Sleep is the new Status Symbol

2024 was the year everyone, including myself was obsessed with sleep. And if you weren’t, let me share with you why sleep is one of the most important daily activities to your overall health and how it impacted me. It’s unclear why we collectively started honing in on our sleep this year. Perhaps it’s an age-related generational shift as millennial Girl Bosses enter their 30’s & 40’s and are compelled to market that transitional time in the form of social media content. We all know that lack of sleep hits different once you exit your 20’s. At the same time, the “Clean Girl” aesthetic reached peak saturation in 2021. “That Girl” who drinks wellness drinks, goes to Pilates, sets healthy relationship boundaries, and gets a full night’s sleep enters the zeitgeist and popularizes wellness over being productive. Or perhaps we all share in similar algorithms and watched the same Diary of a CEO episodes where countless scientists, researchers, and high performers attributed their mental discipline and performance capacity to sleep. The reason may be as simple as a shared experience of reprioritization. Having limited options in 2020, sleep may have been a common escape from the stress of an unsettled world that later formed into a long-term habit. All this to say, it’s not cool anymore to be so busy and brag of sustaining yourself on less than 5 hours of sleep. Sleep is a luxury and lack of it is not a badge of honor.

This article will be the first of a two parts. In this entry, I will share context behind the why, why me, why now, and why sleep. If you would like to skip ahead to see the results, lessons learned, tips and tricks I picked up over this year of tracking my sleep, then stay tuned for part two.

Reaching back into my childhood years, I distinctly remember hating sleep. I hated naps and felt like sleep was a waste of time. I wanted to play, to learn, to read; not lay in my bed watching the peach colored static of my eyelids dance on end. Whenever asked what superpower I wished for, never did said I wanted to fly, or be invisible, or have super strength; I always wished I could do away with sleep. Jumping forward to my teen years, I could not have had a worse routine. I would wake up at 5am for school, get ready, take an early elective choir class, sleep through my AP Physics or AP Chem class before spending the afternoon in theatre. I would get home around 6 or 7, take a nap, wake up sometime between 9pm and 1am, eat dinner, fall back asleep, then do that all over again. Mind you, I took 2-3 AP classes my Junior and Senior year and never got through the 3-4 hours of homework assigned each day. It’s a wonder how I kept a solid GPA. My sleep hygiene was better in college, but not by much.

Post-graduation, the first few years into my professional career, my daily routine was less dynamic and forced me into a stable schedule Monday through Friday. However, come Saturday and Sunday, my routine flew out the window. On days I didn’t have to wake up at 6am, I’d sleep till noon, 1pm, or even 2pm. I called these my mini comas as I “caught up” on sleep. The worst part about this routine was every weekend I experienced a crippling headache that was so predictable, sometimes I’d rot in bed attempting to avoid the experience altogether. I share these intimate details with you to convey how no one could have disrespected the healing powers of healthy sleep more, nor needed it most.

After taking an audit of my life, it was clear I had not given sleep the respect she deserves and this charade was nothing short of embarrassing as a 30 year old professional. I resolved to make this my “one thing” for 2024. The “one thing” is a goal setting strategy popularized by a book written by Gary W Keller and Jay Papasan, whereby everything you do must directly or indirectly support your one goal. No diffusion of responsibility to a list of various categories, no shifting priorities depending on the day. One goal to align yourself and your efforts. Just like any goal, it must be smart and you cannot improve what you don’t measure. Starting in November 2023, I tracked my sleep score every night. Every new habit would be measured against my nightly sleep score. I tracked what time I got into bed, what time I fell asleep, my sleep stages, whether I had alcohol, what time I ate, if I attended a yoga class, if I had any remaining daily tasks on my list, etc…

What I learned through this experience I could not have gained in a single month. I was still learning new things about sleep well into my 11th month and stacking those tips onto new habits for a cumulative effect. The first two things I did in this journey was 1. Determine how I was going to track my sleep every night, and 2. Start to learn about sleep. What is the evolutionary or biological purpose of sleep? Why do we need sleep anyway? What happens while we are asleep? What happens when we don’t get enough? It was clear I did not respect sleep. Maybe I would if I better understood it.

12 months later, I am excited now to share with you my journey, the results, and what surprises I learned along the way. Stay tuned.