What is the one thing you do everyday for eight hours? It's not even your job, you only do that Monday ‘til Friday.

It's sleep.

In this article. I will be exploring how modern life has caused us to degrade the one thing we cannot live without. It's subtle. It's all-pervading. It's crucial.

First off, we start with an unappreciation of sleep. In the Pathless Path, Paul Millerd explored how most of us have integrated the belief that work should be the most important thing in our lives. In addition to this false presumption, we've wrongly assumed that in order to make work the greatest, most significant thing in our lives, we can take time from our “sleep budget” to achieve this.

“I never sleep, ‘cause sleep is the cousin of death.”
Nas “N.Y. State of Mind.”

I've got several theories to what the legendary rap artist Nas, had in mind with this line.

He is telling his enemies that he's always aware and they'll never catch him slippin’
He is making a reference to Greek mythology; where sleep is personified with a character called Hypnos and the story is such that he is the brother of Thanatos, who’s character is the personification of death.
“I am grinding so hard at my work or craft, that I never sleep.”

I think most people would perceive this top shelf wordplay to mean the latter.

Hypnos and Thanatos as portrayed in the videogame: Hades, by Supergiant Games

Hustle Culture

Have you heard of hustle culture? It’s an ideology which encourages working flat out at the sacrifice of every other part of our lives.

Working until 9pm on weekdays – check
Checking and answering emails on the weekend – check
Being so burnt out, that you need to recover on the weekends and therefore miss fun things with friends and family – check

I think the basis for hustle culture had noble intentions; “you can achieve your goals if you work hard enough.” But extremes are dangerous and not fun. Although topics like self-care and mental health are growing, I’ve yet to hear a narrative for the other end of the scale, to balance things out.

Sleep has generated a bit of a loser stereotype. It's not sexy (although close to sex), it's not something we find interesting to communicate about, and therefore loses importance through lack of presence in every day language (unless you want to share and analyse your dreams with others) but the real nail in the coffin is…

Sleep isn’t Interesting

Compared to the ceaseless stream of sensational stimulation delivered to our brains from our devices: sleep is boring.

Let me know if you've got notifications enabled on your phone. I must have been in my early twenties when I realised, this constant distraction wasn't doing me good. Imagine as I'm writing the draft of this article on my phone, how I could be constantly receiving notifications which cover my screen and distract me. This would get wildly amplified:

If I'm in group chats with many people
If I'm getting comms from teams at my work
If there’s a high amount of emails coming in that day

Anyone here receiving notification from all three categories? How could I expect myself to finish this piece with any attempt at coherence if I'm constantly distracted?

Here's the kicker. Your phone is not a book. Your phone is a device, built for good, but full of apps, whose designers are not thinking of your well being. They are thinking of the bottom line. Business. It is simply good business if you are constantly on them.

Something I want to avoid with my own project of earning a living my way, is the idea of “profit at all costs.”

To paraphrase Cal Newport: the richest companies in the world, pay the smartest people, the highest salaries – all in order to make their apps as addictive as possible. You can't win. It's you versus an army. It doesn't make sense to take on this fight.

I recently saw a thought-provoking video which presents an explanation for the recent mass firings in the videogame industry. The author claims that this was in fact a business strategy in order to optimise growth. It involves creating inappropriately vast hype around a new product, which spurs investment and huge hirings of new employees to support development. Later in the year, once the hype dies down and the investments slow down, and many employees are let go under the guise of corporate responsibility, in order to prevent damaging the dividends to investors. The speaker states that the videogame industry have been (often unsuccessfully) imitating this practise from the tech industry giants we have all heard of and whose products have become a part of society. I find it interesting how mobile phones and messaging are so proliferent in TV and cinema these days.

Where this all ties up to your sleep is something we innocently do, often as a form of relaxation, that sabotages

“Mother Nature's best attempt at immortality.”
Matt Walker “Sleep is your superpower.”

Using our Phones in Bed

Do you use your phone in bed? It's the time of the day when we are meant to wind down and achieve the highest quality sleep possible because

Quality of Sleep > Quantity of Sleep

But instead, we shoot ourselves in the foot by overstimulating ourselves with the endless and addictive pull of the apps on our devices.

If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product.”
Tristan Harris “The Social Dilemma”

The business model of these often-free services is tracking how you use them, then selling that data to marketers who then use what they know about you, to sell you things by offering you relevant ads. Is there money in this? Below is a list of the richest companies in the world by MSCI. Recognise any? Hint: The names you don’t recognise are the companies which own the ones you have heard of.

In a recent video where I talked about how we can improve the relationship with our smartphones; I noticed that if I sit down to watch a few minutes of YouTube on my lunch break, I would often find myself still there past my lunch break was over. The platform is too good at suggesting to me things that I will find interesting.

I noticed that this doesn’t happen when I sit down to read a book or magazine as they eventually get boring. And that's OK because I can move on to the next thing in my day. Stopping after a healthy amount of reading is easy and natural.

The apps on our phones are designed in such a way that we don’t get to the point when we’ve had enough. Innocently watching a single YouTube video ends in another, in another, in another. If I had access to Instagram, Facebook and others as well, would at best damage my ability to make progress at work and at worst, damage my sleep.

We are Creatures of Habit

It's been well researched how sensitive we are with how we get to sleep. If we get excited in our bed or bedroom, our body remembers that it's a place of excitement and keeps us awake.

We Cannot Change our Physiology

Using screens of any kind late at night stops our bodies from producing the sleep hormone called Melatonin. They stop producing it because they evolved to associate light with daytime.

“Oh, it's still bright outside, I better stay awake.”

We are like the light sensors on the lamps in your garden, we cannot turn off! I talked about this more in my video on Seasonal Affective Disorder. Here's a tip. If for wherever reason you cannot get to sleep. Don't look at your phone to see the time. The light will make you sleep even later.

Damaging your Sleep, Damages All Parts of your Life

I recently challenged myself to wake up at 6am every dayll, but what I did learn is that getting good sleep, resulted in me having a good next day. A kin to investing.

Throughout this challenge I saw that even if I managed to force myself to wake up at 6am, if I didn’t get good sleep – I would be a shadow of my true self. I would lack: energy, vitality, thirst for life, strength, concentration. I'm would be more grumpy, irritable and aggressive.

Imagine a world where everyone is more aggressive, more cynical and less excited about being alive.

What if we've deprived ourselves of good quality sleep for so long that we’ve wrongly confused it with how we should normally feel?
What if the whole world has gotten used to this?
Do you know anyone who doesn't take their phone to bed?

If Nas said all those years ago that sleep is the cousin of death. Then the lack of sleep, is death itself.

Where do We Go from Here

Although in an ideal world the corporations which provide us with these apps should feel a kind of “social responsibility,” I understand there are practicalities of business (and our culture) that make that difficult.

Are alcohol manufacturers responsible for alcoholics? Those apps are in the entertainment business, you cannot hate on them for being good at their jobs.

We cannot go back to how things were nor can we ignore them. So it is up to us to find a healthier and more appropriate balance.

Actionable Steps

What I do is put my phone on airplane mode before going to bed, and switch it back to normal only once I’ve had time to wake up slowly, the morning after
What if you don’t bring your phone to the bedroom at all? Is it time we go back to having alarm clocks?
Customise your phone so it suits your needs. Don’t like notifications? Turn them off. There’s a reason such features are built into your phone. I share my top five in my video about building better relationships with our phones.