GETTING BETTER Sleep

GHAZAL YADAV asks if we have been sleeping long enough and soundly enough. She explores the relationships between work-life balance, toxic productivity, FOMO, social media, and declining sleep quality around the world.

- GHAZAL YADAV

It is no secret that sleep has slowly been pushed lower and lower on society’s priority list of needs. In the United States, adults average 6.8 hours of sleep, a stark difference from 1942, when the average was 7.9 hours. Sleep disorders are on the rise, and melatonin sales in the US have increased by almost 500%, with sales of 62 million USD in 2003 compared to 378 million USD in 2014.

With the onset of 2023, most people will add “sleeping more” to their New Year’s resolutions. As with many of the items on their list, however, this will be easy to give up quite early into the year. To truly reprioritize sleep in our lives, we need to examine the root of the problem: sleep is no longer considered a worthy need.

The concept of work-life balance has dramatically transformed over the past few decades. “Leaving work at work” and fully engaging in our personal lives when we’re at home seems like a distant privilege today. The advent of the smartphone has let work pressure seep into all hours of the day, and most people are expected to remain mentally clocked in after leaving work.

Despite the fact that we all face the repercussions of a perimeterless workplace environment, the modern-day tendency to serve one’s self-interests pushes us to compete with one another and propagate the system, thus compounding the problem. Not only are we now bogged down by an eternal workload, but we feel obliged to cope with it alone. It is now the individual’s responsibility to run the career treadmill and compete, or accept defeat and fall behind. In today’s hypercompetitive environment, choosing to limit one’s ambitions is a death sentence.