来一场真正的睡眠革命 Dreaming of a better world

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.

我在数年前发现，创办新闻和博客网站《赫芬顿邮报》(Huffington Post)的记者阿里安娜•赫芬顿(Arianna Huffington)在办公室安装了“睡眠舱”，以便其员工能够小憩片刻。

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?

我感到很意外。毕竟，赫芬顿属于意气风发、生活奢华的全球成功人士群体中的一员，而这些人似乎都忙到没有时间睡觉。对他们来说，能够以最少时间的睡眠生存通常被视为是一种荣誉，甚至还是成功的前提。因此，我纳闷她为何通过公开支持白天睡觉来抵制这种形象？

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).

赫芬顿在2014年出版的《茁壮成长》(Thrive)一书中谈到了睡眠的重要性，她还将于4月出版一本新书《睡眠革命》(The Sleep Revolution)，并在其中列出自己的宣言。她在书中宣称，现代世界最有害的问题之一是长期睡眠不足。因此她主张发起一场社会态度“革命”：我们在某种程度上全都需要认识到，人们完全应该获得足够睡眠——即便是在办公室里——而不用感到不好意思或者因此遭到解聘。

Now, it is hard to argue with the science behind all this — especially if you look at the research Huffington cites in her book. As we all know from experience, too little sleep makes us grumpy, emotional, stressed and befuddled. But, if the scientists are correct, it also harms our health, shortens our lives and makes us podgy (apparently, lack of sleep encourages our bodies to lay down stores of fat).

如今很难反驳这种说法背后的科学，尤其是如果你看了赫芬顿在书中引用的研究的话。我们凭借经验知道，睡得太少的话，人们就会脾气暴躁、情绪化、紧张不安而且昏昏沉沉。如果科学家们说得正确的话，它还会损害我们的健康，缩短寿命，并让我们变胖（据说，缺乏睡眠促使我们的身体堆积太多的脂肪）。

But what really fascinates me about Huffington’s book is something she does not explicitly discuss: sleep (or the lack of it) as a cultural marker of social status and success. A couple of centuries ago, sleep in the western world was something associated with wealth and privilege. If you were poor, you had to work so hard to survive that spending endless hours in bed was not an option (the working “day” in Victorian-era factories often lasted 14 hours).

但是真正让我对赫芬顿的著作感兴趣的是她没有明确讨论的事情：睡眠（或者睡眠不足）作为社会地位和成功的文化标志。两个世纪前，在西方世界，睡眠是某种与财富和特权有关的东西。如果你是穷人，你不得不努力工作以维持生活，长时间赖床不是选项（在维多利亚时代，工厂的工作“日”通常持续14个小时）。

However, in the early 20th century, it briefly seemed as if the modern world would deliver a democracy of sleep: economists such as John Maynard Keynes predicted that machines would replace human labour to such a degree that everyone would have plenty of leisure time — and slumber.

然而，在20世纪初，现代世界一度似乎将产生一种睡眠的民主体制：约翰•梅纳德•凯恩斯(John Maynard Keynes)等经济学家预测，机器将大规模取代人类劳动力，每个人都会有大量时间休闲和睡眠。

The 20th-century technological revolution actually created a bifurcated world: some people lost their jobs and were pushed into enforced “leisure”, while others became even more frantically busy. By the end of the 20th century, cultural values around sleep had flipped: if you were part of the successful elite, in a professional sense, it was assumed that you were too busy (or important) to sleep. Publicly asking to snooze was for wimps.

20世纪的技术革命实际上创造了一个分叉的世界：一些人失去了工作，无奈之下被迫“休闲”，同时其他人则忙得不可开交。到20世纪末，围绕睡眠的文化价值观颠倒过来：如果你是成功精英人士中的一员，从专业意义来说，人们会认为你过于忙碌（或者过于重要）而没有时间睡觉。公开要求小憩是懦弱无能的表现。

But now those cultural markers are shifting again. For a world where sleep deprivation is common, endless sleep is the new scarce commodity — and thus a modern “luxury” item that marks out the 1 per cent, just like whitened teeth or organic food. Spending time in bed demands a well-planned, well-balanced lifestyle, and that itself requires money (or it does if you live in an urban centre or have a career).

但如今那些文化标识再次转变。对一个人们普遍睡眠不足的世界来说，睡足是新的稀缺商品，因而是1%人群专享的现代“奢侈品”，和美白牙齿或者有机食品一样。睡足需要详尽规划、完美平衡的生活方式，这本身需要金钱（或者如果你居住在市中心或有事业也行）。

Not surprisingly, a new type of conspicuous consumption has emerged. The rise of wearable health gadgets, such as the Fitbit or Jawbone, means that the elite can now record how long they have slept, and tell others. Instead of boasting about how little sleep they have had, today’s hedge fund managers or media moguls are more likely to point to their wrists and proudly declare they had six hours of REM-type sleep.

并不意外的是，一种新的炫耀性消费出现了。Fitbit或Jawbone等可穿戴健康设备的兴起意味着，精英人士现在可以记录他们睡多长时间，并告诉其他人。如今的对冲基金经理或者媒体大亨更可能指着他们的手腕，并自豪地宣称，他们有6个小时的快相睡眠，而不是夸耀他们睡得多么少。

Is this progress? In some ways, yes. I agree with Huffington’s argument that most of us need more sleep, and welcome her attempts to spark a shift in social attitudes. I also love the idea that companies should make sleep pods widely available. As she says, more sleep is a “way to a more productive, more inspired, more joyful life”.

这是进步吗？从某些方面来说是的。我同意赫芬顿的观点，即我们大多数人需要更多的睡眠，并欢迎她希望促进社会态度转变的努力。我也赞赏如下想法，即公司应该普及睡眠舱。正如赫芬顿说的那样，更多的睡眠是“提高生产率、激发灵感以及让生活变得更快乐的方式”。

But if we are going to create a healthier world, we need to find a way to ensure sleep is not just a scarce commodity that only the super-wealthy — or unemployed poor — can indulge in. So my personal utopian ideal would be a world where sleep pods are found not just in the Huffington office but on every urban street corner; and are used not just by the 1 per cent but everyone else too. That would be a true “sleep revolution”. Or a dream for a healthier world.

但如果我们要想创造一个更为健康的世界，那就需要设法确保睡眠不仅是一种只有超级富豪（或者失业的穷人）才可以享受的稀有商品。因此我的个人乌托邦梦想将是这样一个世界，即睡眠舱不仅在赫芬顿办公室有，而且在每个城市的街头巷尾都有；不仅1%的人可以使用，而且其他所有人都可以使用。那将是一场真正的“睡眠革命”，或者是对更健康世界的梦想。