in the past For months, I fell asleep every night listening to the voice of a woman named Teri or someone like her. I climb into bed in the middle of the night, open some proprietary health app on my phone, tap the “sleep hypnosis” section, and nonchalantly select one of the hundreds of available tracks. Then I lay the phone face down on the pillow, next to my head, and focus on the sound in my ear. I often get distracted before the recording is over. I haven’t slept this well in years.
I don’t know who Terry is. Her bio identifies her as a “Hypnotherapy and NLP Trainer.” According to a small study, NLP stands for something called neuro-linguistic programming, a pseudoscientific approach to hypnotic instruction that is somewhere between life instruction and magical thinking. On other nights, I’ll choose Dorothy, a “licensed psychotherapist and meditation teacher,” or Anais, a “neural awareness coach.” From a scientific standpoint, I haven’t found much evidence that these methods are effective for treating insomnia. The tracks are cheesy—often with bells or pattering rain in the background—and the whispered clichés sound silly when I listen to them during the day.
I do not care. The application works. These invisible voices provide a much-needed transition—from day to night, from speech to silence, from socialization to solitude. Perhaps most importantly, they allow me to escape my technology-saturated life and sleep.Ironically, this transition into sleep is possible go through My cell phone. At the moment when I should break away from it and take a break, I become more and more attached to it. This is perhaps the paradox of the great meditation teachers who tell you that in order to find peace you must give up trying to achieve it.
any doctor, any Anyone on the Internet or on the street will tell you that the first line of defense against insomnia is to develop a calm nighttime routine. In technical terms, this is called “sleep hygiene.” The top rules for sleep hygiene include: keeping a strict bedtime and wake-up time; cutting out caffeine, alcohol, and food before bed; and staying away from all screens at night.
health is a persuasive word. It is no coincidence that the predecessors to these rules were invented in the Victorian era as part of a Puritan response to technological interventions in everyday life considered “unnatural” such as the telegraph, radio and electric light, which were accused of The new “epidemic” of high-society insomnia. In the century and a half in between, these sleep-disrupting technologies have been incorporated into the precious, loathsome, all-consuming items in the palm of my hand. I force check for updated objects. Objects that transmit the voices of my employer and my loved one (now my hypnotist) into my ears. Something I stroke in my coat pocket as I walk down the street. It’s almost impossible for me to convince myself that the object closes at 10pm.
I’ve had poor sleep quality for as long as I can remember, and have had terrible sleep quality for the past few years. I followed the usual course of action for solutions: sleep studies, various types of therapy, dozens of medications. I changed my diet, worked out to exhaustion, and chomped on a handful of melatonin gummies. But in my experience, both sleep doctors and health professionals are particularly obsessed with screens, and that’s telling. The message I got was that all of the social, economic, and political causes of my burnout and sleeplessness could be remedied by personally imposing a tougher approach to screens. They urge to keep phones locked in boxes. Install an application that can close other applications. Write an automatic reply. Set boundaries. Exercise self-control!
To real insomniacs, these tips and tricks might sound like a cruel joke. From the r/insomnia subreddit: “You think normal people have to put their phone in another room, read for 20 minutes, never drink coffee, use a humidifier, listen to calming music for 20 minutes, take a hot shower and don’t look at it afterwards Screen at 8pm just to get some sleep? Fuck sleep hygiene missionaries.” Or: “Insomnia. Serious. Don’t tell me about sleep hygiene, it’s an emergency.”
Aside from alarmism about the health effects of connectivity, from too much light at night to technological necks, I also found remnants of a deep cultural anxiety dating back to bourgeois Victorian moral panics. It is still believed that the telephone is an artificial object that forces us to live against our true nature – as if there is a pure, unadulterated, technology-free existence to return to. If I can get away from the screen, I’ve been conditioned to believe that I can find myself again. I can get in touch with my body, I can slow down, I can rest.
