We Turned Sleep Into Homework. Now We’re Losing Sleep Over It

A few months ago, a new patient sat down in my office and started talking before I had finished my hello. She hadn’t slept well in months, and it showed. She was short with her husband, tired at her desk, and dreading her own bed as if it had betrayed her. My patient turned her phone toward me the way you would hand over bad bloodwork. A sleep score: 61 out of 100. “Look how bad it is,” she said.I see it all the time. An ordinary bad week or two of sleep turned serious by constant monitoring. For a growing number of my patients, rigid discipline and the effort to sleep perfectly can tip a rough patch of poor sleep into a diagnosis of clinical insomnia.How did we get here? For decades, sleep was an afterthought. It was the first thing people cut when ambition or parenting demanded more. Thomas Edison called sleep “an absurdity, a bad habit,” and believed his lightbulb would free us from needing it at all. Then, over the last decade, we swung hard the other way. Arianna Huffington’s collapse and Matthew Walker’s best-selling book Why We Sleep turned sleep into a public-health alarm. Wearables placed a number on what used to be a feeling, and adequate sleep became a status symbol. Wit...