A few years ago, I discovered that Arianna Huffington, the journalist who created the news and blog website the Huffington Post, had installed “sleep pods” in the office to enable her employees to snooze.
I was surprised. After all, Huffington is part of that tribe of glamorous, jet-setting, global overachievers who seem far too busy to find time to sleep. For them, surviving on minimal slumber is usually taken as a badge of honour, if not a prerequisite for success. So why, I wondered, was she bucking this image by publicly embracing daytime sleep?
Having touched on the importance of sleep in Thrive (2014), Huffington is publishing a new book next month, The Sleep Revolution, which lays out her manifesto. In it, she declares that one of the most pernicious problems in the modern world is chronic sleep deprivation. So she is campaigning for a “revolution” in social attitudes: somehow we all need to accept that it is entirely desirable for people to get enough sleep — even in the office — without suffering shame (or the sack).