Arianna Huffington: The Sleep Revolution, Microsteps, and the Joy of Being Awake [From the Archive]

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0:43This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is the James Altucher Show.

0:54Presenting the archive Classic episodes that remain timeless The raw, unfiltered conversations from the early days In which people shared their failures And showed us exactly how they rebuilt everything from the ground up

1:12I don't want people to make the perfect transition The enemy of the good because what is important is to begin with micro steps. Even if you begin five minutes before you're going to turn off the light, just begin somewhere. Nobody is ever going to do anything perfectly. I mean, who had a homeless teenager write a piece that Harvard happened to read and their admissions office offered him a place at Harvard. He's now in his third year. It's one of my favorite stories about the magic of the internet, how you can bring people together who otherwise would not know of each other's existence.

1:58So I'm here with Ariana Huffington. Ariana, how are you doing? I'm doing great. I got my eight-hour sleep. Did you? I did get eight-hour sleep. And, you know, we're going to talk about your book, The Sleep Revolution, transforming your life one night at a time. I do want to talk about a couple of other issues first, if that's okay. Yes, of course. But I loved your book. I am a pro-sleeper. I will do anything I can to sleep eight, nine hours a night. Nine hours is good for me. I feel I need nine. Is that okay? You think it's too much? No, no. As they say, unless you are narcoleptic or severely depressed, you can over-read, but you cannot over-sleep.

2:33That's good to know. Oh, here's another quick question I have before getting into everything. Sometimes I try this, and I used to do this more as a serious experiment, but now I only do it occasionally. Four hours in the afternoon, four hours at night. You think if I divide it in two, is that okay? Well, here's what science says, that completing all the cycles of sleep requires seven to nine hours for the vast majority of people. You know, you may be needing nine hours, I need eight, that's my optimal, somebody else may need seven, And unless you have a genetic mutation, if you have a genetic mutation, then you can do great with four or five hours.

3:16About 1 % of the population has that mutation. You can test yourself, but really, you don't really need to test yourself. You know that. You wake up in the morning and you feel completely recharged. But what about if within a 24-hour period, I do two phases of sleep? Why would you do that? Sometimes if I'm staying out late, and I'm just hypothetically saying, If let's say I go to sleep from 1 a.m. to 5 a.m. and then from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. It's definitely not optimal. Because when you wake up in the morning, you're not going to be fully recharged. I see. So you're going to have those hours until you go back to sleep.

3:53Where you're going to feel tired. That's where you're going to feel tired. And for me, any hour of your day when you feel tired is really an hour when you're not living life to the fullest, when you're not fully vital, fully present, fully joyful. Well, I want to talk much more about the book, and it's an important book for people to read. But I feel like I would be wasting a little bit of time here. I mean, you're Ariana Huffington. Your name is iconic, The Huffington Post. I want to kind of—I always look for the secret origins of my superhero. So I want to kind of go back to the fact that I'll let you know I just bought a book for$156 on Amazon.

4:33$156. Your book from 1974, The Female Woman, is on sale on Amazon for$156. I bought it. I could have given it to you for free. No, no, no. An author deserves to get paid, although I am sure it's just a collector. I'm sure I'm not being paid anymore for The Female Woman. So you've been active in writing and in media and in public life for so many years, and you've reinvented yourself constantly. You've had your ups and your downs. You've reinvented yourself constantly. what obviously something is driving you that has catapulted you to success on each new reinvention. What has been this driving force since you were a young woman?

5:13And you're still obviously a very young woman, but... I'm no longer a young woman, but I credit my mother for a lot of things because she always made my sister and me feel, even though we're living in a one-bedroom apartment in Athens without any money, She always made us feel that we could aim for the stars and that if we failed, she wouldn't love us any less. And that failure, she used to say, is not the opposite of success, but a stepping stone to success. So a lot of it for me had to do with pursuing things I loved, things I wanted to learn about. You know, I've written 15 books. They're all very different.

5:53They're often about things that I'm exploring and then I'm sharing my discoveries with my readers. and the Huffington Post was born because I really love bringing people into conversations and I could see conversations were moving online and a lot of some of the most interesting people I know were not going to be online unless we made it super easy for them and that's what the Huffington Post did. And so everything springs from what I'm experiencing, what I'm learning, and how do I present it to the world. Well, and a lot of it, though, has been through reinvention over the years. Like, you've gone from book writing to television personality to politics, and politically you've changed.

6:43What has been kind of a low moment through these that resulted in a profound, let's say, a change that really catapulted you to a next level of success? Because often we achieve success from a bottom. And when have you found yourself like thinking, oh my God, I can't believe I'm going through this again? There were always low moments. When you mentioned my first book, which was a big international bestseller and I was 23. So it all came really fast. And then my second book, which was on the crisis in political leadership, because that's what I was interested in, was rejected by 36 publishers. and I ran out of money and I was living in London at the time and I remember sort of walking down St.

7:29James Street rather depressed wondering if I was following the right profession and whether I should do something else and I walked into Barclays Bank just on a whim and asked to see the manager and asked for a loan and he gave it to me even though I had no assets. Why? That wouldn't happen now. Well, I know. It was just one of those gifts that the universe gives you. I felt a little bit like in fairy tales, you know, when sometimes you have the hero or the heroine lost in a dark forest and little animals appear to guide them through the forest. Well, I felt that bank manager was like a little helpful animal helping me through a dark period in terms of decision-making about my life.

8:22And so they gave you that loan. What happened then? What did you do with the money? And then, you know, it made it possible to keep things together for a little longer until I finally got an acceptance and the book was published and it meant I stayed on the path of being a writer, which is what I did most of my life until I launched the Huffington Post. and then I've continued writing books while editing the Huffington Post. Well, let's talk about the Huffington Post. That it seems like originally your motivation for, I don't know if this was your motivation or not, but it seemed like a good way for you to launch the Huffington Post was to get your celebrity, or not celebrity, but powerful friends together to write.

9:07It was a way for you to actually interact with them. Like it was a good excuse for you to call all these people and say, hey, write for my website. And that seems like a good way to launch a site. Many people try to launch successful popular sites but are unable to. You obviously had a great technique for launching a site which is to get well-known people to write for it. Well, the Huffington Post was from the beginning a combination of being a journalistic enterprise where we, as we became profitable, started hiring more and more reporters, editors. We now have over 800 in 15 countries. but also a platform that invited people, some very well-known, as you mentioned, some not at all known, to share their stories, to share their opinions.

9:54And we now have over 100 ,000 bloggers and we are developing a new product to make it easier to blog on half post and hoping to get to one million quickly. and that for me is as exciting as earning a Pulitzer because of our journalism. I love the most amazing voices that we give a platform to at Half Post. I mean, we had a homeless teenager write a piece that Harvard happened to read and their admissions office offered him a place at Harvard and he's now in his third year. It's one of my favorite stories about the magic of the Internet, how you can bring people together, otherwise would not know of each other's existence.

10:44Was there ever a point with the Huffington Post where you felt, oh my gosh, this might not work out? Oh, at the beginning, yes. I mean, the reviews were not very favorable. I remember on day one, one of the reviews was the Huffington Post is the movie equivalent of Gili, Ishtar, and Heaven's Gate all rolled into one. That's pretty harsh. Yeah, absolutely. But I really believed in the vision. I had a great co-founder in Kenny Lair, a great chief technology officer in John Apparetti who went on to build Bass Feed. So we had a great team. And as you know, having been an entrepreneur, teams are very important, especially during the hard times.

11:28And how did you personally deal with the hard times? Did you get anxious? Did you get afraid? What am I going to do next? How are you dealing with it? I've always had a spiritual side to my life. I've always had this belief that, as Rumi said, live life as though everything is rigged in your favor. And I've had so much experience in my life of things that seemed really dark that turned out to be the best thing that could happen. Like what? Like when a man that I was in love with in my 20s that I was with for seven years, didn't want to have children, didn't want to get married, and I really wanted to have children.

12:11So I left him and moved from London to New York. So everything that has happened to me in this country, you know, being married and having my wonderful daughters, having my career, the Huffington Post, my friends, everything happened because, in a sense, a man would marry me and I moved continents. So I really believe that very profoundly. So it doesn't mean that you don't get anxious or afraid, but one of my favorite lines, again, from my mother, is that fearlessness is not the absence of fear, but moving on despite your fears. So speaking of the Huffington Post and moving on, you did sell it for a nice sum, but you're still with the Huffington Post.

12:56Like how have you seen many founders after they sell their company and after a year or two, they leave the company, they move on to different things. You've stuck with it. You continue to build it. How have you seen your life change since basically selling the company and making a significant amount of money and, you know, living out the dream? So always the agreement was that it would continue running the Huffington Post. and a few months ago I signed another four-year contract and the great exciting thing is that the Huffington Post keeps changing so much so it doesn't feel like I'm running the same company because first of all our global expansion has been so significant.

13:40We are all over Europe, in Japan, in South Korea, in Australia. We launched an Arab edition. So that has been a very exciting extension of what we're doing. Video has become more and more important. So also what we're doing in the wellness section has become more and more prominent ever since 2007 when I collapsed from sleep deprivation and started discovering the importance of sleep, which led to the writing of the Sleep Revolution. But long before the writing of the Sleep Revolution, we launched a dedicated sleep section at the Huffington Post. So we feel that increasingly we are adding value to our readers' lives by both, of course, covering news and politics and covering solutions to our problems, but also by covering how we can live our lives with less stress and more fulfillment pretty relentlessly.

14:45And, you know, it's funny. So 2007, you collapsed from sleep deprivation and which, as you mentioned, led to the writing of the book, The Sleep Revolution. You were so successful and you've been so driven all of these years. Why do you think you were feeling, oh my gosh, I still can't sleep. I still have to keep moving. Like sleep deprivation is not a disease, it's a symptom. The disease is some sort of internal motivation where you feel like you're going to be considered weak or not as prolific if you don't just stay awake and keep working. So what was it causing you? What insecurity was causing you to keep moving forward rather than sleep when you needed to?

15:28I think it's actually something else. I think there is a collective delusion that we are all suffering from, that sleep deprivation is essential for achievement. And that's a delusion that millions of people have now discovered are suffering from. It really goes back to the first industrial revolution. In the book, I have an entire chapter on the history of how we came to believe something scientifically false. And during the first Industrial Revolution, we started believing that we actually are like machines, effectively, and the goal with machines is to minimize downtime. Now, human beings are not set up like machines.

16:14So that's what became, for me, the big turning point, you know, after my collapse, when I studied the science of sleep, which I wasn't aware of, and realized that sleep deprivation was in fact the new smoking. But I'm going to call you a little on this because I don't believe it was just a societal thing. Because you yourself are incredibly driven. What was causing you to feel you needed to stay awake so that to the point where you collapse from sleep deprivation? Not everyone collapses. You were very successful in depriving yourself so much of sleep that you collapse from it. So it's not, you kind of take things to extremes in every direction.

16:58This is your personality. I think it is a combination of a sort of perfectionism, which made me believe that, you know, I was building the Huffington Post. It was two years into launching it. We were growing. I felt I really had to be making every decision, making sure everything was perfect. And at the same time, I had two teenage daughters and I was a single mom. So I also wanted to be the perfect mother because I believed I did have the perfect mother. And what, as I say in the introduction to the sleep revolution, what really happened just before my collapse was that I was on college tour with my oldest daughter, Christina.

17:47And we're going around the country from college to college for her to decide what colleges she was going to apply to. and our ground rule was mommy was not going to be on her phone was not going to be on her laptop and that meant that really I could not work during the day I was with my daughter all day and then I would Was that stressful to you? Like you say, two years into launching a company you were probably getting a thousand texts a day Absolutely, yeah So what would happen is that she would go to sleep when we would check into a hotel and I would start working So that went on for a week and I think it was really that that prompted the collapse.

18:28So I think what I learned is that in the end, we are not the best we can be, either at work or with our families, if we don't first, as they say on airplanes, put our own oxygen mask first. Take a quick break. If you like this episode, I'd really, really appreciate it. It means so much to me. Please share it with your friends and subscribe to the podcast, email me at altitra at gmail.com and tell me why you subscribed. Thanks.

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21:24It's like having a teammate whose only job is to help you be better at yours. Go keeps up so you can move forward. With Go working with you, you can show off what you do best. See what Superhuman Go can do at superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com. Sleep is a third of our lives, and yet people discount it so much. So much in literature over the past several hundred years has kind of suggested that sleep is a waste of time as opposed to an incredibly important piece of time that we should pay attention to. So let's just get right into it. Your book's great. It gives so many different formulas and advice on why sleep is important and how to get sleep.

22:06First off, what are the main benefits of sleep? I'll get right into it. So the benefits fall into three categories. The first is health. You know, sleep is the foundation of our health. You know, we've convinced the world that nutrition and exercise are key to our health, and they are. But the first pillar is sleep, nutrition, exercise. These are the three pillars. So if we don't get enough sleep, our immune system is suppressed, which means we are much more susceptible to all the viruses that are around us anyway. And we all know anecdotally when we are run down, we are more likely to catch a cold.

22:50We are more likely to get the flu. Well, that is science. It's not just that it's not an accident. All our inflammatory biomarkers are up. We are more likely to put on weight because sleep deprivation activates the hormones that make us crave all the wrong things, carbs, sweets. We are, as a result, more likely to become obese. So there's a connection between sleep deprivation, obesity and diabetes. We are more likely to be stressed. So there is a connection between hypertension and heart disease, a connection with cancer. And one of the recent findings that I find absolutely fascinating is what happens to our brain when we sleep.

23:34Because when we sleep, it's a time of frenetic activity in the brain. And contrary to what we used to think, that sleep was a time when we effectively put the car in the garage and turn the ignition off. Sleep is the time when we wash away the toxins that have built up during the day. What does that mean? So it's a metaphor, but what is actually happening? Literally, there are toxins that build up among the cells in our brains. And if they are not cleaned up during the night when we sleep, they accumulate. And one of the side effects is difficultly consolidating memories and ultimately Alzheimer's.

24:23In fact, Dr. Nedergaard, who was the scientist behind a lot of these findings, had a great metaphor. I don't know why sleep scientists are amazing with metaphors, but she said... Because they sleep more, so their brain But she said that the brain can either be alert and awake or asleep and cleaning up. She said it's like you can either entertain the guests or clean the house. And so that's really what happens. And that's the health part. The second part is productivity. And that's kind of very ironic because a lot of the reasons, as we said earlier, that people sacrifice sleep is because they think they're going to be more productive if they don't sleep.

25:09Well, the truth is that we are not. That we are much less able to make good decisions. We are much less able to see creative solutions through problems. We are not as engaged in what we are doing. In fact, we are working harder. We're working longer hours, but last year we lost 11 days of productivity because of sleep deprivation. Let me ask you this, though. Take countries where the siesta is a part of the culture, like, I don't know, Spain, Mexico, some of these kind of more Latin countries. How would you compare the U.S. economy to their economies in terms of productivity, given that we are sleep deprived and they're sleeping more?

25:56Well, it doesn't mean they sleep more. I come from one of these countries. They're terrible habits. that are changing. But when I was growing up in Greece, you know, people would go to dinner at 11 o 'clock at night. Then they would go straight to sleep on a full stomach, which as you know, is not a good thing to do. Then they would wake up, have a cup of coffee and a biscuit, no breakfast. And then they would have lunch at one and go to sleep on a full stomach. I don't think this is really the most effective way of living. All right, good point. It's very different if you are tired for whatever reason.

26:36You're jet-logged, your child was sick, and you stayed up at night, and you have a nap. That's a very different thing than having a life which is structured around having heavy meals, light at night or in the middle of the day, and then going straight to sleep. You know, it's interesting about the sleep in the brain. I was reading about Carl Icahn, the hedge fund manager. he would, you know, because of this aspect that we have willpower depletion when we don't sleep. So we start off the day with a certain amount of willpower and we lose it by the end of the day. So he would schedule his negotiations at the end of the day and then he would sleep all day, go into the room.