#159 - Extreme Insomnia: You're Killing Yourself If You Don't Believe It

The Atlantic recently published a feature article entitled "Why Americans Can't Sleep." The article was written by Jennifer Senior, and fantastically accomplished writer (2022 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, the 2022 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, and the 2024 National Magazine Award for Columns & Essays) and details not only her own personal struggles with insomnia, but also attempts to dive deeper into sleep science and what she describes as a "public health emergency." In this episode, we will:

• Look at this article in a list of similar articles and books over the decades that detail harrowing personal accounts of insomnia
• Understand why the hook of these articles seems to mirror that of other news/extreme weather, where the thrust of the piece is centered around the insomnia being "the worst" and "the most severe"
• Discuss how failure to differentiate sleep deprivation and insomnia can lead to erroneous conclusions
• Examine how these pieces almost uniformly fail to define insomnia, and in doing so fail to define what a successful outcome/solution would look like. In other words, what does "work" mean?
• Imagine what a truly revolutionary article about insomnia might look like

Produced by: Maeve Winter

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Thanks for listening and sleep well!