How would you describe your relationship with sleep? For many, it is a touchy subject with lots of people admitting they don’t get enough sleep or sleep as well as they would like to. Well in The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time, Arianna Huffington is on a mission to help everyone transform their relationship with sleep and get a good night’s sleep.

Arianna Huffington is most famously known for creating The Huffington Post and it was during her time as co-founder and editor-in-chief of Huffington Post that Arianna woke up in a pool of blood after having collapsed. Rightfully so Arianna wanted to know why she had collapsed and after investigation, it turned out to be the result of exhaustion. She hadn’t been getting enough sleep. This set Arianna on a journey to transform her relationship with sleep and now she is on a mission to help everyone else do the same thing.

Like Arianna, a big reason why lots of people don’t get enough sleep is because they believe that losing sleep is part of the price you pay for achieving success. She states “If we don’t continue to chip away at our collective delusion that burnout is the price we must pay for success, we’ll never be able to restore sleep to its rightful place of importance in our lives”.

A lack of sleep impacts our lives in so many ways and the book shares the impact on our productivity, weight and mental health. In certain industries, a lack of sleep doesn’t just have an implication of your life but the lives of others. From pilots and train drivers to doctors there are people who have jobs that require a decent night’s sleep but they don’t get it.

Not having enough sleep isn’t bad news for everyone and in the book, the sleep industry is discussed. As someone who has never really known much about sleeping pills, I found this chapter fascinating. The side effects are outrageous so it is unbelievable how many people around the world take them. Whilst the book is full of science there is also a mixture of sleep history and then conversations about dreams and nightmares.

Arianna pinpoints the industrial revolution as a key moment when our relationship with sleep changed. She writes “To support this new way of working and compel workers to go along with it, going without sleep was cast as an act of masculinity, a sign of strength.”

The second half of the book (The Way Forward) concentrates on what we should be doing now. It is great knowing we need more sleep or better sleep, but what can an individual do to physically make it happen.

This section walks you through best practices to do with light, blue light, temperature, physical exercise, alcohol, food, what to wear and night time routines.

In this section, Arianna also brings up a topic that I feel many people may be avoiding dealing with, which is the dangers of sleeping with a partner. She writes “We now realise that the primary night time danger to our sleep is all too often coming from inside the bedroom, in the form of the partner with very different sleep habits.”

Even if you are generally a good sleeper there are certain times when we have no choice but to break our usual sleeping cycle and Arianna even has some advice to help travellers cope with the joy of changing time zones and experiencing jet lag.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Overall, I really enjoyed The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time. Arianna is clearly a well-informed woman and thoroughly researches a topic before writing about it. I loved the walk through the history of sleep and was fascinated by some of the personal accounts from athletes and how they prioritise sleep.

One thing to note is that given the size of the book the amount of advice is pretty limited. If you are truly someone who is looking for a good night sleep then there might be a more practical book to use.

If you like the sound of The Sleep Revolution you can buy a copy for yourself by clicking here.

This book was read as part of PropelHer’s Book, which is a women-only non-fiction book club. If you are an ambitious women who want to read books to support your personal development and professional success then you can find out more about PropelHer’s Book Club at www.propelher.co.uk/bookclub.