I Hate the Term "Sleep Hygiene!"

 

Did you drag yourself out of bed grumbling and bleary-eyed instead of springing up fresh as a sprig of locally-sourced lemon thyme this morning? Well, I have the solution for you!

Just do an internet search about waking up exhausted and read a few of the jillion articles on "sleep hygiene" that it turns up, and soon a flare of indignation will perk you right up!

On the other hand, it just may depress you and make you even more tired. Because nothing says "blame the victim" like the term "sleep hygiene." You are a dirty person, say the sleep hygienists. You have sabotaged your ability to get refreshing sleep by not following the Rules.

Let's consider those Rules.

1. "The only things you should ever do in your bedroom are sleep or have sex. This is necessary so that your mind associates being in your bedroom with sleeping." Because everyone can afford to live in a large house with multiple rooms and needn't, say, set up a computer desk in the same room where they sleep! Anyone who lives in a studio apartment is practicing poor sleep hygiene and should move into a large multiroom house right away. In other words, wealth is a choice and the non-wealthy are dirty.

2. "Keep your bedroom at between 60-67 degrees." Right. Perhaps you've noticed that heat waves are increasing in frequency? And with them, power crises caused by too many people trying to use fans and air conditioners? And environmentalists are begging us to avoid or at least limit the use of AC, and set it modestly, say at 75 or 76? And chilling down your home to 60 degrees when it's sweltering outside leads to huge electric bills? So hmm, it seems like climate change is making it harder for all of us to sleep, and we should perhaps be doing something about that. But no, the sleep hygienists blame us as individuals for failing to sleep in a chilly room.

3. "Go to bed at the same time every day." Because nobody works a highly irregular schedule handed to them with no choice by a manager the week before--as is more and more common in our contract labor service economy. Sociologists say this is due to the loss of power workers have suffered due to the destruction of unions. But for sleep hygienists, the difficult conditions under which working people labor today are something they should just choose to opt out of, or they will suffer poor sleep quality due to their poor choices.

4. "Avoid exposure to screens for two hours before bed or the light from them will disturb your circadian rhythm. Try reading instead of watching a video." Where do I even start with this one? All the tsking about unplugging from our screen addictions blames us as users for living in the era we inhabit. Many activities moved online when Covid hit, and have remained virtual. We socialize via screens, and for most of us, most of the time, this is actually a positive thing that sustains us, checking in on family and chatting with friends. We read books on screens. We may be forced by employers to check emails or respond to Slack DMs or whatever at all hours. Our consumer capitalist economy is basically dependent on us consuming media and shopping online in our free time. We are even told to monitor our sleep quality using apps by the same sleep hygienists chiding us not to look at any screens for two hours before bed.

5. "Allow natural sunlight to wake you up." Because we all should work a 9-5 schedule, and being a natural night owl is a bad moral choice, and everyone has a bedroom with windows, and nobody needs to use blinds for privacy or safety. Sure.

6. "No food or alcohol for two hours before bed." Because anyone who comes home from a late work shift, shoves food in their mouth, and crawls into bed has made a bad life choice rather than being forced into that by uncaring capitalism. And anyone who has a nightcap before bed is self-sabotaging by using drugs to fall asleep, and should be taking a doctor-prescribed sleeping pill for insomnia instead!

7. "Sleep in a dark, quiet place. Noise and light pollution negatively impact your sleep quality." Um, right. You know, it is very rare that the noise interfering with our sleep is caused by our choosing to blast Norwegian death metal as a lullaby. We live in apartment buildings with people with crying babies. If we live in houses, most of us have neighbors nearby, with their barking dogs and family fights. Many of us live in cities with trucks rumbling by all night, or near airports or train tracks. Peace and quiet today are experienced only by the wealthy in their retreats, or rural isolates. And as for light pollution--didn't you just tell us to wake to natural light coming from windows with little or no curtaining? But now we are supposed to use blackout blinds to avoid seeing streetlights?

And finally, the absolute worst:

8. "Stress interferes with quality sleep. You should eliminate stress from your life. Consider meditation or yoga before bed." What could be more victim-blamey than presenting living with stress as a poor personal choice? Is pandemic uncertainty stressing you out? Just relax already! Are you an immigrant living with gnawing anxiety that having a green card no longer means you won't be deported away from your family and friends? You should have cured that anxiety with yoga! Do you live with job insecurity? An abusive partner? Bigotry and street harassment? Health problems and insufficient health insurance? You should have meditated that stress away!

You know, it sounds like people are dealing with a whole bunch of social problems that are impacting our health. We need social change. To get it, we need social movements: collective education, advocacy, protests, etc. But according to sleep hygiene principles, it's not the world that needs changing, it's us. Apparently we should all just choose to live in large exurban farmhouses, air-conditioned within an inch of our lives but unplugged from the grid when it comes to televisions, computers and phones. We should rise at dawn, having a single cup of tea, working until five, and then close our day with wellness routines of yoga and meditation. Then we can retire stress-free to the bedrooms we use only for sleep and sex, in our surroundings free of noise and light pollution, and enjoy the restorative sleep that is the reward of the deserving.

I mean, if the oligarchs would like to share with all of us that lifestyle of wealth and privilege that allows them to choose whatever home, location and working conditions they like, then fine. But until then, the "sleep hygiene" paradigm is irreparably flawed. It blames the vast majority of us for having our sleep troubled by troubling life circumstances.

Just thinking about all the ways sleep hygiene advice blames victims for their suffering is enough to give you insomnia.