When Arianna Huffington was surviving on three or four hours’ sleep a night, fairly standard for many CEOs, decision-making was more difficult. She was also “more irritable, more reactive, less present and absolutely less joyful in my life. When I’m sleep deprived, I tend to focus on what is not working rather than what is working.” Then, in 2007, the founder of the Huffington Post collapsed and woke in a pool of her own blood (thanks to a broken cheekbone). Her doctors told her she was exhausted – not so much a wake-up call as one that told her to get more sleep. Since then, she has become a champion for slumber.
Huffington is running a competition to promote her new book, The Sleep Revolution, in which the prize is her bedroom (“a sleep sanctuary”) for the night, which means you, too, can sleep like she does: wearing proper nightclothes, no pets, with mobile phones and tablets replaced by candles and poetry, and, hopefully, eight full hours of sleep.
“I started setting ground rules, such as turning off my devices,” says Huffington on how she turned around her sleep habits. “Creating a transition ritual to sleep is absolutely key.” This included having a bath, getting into pyjamas, and “reading only physical books that have nothing to do with work – poetry, novels, philosophy. It’s a 30-minute ritual now, it’s not as if it takes a long time. I’ve given myself time to slow down.”
What did she notice about herself when she got more sleep? “I’m much more present in my life, much more joyful. I am, without question, a better leader, because I can look ahead with more clarity.” But she was the boss when she decided she needed eight hours. Could she have built the Huffington Post in those years when she was staying awake for longer? “I think the biggest growth of the Huffington Post happened after [she slept more]. I think it’s a delusion that in order to succeed as an entrepreneur you need to burn out.”
Her goal is to “change cultural norms. It started with the industrial revolution, when we began to think human beings could be treated like machines. The goal of a machine is to minimise downtime, but human beings are not machines. The need for eight hours’ sleep is evolutionary, it’s not negotiable. If we ignore that need, we pay a huge price in every aspect of our health and cognitive performance.”
We know that most adults need between seven and nine hours a night. Judging from the number of articles (yes, this one included) published on the topic, we are endlessly fascinated by the sleep habits of the rich and successful. These seem to imply that we would be more productive if only we synchronised our body clocks to those of Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer (four hours’ sleep), or Richard Branson, or PepsiCo’s CEO, Indra Nooyi (both are said to get around five hours).
One theory, currently gaining popularity, is that Donald Trump seems so deranged because he is chronically sleep-deprived. In his book Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, the mogul says he sleeps only between 1am and 5am: “Don’t sleep any more than you have to. No matter how brilliant you are, there’s not enough time in the day.” On the campaign trail, he has claimed to have slept even less – sometimes just an hour a night.
It’s a serious point, says Huffington. “Maybe his biggest contribution to politics is going to be as a case study of the dangers of sleep deprivation,” she says. “He really displays what the American Academy of Sleep Medicine has described as symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation: inability to process information, impulsiveness, trouble listening to others, being prone to paranoid tendencies such as claiming that thousands of Muslims were cheering the fall of the Twin Towers. [These] are all symptoms of someone who is clearly not operating from a centred place, which is where you want leaders to operate.” For a president, she adds: “Being sleep-deprived is like leading while drunk.”
