Sleep. I'm glad the Times put this study together, because it shows me just how dumb I am for not sleeping well on a regular basis.

It also gives me the quote of the day:

All good nights of sleep are alike. Each miserable night of sleep is miserable in its own way.

So true! Well not that I've had many good nights of sleep to compare.

The article also appears to vanity, if by "vanity" I mean "health".

Quinn delivered a galvanizing pep talk on selling better sleep to an industry convention in April. He cited new research linking insufficient sleep to poorer metabolism and appetite control. “Are you telling me that we can say, as an industry, ‘If you sleep better you might be able to lose weight?’ ” he said as a slide reading “Chronic sleep deprivation could be making you fat!” filled the wall behind him. Plus, he continued, a bad night of sleep makes you look worn out. “We have a product that can make you look good, and we never talk about it to anybody!” Quinn later told me, “Create the pain, then give them the solution.”

There's also a fascinating little bit about how we used to sleep. Apparently the done thing before the 19th century was to sleep in two "shifts" of a few hours, with an hour or two betweeen of sort of being awake. Sounds quite appealing, though their reasons for doing so probably had more to do with having to tend fires and being in bed with a half-dozen other people.

Labels: science