News this morning to file under the genre marked, “No shit, Sherlock!”: money doesn’t bring you happiness, but good sleep does! I mean, having enough of the first will go a good way to making sure you don’t lose much of the second, but hold that thought: a decent night’s sleep, says a study by Oxford Economics, “outweighs sex, chatting, going for a walk, eating with family” when it comes to measuring personal wellbeing. Gloss over the “science”, commissioned as it was by Sainsbury’s, and there’s a nagging truth that I have only recently, reluctantly, come to accept: the sleep-industrial complex is real. The more you get, the more you crave, the more you become susceptible to the machinations of Big Sleep. Talk of sleep apps, sleep routines and clean sleeping become normalised; you’ll read press releases from duvet companies claiming “our love of bed and sleep has seen bedtime move from functional must-have to a complete lifestyle trend” without flinching.
If you had asked me three months ago, I would have ranked “fun, all categories of” several priorities higher than lying in bed comatose for a third of the week. But unlike the gains you expect to make in getting older – primarily, in weight and wisdom – no one really tells you that your accumulated lack of sleep will creep up on you with a sudden blow. One minute, you’re careening around town until the very early hours, still operating as a human and holding down a job, a life and a deep affinity with 3am research projects. The next, years of being peppy and annoying take their revenge and a single birthday later, an internal switch flicks so you emerge slug-like, incapable of adapting to this debilitating need for five, six – eight! – hours of uninterrupted shut-eye.
The successful and smug, of course, cottoned on to this ages ago: if you’re rich and powerful enough to outsource what keeps most people awake – by and large, bills and babies – you can fine-tune your sleep to suit you and then spend your free time writing important works about slumber; Gwyneth Paltrow gifted us a regimen that involved “pillows infused with fine strands of copper oxide”; Arianna Huffington has written up a whole sleep revolution. Both, I think, work on the principle that you are not doing it (sleeping) right, but, as with industries built on showing you how to breathe and eat, there is hope if you invest more money in stuff designed around the basic auto-function of closing your eyes. (Which is probably why I am now persistently stalked online by targeted ads for aspirational eccentricities such as pillow-in-pillow designs and £79 slippers, but that’s by the by.)
Few things offer a more pronounced transition to modern adulthood than developing an obsession with getting sleep: how much, how little, how it’s just never enough. Society traditionally decrees the markers of growing up to revolve around marriage, a mortgage and making a mini-me, but anyone living outside a projected 70s fantasy knows that the true moment you have lost yourself to maturity is when you have caught yourself having a conversation about how tired you are.
Yes, “I didn’t get enough sleep last night, I’m so tired” is probably the single most boring sentence you can use to excuse yourself for being boring, but I have used it at least three times in the past week and so I can confirm what my own marriage and mortgage failed to: I am an adult. I need sleep. I am constantly tired. Before, my flawless personal logic would dictate that going to bed early was tedious – who, after all, would go to that weird Wednesday party or half-read those books and watch all these films and spend important hours on the internet, deep-diving into page seven of a Google search? Not people who are asleep. Not people smart and responsible enough to value the regenerating capacity of their bodies on a daily basis.
I have now developed a tedious fact-repository about the sleeping habits of the rich and famous – Voltaire survived on four hours a night; Thomas Edison worked on five! – and if there is anything to confirm that getting more sleep is crucial, it is the knowledge that both Margaret Thatcher and Donald Trump proudly declared themselves fit on three or so hours. I would be hard-pressed to claim either as shining examples of empathy and, on that basis alone, it is fair to say that a British supermarket survey truly has cracked it: sleep is the answer to all human happiness.
