Are We Treating Sleep Like Another Productivity Tool?
For something that is supposed to be restful, sleep has become surprisingly stressful.
Many of us go to bed wearing a device that tracks every toss and turn, wake up to a sleep score, analyze our recovery metrics over coffee, and spend the day wondering whether last night's numbers explain why we're feeling a little sluggish. We invest in blackout curtains, magnesium supplements, red light devices, mouth tape, cooling mattresses, sleep trackers, and evening routines designed to help us squeeze every possible benefit out of our time in bed.
Sleep, once a basic biological necessity, has become another category of self-optimization.
This shift isn't entirely surprising. We live in a culture that encourages us to measure, improve, and maximize nearly every aspect of our lives. If there is a better way to eat, work, exercise, recover, or age, we're told we should find it. Naturally, sleep has become part of that equation.
But while reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, we found ourselves returning to a different question entirely: have we become so focused on what sleep can do for us that we've forgotten what sleep actually is?
Because the central message of the book isn't that sleep makes us more productive. It's that sleep is one of the most fundamental biological processes that makes us human.
When Rest Became Recovery
Not long ago, sleep was often treated as an inconvenience. The most successful people were assumed to be the ones functioning on the least amount of it. Pulling all-nighters was a badge of honor. Being busy signaled ambition. Sleep was what happened after everything else on the to-do list was finished.
Today, the conversation has shifted dramatically.
The rise of longevity culture, wellness technology, and performance optimization has transformed sleep into one of the most talked-about pillars of health. We now understand far more about the relationship between sleep and cognitive function, emotional regulation, metabolic health, athletic performance, and long-term disease risk than previous generations did.
That shift is undoubtedly a positive one. As Walker explains throughout Why We Sleep, sleep plays a critical role in nearly every system of the body. During sleep, the brain consolidates memories, processes information, regulates hormones, supports immune function, and performs countless restorative processes that simply cannot happen while we're awake.
The problem is that somewhere along the way, many of us began viewing sleep through the same lens we use for everything else: performance.
Instead of sleeping because our bodies require it, we increasingly sleep because we want better workouts, sharper focus, higher productivity, improved skin, healthier aging, and greater resilience.
Those benefits are real. But they are also secondary.
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