Member-only story
Sleep is the Hack
The Sacred Hours of the Night Shift: Reclaiming Rest as Art, Resistance, and Recovery
The soft click of the bathroom door reaches into my dreamstate and on some level I’m aware that my eldest is about to leave for college. The sky is still dark and a snuggle deeper into the warmth of my covers, safe in the knowledge I have another hour.
The insistent grating sound of an alarm from the room next door, it will snooze and return too soon. I sigh but don’t move, determined that the next 38 minutes can still be mine.
The weight of a small person’s stare reaches me next. She knows not to come charging in and unsure of the time she’ll stand there as long as it takes for me to show signs of life. I raise the cover with one arm, she climbs in and I know this tiredness will chase me all day.
We’re all looking for a magic pill, aren’t we? That one simple thing that would make everything click: the right mindset, the right routine, the perfect diet, the money hack, the dream relationship. But what if it were as simple as going to sleep?
That might sound too easy, too obvious. Sleep? Really? But yes, really. And it isn’t just spiritual whisper or self-care fluff — science agrees. The quality of our sleep impacts nearly every area of our lives.