M.-and a few dreamy self-care rituals involving baths and tea. “Sleep your way to the top!” she jauntily enjoins us.Īlthough Huffington’s book has doubtless been helpful for many, her proselytizing leaves the misleading and slightly infuriating impression that sleep is a life-style choice, a free resource, available to all who care enough to make it a priority. Sleep isn’t the enemy of success and ambition, she’s discovered, it’s the royal road to the corner office. Only when months of chronic exhaustion led her to pass out and break her cheekbone on her desk did she wake up, as it were, to the madness and masochism of her work ethos and set about repairing her “estranged relationship with sleep.” These days, she retires at an eminently sensible hour each night, takes a hot bath with Epsom salts, drinks a cup of lavender or chamomile tea, and, just before getting into bed, writes a list of the things she is grateful for-which is a great way, she tells us, to “make sure our blessings get the closing scene of the night.” As a consequence of her sleep-hygiene regimen, not only has her quality of life improved but her business has done fabulously, too.

She thought that to get on she had to stay up. She was once lackadaisical about getting enough rest. “If we don’t continue to chip away at our collective delusion that burnout is the price we must pay for success, we’ll never be able to restore sleep to its rightful place in our lives,” Arianna Huffington wrote a couple of years ago, in her best-selling how-to guide “The Sleep Revolution.” By way of inspiration, she offered her own conversion story. We remain convinced, in contradiction of all the available evidence, that stinting on sleep makes us heroic and industrious, rather than stupid and fat. Deep down, they say, we simply do not respect the human need for repose.

light, nicotine, caffeine, central heating, alcohol, the addictive folderol of personal technology-but social attitudes seem to exercise them the most. They worry about many things, of course-incandescent light, L.E.D. Contemporary sleep evangelizers worry a good deal about our social attitudes toward sleep.

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