As one of the leading pioneers in the digital media revolution and a best-selling author several times over, it’s safe to say that Arianna Huffington knows a thing or two about success. But after stepping down as editor-in-chief from her flagship Huffington Post in August, the 66-year-old is trying to change the way we think about what success looks like.
With the launch of her new company, Thrive Global, Huffington aims to preach the importance of self-care to highly-driven, entrepreneurial, type-A personalities — including the simple, basic importance of getting a good night’s sleep. Coinciding with the release of her latest book, The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time, Thrive Global will serve as an online wellness resource, including corporate coaching programs and a wealth of tools and gadgets that promote restful sleep.
“The deep cultural belief that if you are a driven, smart person who wants to succeed you just have to sacrifice your health, your relationships, everything along the way is unbelievably deeply embedded — and it just isn’t true,” Huffington told Fortune recently.
Of course, the idea that a full eight hours of sleep is positively correlated with higher well-being is nothing new. But it’s one that Huffington herself learned the hard way. In 2007, two years into the launch of Huffington Post, she suffered a collapse from exhaustion that left her with a broken cheekbone and stitches across her eye. After that, she pledged to take better care of herself — and found that it helped her productivity, too.
More and more corporate magnates are tuning in to the importance of self-care as a productivity tool. Some of them, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, are even lending a hand to the Thrive Global cause, speaking at events and endorsing the company’s products.
“As any of us go through our lives, we don’t need to maximize the number of decisions we make per day,” Jeff Bezos wrote in a piece for the Thrive Global launch. “Making a small number of key decisions well is more important than making a large number of decisions. If you short change your sleep, you might get a couple of extra ‘productive’ hours, but that productivity might be an illusion.”
In fact, some studies suggest that a lack of sleep is currently costing the U.S. economy $411 billion a year in worker productivity losses. Combined with the fact that insufficient sleep can also weaken your immune system, and we could be looking at an additional 200 million days of diminished productivity and 75 million worker absence days from annual influenza illnesses, too.
Between Thrive Global’s online support resources and its products, which include everything from a smartphone charging “bed” to meditation guides to an office-friendly napping pod, Huffington has made it her new mission to help the world sleep better. And perhaps in turn, make the world a better place.
“If we can prove that, in fact, when you put your own oxygen mask first, as they tell us on airplanes, you are going to be more productive and more creative, then we’ll be able to shift the culture faster,” Huffington said. “The shift is already happening. It’s not like we are going to be creating it. It’s just a question of accelerating it.”
