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Sleeping, Together: 5 Ways to Build Your Sleep Community
Troubled sleepers have many options now. Because most sleep medications have been shown to have deleterious health effects, nonpharmacological options have mushroomed: multiple technological devices, hundreds of apps that offer meditation and calming music or stories, and Cognitive Behavior Therapy, either self-taught or taught by sleep specialists and therapists. Rather than just nagging people to get more natural sleep, such options can, I argued, allow for playful exploration of possibilities.
A recent study in the Journal of Community Health, however, showed an alarming trend: the number of working people sleeping less than six hours a night increased from 2010 (30%) to 2018 (35%). In 2014 the CDC deemed sleep deprivation an epidemic at the 30% level, so the increase is worrisome for public health and safety. (Think: sleepy health care providers and truck drivers.)
The increase might mean that the pills, the devices, the informing and nagging, the playful exploration, all of it — is falling short.
Arianna Huffington took up the cultural challenge of addressing sleep deprivation in The Sleep Revolution: “Much of our society is still operating under the collective delusion that sleep is simply time lost to other pursuits” (p. 18). Such a collective delusion suggests that social norms might be…
