British GQ - 09.2019

O

n a Wednesday afternoon,

in a darkened room on the

ground floor of the vast

PricewaterhouseCoopers build-

ing on the bank of the Thames,

sleep expert Dr Guy Meadows took to the

stage and set about giving the crowd night-

mares. He started, in fairness, with a joke.

“If you are feeling tired today,” said

Meadows to the hundred or so PwC employ-

ees, “this is probably the one talk where it’s

perfectly OK to have a good nap.”

The crowd chortled. Sleep experts don’t

have too many jokes in their locker, but this

was a hardy perennial and Meadows – a slight

man with excitable eyebrows and the forced

bonhomie of a stage hypnotist – explained

he was the cofounder of The Sleep School. It

had programmes for schools and parents, he

said, but today was its increasingly popular

“professional” programme – for businesses.

The past decade, he said, had seen a “tidal

wave” of new research all showing the

multifaceted importance of sleep to human

performance and so he set about explaining

how they could use it to – quite literally –

sleep their way to the top.

Sleep research is often only defined in the

negative – there’s no benefit to sleeping more

than you need (actually, it’s often bad for you)

• so Meadows began to explain the mental and
  physical catastrophes in store if you slept less.
  First, weight. In the past six years, he said,
  researchers had found that cravings for junk
  food increases 45 per cent for the underslept.
  Lack of sleep swells the hormone for appetite
  and, worse, limits the hormone for satisfac-
  tion, so we don’t feel full even after eating. The
  result: “We don’t know when to stop eating.”
  He moved on. In the past seven years, he
  said, researchers discovered that cerebrospinal
  fluids were pushed up during the night in order
  to wash out all the toxins the brain created
  by thinking during the day. The degradation
  of this process – naturally with age, unnatu-
  rally by simply sleeping less – dramatically
  increases the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s.
  Two women next to me shared a glance.
  Finally, stress management. “Have you ever
  heard of the phrase ‘getting out of the bed
  on the wrong side’?” he asked the crowd.
  They had. Research found that your stresses
  through the day are replayed during REM
  sleep at night (as dreams), but with the stress
  hormones switched off. “So it allows us to take
  perspective and reset ourselves emotionally.”
  Far from simply being something you did in
  order not to feel tired, sleep was the ultimate
  wellness cure. As Meadows put it on stage,
  “It’s the most powerful performance enhancer
  known to humankind!”
  The assembled PwC staff had completed a
  survey: they wanted to know how sleep could

help them get ahead at work. Most said they

wanted to increase their attention to detail

(sleep, naturally, was good for that). Many

wanted to increase their problem-solving

(“Have you heard the expression ‘sleep on

it’?” Meadows asked. They had).

Meadows mentioned cutting-edge advances

currently taking place and how they could

help at work too. In the US, he said, research-

ers were looking to develop technology within

the next decade that would let us inter-

act with our dreams (“Assisting things like

problem-solving”). With other advances, “You

could merge into someone else’s dream,” like

video-conferencing.

For now, the solutions were more prosaic.

Caffeine (none after midday), alcohol (not

too much) and any form of screen (the blue

light makes our brains think it’s daytime; try

to have at least a half-hour break before bed)

were bad. A regular sleep routine: good.

“But I don’t want to scare you!” he insisted.

This was true. Of that tidal wave of recent

audience alone, 35 per cent said they weren’t

satisfied with their sleep (the national average

is much higher: 63 per cent). They got, on

average, six-and-a-half hours’ sleep a night

(the national average is six hours and 19

minutes). More than half of the employees

said they don’t wake up refreshed.

As our attention economy reaches its nadir,

we live in a world that demands our gaze

and keeps it as long as it can. Take your pick

from the dopamine rush of social media, the

endless scroll of the internet, the auto-play

of streaming services, an always-on work

culture or the steep rise in anxiety: the end

result is the same. We’ve never known more

about the impact of sleep and yet we’ve never

slept less. We are permanently entertained.

On stage, Meadows said the UK was

undergoing a nationwide “sleep depriva-

tion experiment”. But it’s not just us. In

developed nations, two-thirds of adults

don’t get the recommended eight hours.

The problem is so acute that in 2017 the

World Health Organization declared it a

global “sleep-loss epidemic”.

And so, recently, something else has hap-

pened too, of which Dr Meadows’ Sleep School

was part. Into this world of late-capitalism

sleeplessness, business has seen the money

to be made in helping us sleep.

We now have all manner of sleep gurus

and sleep clinics, corporate classes and sleep

retreats. Whole holidays exist for you to

be unconscious as much as possible. We

can track our sleep via apps and mats and

rings that rank and rate our sleep. We can

enhance it by white noise and pink noise and

possibly some other colours too. Mattress

companies were suddenly tech start-ups. Tech

start-ups were suddenly mattress companies.

There are high-tech pillows and mood-altering

blankets and “smart” pyjamas endorsed by

NFL stars. One mattress scolds you for not

lying on it enough. There are bestselling

sleep books, dedicated sleep magazines

and a sleep podcast – Sleep With Me, now

downloaded around two million times a

month – that hopes you’ll miss how it ends.

It is an industry now estimated to be worth

more than £100 billion, around the same value

as the entire creative industry to the UK.

Finally, and perhaps inevitably, after cen-

turies of simply concentrating on our waking

hours, capitalism is coming for our sleep.

B

efore he became a secret

weapon of Manchester City and

Liverpool – and specifically the

most recent season that saw

them both come close to 100

points in the Premier League along with

bagging every cup between them – Nick

Littlehales was in the mattress game.

‘Sleep is

the most

powerful

performance

enhancer

known to

man’

research, some results were far worse. He

didn’t tell them, for instance, that routinely

sleeping less than six or seven hours so demol-

ishes your immune system that it doubles your

risk of cancer; or that regular short sleeping

also increases the likelihood of your coronary

arteries becoming brittle and blocked, leading

to cardiovascular disease, strokes and conges-

tive heart failure; in the spring, when most

people lose an hour’s sleep due to daylight

savings, the rate of heart attacks increases by

a quarter. The less you know about the effect

on your sex drive the better.

Put simply: the less you sleep, the less you

live. Devotees of the mantra “I’ll sleep when

I’m dead” will likely get their wish. Diet and

exercise are commonly thought to have the

biggest impact on health, but the reality is

it’s not even close. If you’re missing sleep

to get up for the gym, you’d be better off

staying in bed.

And yet, as Meadows put it on stage,

“Tiredness is now the new norm.” Of his

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182 GQ.CO.UK SEPTEMBER 2019