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Sleep Tips: The Secrets of Arianna Huffington’s Strict Bedtime Routine

Sleep deprivation is a major cause of many modern health problems. But Arianna Huffington is on a mission to change all that: she’s calling for a sleep revolution.
by Ben Schuman-Stoler | May 12 2017

After collapsing from burnout and sleep deprivation in 2007, Arianna Huffington threw herself into the latest research on sleep and discovered that the sleepless nights she’d been depending on to build her career had had profound negative consequences on her health. What she learned was transformative: these days, Huffington is so dedicated to getting a full night of sleep, she won’t even bring her smartphone into the bedroom, for fear of accidentally stimulating a bout of insomnia.

Arianna Huffington Sleep Tips

We spoke with Huffington about getting on board the sleep train last year after she published The Sleep Revolution, an account of her personal experiences with sleep deprivation and a passionate call for others to learn from her mistakes.

We think it was a pretty great interview. And since the podcast crew is currently working on some super-special, super-secret new stuff that’s totally inspired by Arianna’s super-simple, super-good advice, we wanted to share the episode with you again today.

We hope you enjoy. But more than that, we hope you get some sleep.

Want to get a taste of the interview before you listen? Here are some of our favorite quotes.

“The way I was living my life – buying into the collective delusion that burnout is the way to succeed – was not sustainable and was actually undermining both my health and my productivity and actually my happiness.”

“There’s a lot of suffering in the world and there’s a lot of suffering that we cannot immediately do anything about. But this is suffering that we actually bring on ourselves. It’s self-inflicted.”

“It’s kind of ironic that there are people who get up super early to go to the gym and one of their goals is to lose or maintain their weight and they’re surprised that, in fact, they’re overeating during the day to try and power through and deal with their sleep deprivation.”

“The fact that three-quarters of startups fail should actually be a warning that maybe if we got enough sleep and made better decisions we’d have better results with our start-ups.”

“Once you taste it, why would you go back. That’s beautiful. You have to write about it!”

“I feel that my generation has given millennials just completely the wrong message about sleep and burnout and it’s our job to help correct that.”

“When you scratch the surface, underneath depression and anxiety, in 80-90% of cases—it’s sleep deprivation.”

If you like what you hear, you can read more about Huffington’s key insights on Blinkist. And that’s just the beginning. For thousands of actionable tips from 2000+ of the world’s most important nonfiction books by authors like Tony Robbins, Richard Branson, Seth Godin, David Allen, and many more, download the Blinkist app now.

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