One of the more annoying habits of highly successful people is their tendency to advertise how little sleep they need. Former Yahoo boss Marissa Mayer can operate on four hours, Apple CEO Tim Cook is at the gym by 5am and designer and film director Tom Ford gets three hours a night, and keeps Post-it notes by his bed in case he wakes up with an idea.
Stealing an extra 20 minutes in bed in the morning is practically taboo in the world of high-stakes business, where snoozing has long been equated with losing.
Arianna Huffington has been on a mission to destigmatise sleep after collapsing from exhaustion 10 years ago.
Describing the incident as a “wake-up call”, the Huffington Post founder wrote a book called The Sleep Revolution and launched Thrive Global, which provides workplace wellness training for corporations. “That idea that sleep is somehow a sign of weakness and that burnout and sleep deprivation are macho signs of strength is particularly destructive,” Huffington says. “So changing the way we talk about sleep is an important part of the culture shift.”
But it’s not just those at the top of the corporate ladder who feel under pressure to power through. Most of us are getting less sleep. While sufficient sleep is generally defined as between seven and nine hours, a National Sleep Foundation survey [pdf] found the average adult in the UK is getting just six hours and 49 minutes, in the US that’s six hours and 31 minutes, and Japan is worse again at six hours and 22 minutes.
“There’s a Gallup poll from 1942 that demonstrated that the average adult was sleeping 7.9 hours, so I think there’s been a remarkable lopping off of sleep time,” says Matthew Walker, neuroscientist and author of Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams.
Walker says we are in the midst of a “global sleep-loss epidemic” and that demanding work schedules and commutes are among the contributing factors. “Longer commute times and longer hours are squeezing sleep almost like vice grips,” he adds.