Since I got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, my perception on the relationship between sleeping and health has drastically changed. My condition imposes me to be aware of my body even when I’m not vigil, to understand it and react to its demands when I technically can’t do it. I was already aware of the implications that our contemporary society imposes on us on this matter — of course — but living this experience myself made even more aware of the main character in this equation: productiveness. Contemporary societies teach us and imposes us a concept of sleep and health that implies always being rested as being able to perform better, as if being relaxed would be just another tool for working better. In this part of our collection we present you some studies about this relationship, from emphirical studies on sleeping hours variations during recent years to a semiotic analysis of a sleeping pill add

Labour and sleep go hand in hand and deeply rely on each other. We have surprisingly low understanding of how overworking and undersleeping is affecting the society. We accepted the idea of providing for shareholders and just carried on. We even have a name for working to death – Karoshi. From Japanese of course, the country that is famous for overworked people and poor quality of sleep. Japan has brought us many good things, and we are quick to adapt and steal their best ideas, but should we blindly accept people sleeping in the streets, because they are too tired to get back home? We might just have a better chance at resting since more and more countries adapt a 4 day working week. No one wants to be operated by a tired surgon, or have tired truck drivers on the roads. Poor sleep highly impacts decision making processes which is of huge importance in all of the jobs. We need to proceed with the fight for good workplace practices. Especially in countries with factories and warehouses who are continually exploiting the workers, while we over-consume the cheap quality products with a high and unpaid slave labour. We need to stop and rethink the capitalistic approach to working conditions, and provide access to sleeping rights for those denied power of agency over their rest.

In 1974, when asked about the definition of progress Hannah Arendt said “The law of progress holds that everything now must be better than what was there before. Don’t you see if you want something better, and better, and better, you lose the good. The good is no longer even being measured.”. It is quite clear how these words apply here and now, fifty years later. Class struggle is even more real now than it was before, with individuals being pushed away from peers by late stage capitalism dynamics. Sleep is of course a big part of this equation: used as a commodity to define wealth and being determined by income, heritage and privilege. In this part of our collection we showcase some examples of the effects of living in a specific class — if we still can define them — to the amount and quality of our sleep.

Technology, being an agent of change, has always evolved faster than anything. The way we use it today is an outcome of many factors that have been observed and tested. We think of its impact on every aspect of our lives and yet we forget about sleep. Technology has deeply rooted itself into our beds and nothing can separate us from having an affair. We constantly use technology to rely on being awake and productive. I myself have more than 3 alarms on my phone to properly wake up in the morning. We created a system when you have to use some sort of alarm to wake up. Otherwise you can’t participate in the productive part of society because you won’t wake up on time for work. We are streaming our sleep, we are using apps to track our sleep schedule, we set up alarms, we create content for better sleeping experience, we produce sleep enhancing appliances, we make sleep friendly lights. In this part we show the impact that tech has on sleep. Through social media use to ASMR, you’ll get to know how those things shape your sleep. If you want the full immersive experience you might try to read this part with an asmr video to relax