Why Are We All So Sleep Deprived?

Amrita Ghosh and Bhakti Shringarpure explore the sleep crisis impacting our entire world. Statistics about bad sleep are through the roof and sleep has become more than a self-help or social justice issue; it is actually a subject of human rights concerns. As we go through our daily life either a little fatigued or sometimes dead tired, the big questions here are how, when and why did everything start going wrong with our collective sleep? Sleep advocate, researcher and humanist thinker Ruhi Snyder brings sharp insights to the table and explains that our age of hyper-capitalism and shift work has completely destroyed circadian rhythms. Our society demands nonstop productivity, individualist lifestyles and pressure on the self as structures of communal living have also come apart. Snyder reminds us of a different time when naps were encouraged and doom scrolling on phones did not exist. The episode also brings special attention to the plight of working mothers who have to cope with the double yoke of neoliberalism as well as pervasive patriarchal structures.

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Extra Salty: Not your bag of chips but two women with their fingers on the pulse. Each week, Amrita Ghosh and Bhakti Shringarpure dive deep into a question that’s been floating around in the zeitgeist. Expert guests weigh in. No topic is off limits. Amrita Ghosh is Assistant Professor of South Asian literature and cultural studies at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of Kashmir’s Necropolis: Literary, Cultural and Visual Texts (2023), and co-editor of Tagore and Yeats: A Postcolonial Re-envisioning (2022). She is the co-founder of Cerebration, a bi-annual literary and arts journal. Bhakti Shringarpure is a writer, editor and creative director of the Radical Books Collective. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital (2019) and she recently co-edited the collection Insurgent Feminisms: Writing War for Zubaan Books (2023).