Are we too caught up in sleep as a status symbol?
The problem with 'aspirational' sleep schedules
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This month, I treated myself to a Garmin smart watch. I’d originally bought it to track my fitness levels while running (the watch monitors your heart rate, so it can tell you when you’re practically on your dying breath, and when you slowly begin to improve), but it has another feature which I’ve become obsessed with: tracking sleep.
I’ve always been a relatively Smug Sleeper. I go to bed early, usually get at least eight hours of undisturbed sleep, then wake up early, too. I always thought lots of sleep meant a rested body, but each morning my Garmin watch tells me a slightly different story. Some mornings, after NINE hours of rest, my body battery is still not at 100%. As someone who’s a shameless perfectionist, this annoys me. What more can I do? How can I rest harder than I’m resting?
Then, the other night, I woke up in the middle of the night needing the toilet. When I got back into bed, a thought popped into my head. “I’d better fall back asleep quickly, or my Garmin will give me a bad sleep score.” No sooner had I thought it than I found it twice as hard to do. In the morning, I had to have a word with myself. You’ve been functioning perfectly well on the sleep you naturally get for over thirty years. Don’t start to obsess over it now.
The thing is, more and more, sleep is becoming an indicator of a successful or happy life. When a man I briefly dated told me he had both insomnia and a problem with sleepwalking, I did wonder if that should tell me something detrimental about his lifestyle or personality. Likewise, when I hear about people who, in their thirties, still sleep away their entire mornings on weekends, I recoil. But what a waste!? Weekends are so precious!! Perhaps unfairly, I, like so many others, tend to take people’s sleeping habits as a reflection of how and who they are. Despite it being none of my business whatsoever, I want people to jump out of bed and seize the day. But I’m starting to wonder if I’m playing into a culture that’s obsessed with associating sleep with wellness.
Those of us who are chronically online will recall that about a month ago, fitness influencer Ashton Hall went viral for a video showing off his morning routine. In the video, Hall wakes up at 3:50 am and cracks on with what appears to be a relatively pointless and time-wasting series of tasks. These include meditating, journaling, icing his face, and then inexplicably rubbing it with a banana peel.
Let’s be honest, the video was probably created with rage bait in mind. Meditation and journaling do not require one to wake up in the middle of the night, nor does a decent skincare routine. But there’s a certain status that comes with waking up earlier and earlier. The actor Mark Wahlberg, for instance, supposedly wakes up at 2:30 am and goes to bed at 7:30 pm, and plenty of lifestyle influencers on TikTok join Hall by waking up in the small hours to prove some sort of point. Look at how together my life is! While you’re sleeping like a pig in shit, I’m awake, monetising and optimising!!
The thing is, I think we’re forgetting two fundamental things about sleep.
The first is that sleep is really good for you. These influencers who wake up in the middle of the night to perform wellness tasks like ice bathing and skincare routines would probably look far younger and more radiant if they simply got a good night’s sleep. Same with middle-of-the-night “morning” yoga. It might look sexier, but it’s no substitute for the restorative treatment your muscles get during sleep.
The second thing is that the timing of sleep is culturally shared. When I watched Hall’s morning routine video, I couldn’t help but think of the controversially-named ‘male loneliness epidemic’. I pictured young boys exhausting themselves trying to emulate Hall’s ‘alpha’ routine, forcing them into bed by 7 pm, then wondering why they have no social life, or no energy to seek one out. It’s antisocial to wedge yourself into a routine that sees you awake when everyone else is asleep. And, unless you’re literally Michelle Obama, quite unnecessary.
From obsessing over my Garmin sleep score to actors and influencers promoting 3 am wake-ups, I wonder if many of us (myself included) need to reassess our relationship with sleep—to stop seeing it as an indicator of something deeper, or a gateway to an aspirational life, and see it for what it is: something we do, sometimes well, sometimes poorly, that gives us the energy to live our messy, complicated, gorgeous lives.
Tangential as hell but I feel like pointing out there's not a lot of jobs where you can even be home by seven, let alone actually asleep by then.
I'm usually up on a non-work day by 8:30 or so; Hazel wakes me cause she's hungry by then.
I don’t really get why anyone would want to get up at 2.30, like the only thing that changes is when they sleep, not necessarily how much they sleep, so why on earth would you want to go to bed at 7.30? You make a great point about loneliness, this trend really is neoliberalism at its worst. (Also, there’s a German influencer that pops up in my feed sometimes who gets up at 3.30 every day to clean her entire flat (she lives alone), which I find bonkers but also fascinating)