The Sleep Revolution

Sometimes I swear my unconscious is conspiring to take care of me.

I've been having problems with my Kobo lately. It's great and I love it, until I got caught up in some mysterious and seemingly hyper-common authorization issues and I can't read my library books anymore. It seems to me that these things are not supposed to be amateur anymore.

Anyway. All that to say that I did a lot of tests, I borrowed a lot of books I didn't know about, that I found by typing random words in the search bar, and one of those random words was "sleep". Well, look at that. Just during my vacations, where I can sleep as I want. And it just happened that I had already heard somewhere about The Sleep Revolutionby Arianna Huffington, the co-founder of Huffington Post. So when I finally got my e-reader working (download Abobe Digital Editions 3.0 everyone), I was able to start my own little revolution.

Summary

Arianna Huffington operated for too long on about four hours of sleep a night. Until she literally collapsed from exhaustion. One day she woke up in a pool of blood, with a broken cheekbone and a cut above her eye. The doctors named the obvious: she was sleep-deprived.

This event was a revelation for her. She realized how much our society trivializes sleep, and what impact this has on us. According to her, to change the situation, we need nothing less than a revolution. And this is what she tries to convince us in The Sleep Revolution.

She didn't have to look far to find her arguments. Scientific evidence of the impact of sleep deprivation abounds: irritability, stress, lack of concentration, increased risk of contracting multiple unpleasant diseases, deterioration of interpersonal relationships, etc. When we sleep better, we live better. Not to mention that sleeping is so much fun.

Impressions

I have neglected my sleep in the last few months. Normally, I don't handle sleep deprivation very well, but lately I've been so busy and so excited that I didn't realize it. I must have been running on adrenaline, I don't know. And I was thinking that after all, six hours of sleep a night is not so bad either.

That was a mistake. My excitement quickly turned to pure stress, and by the time the vacations rolled around, I was sick of life. It took all my energy to do even the smallest task, and my biggest dream was to lie down and do nothing for days on end. That's why I didn't post a review in the last two weeks.

And then I read The Sleep Revolution. Very effective. Every time I took it, I felt like sleeping, and that's exactly what I did. He also reminded me of some basic tips: now I try not to look at screens for at least an hour before I go to bed, I leave my phone in the living room, I leave my little lavender essential oil diffuser in my room, and I read until I fall asleep. I try to get at least some exercise during the day, because otherwise I don't sleep as well, and if I get up too early for any reason, I go back to bed (I especially love getting up, eating breakfast, and going back to bed.) Thanks to all of this, I've been sleeping 10-11 hours a night for the past week. It's been great.

I am also starting to pay attention to my dreams. The book devotes a chapter to them, because they can motivate us to want to sleep: dreams are a door to our unconscious, and writing them down can give us a lot of information about our state of mind and our life. I know this well, I am with my current lover because of a recurring dream.

This book is written as if by a journalist, that is, not very poetically. It is very factual, with a few little jokes here and there, but nothing more. So it's not Arianna's personal story or her prose that inspired me, but the facts speak for themselves.

This is my little gift to you this holiday season. Read this book, sleep through the vacations, and if you're doomed to telecommute because of the pandemic, at least get a little more sleep.

I hope you sleep well and read well in 2022!