With finals setting in, our sparse hours of sleep are deeply cherished. Rest is yearned for during the day and eagerly welcomed at night, maybe even christened with a berry-flavored gummy of melatonin. Our greatest reserve of “unproductive” time, the eight hours spent out of commission, is not just a retreat from daytime demands. Being well-rested enhances cognitive ability. However, our efforts to improve sleep quality might be doing more harm than good. While it may appear that sleep is our final expanse of time left unharnessed by the capitalist system, the ritualized use of sleep aids has extracted both consumption and control from nighttime hours.
Our routine escape from productivity is quickly becoming another instrument of coercion by corporations. While sleep was once reserved for personal restoration, the current, common experience of sleep serves a capitalist rhythm. Tech corporations like Meta and ByteDance have designed apps that divert attention from personal control through dopamine production, simultaneously polluting the body’s circadian rhythm with blue light that limits melatonin production. These platforms are intended to confiscate the nighttime hours that were once the individual’s temporal claim. The ideal of a dedicated period of recuperation has been intentionally corroded and stripped of its power of restoration.
With this disruption, it falls upon the individual alone to sanctify their nighttime ritual from the onslaught of stimuli and distractions—a near-impossible mission. Of course, this blight has been identified and concocted into a marketed solution: sleep aids.
The sleep wellness industry grows alongside insomnia. The market for better sleep includes products like temperature-controlled mattresses, sleep trackers and sleep enhancement vitamins. Its problems are typified by the deception of melatonin supplements. A naturally occurring hormone that regulates sleep patterns, melatonin is now commonly consumed in supplement form. The supplement is widely misunderstood to simply induce drowsiness, but it actually causes a reset of the circadian rhythm. When used simply for sleep enhancement, the hormone disrupts and reduces the body’s natural melatonin production. So, taking a melatonin gummy at 9 p.m. on Monday, and then at 1 a.m. on Tuesday, is going to demolish the body’s natural rhythm and diminish sleep quality. While the Sleep Foundation reports that 27.4 percent of people in America take melatonin as a sleep aid, its status as a supplement excludes these products from FDA evaluation. Many have varying dosages and include other unreported compounds like CBD or serotonin. The NIH found that some of these marketed supplements “contained almost 9 mg of melatonin when [t]hey [w]ere supposed to contain 1.5 mg.” Needless to say, this volatility creates health issues for consumers and further destabilizes sleep patterns.
As corrupted sleep increases, the consumption of sleep aids rises. However, these products also create the ideal consumer. Sleep deprivation evokes impulsivity, resulting in an increase of purchases. The nighttime attention market led by technology companies benefits other corporations by creating a reliance on sleep aids and propensities for purchasing. I would venture to say that this cycle of sleeplessness financially benefits every market by increasing rates of consumption.
The sleepless subject is not maximized in its productive ability, but easiest to distill into these comprehensive data markers. These data points allow for more precise content curation that will keep users enthralled with applications, therefore enlisting more time to view sponsors and advertisements.
Technology companies design their products to separate time from perceived reality, distorting our sense of how much time has passed. In the digital space, time becomes mercurial and nebulous, difficult for users to track. Short-form content engrosses hours of attention. Such algorithmic structures further distort mastery over our own time, allowing corporations to reclaim the confused hours for economic gain.
A sleepless subject is unstable, and therefore, controllable. They become compliant—the ideal consumer. Easily entrancing viewers with media and marketing, the attention economy thrives upon exhaustion. It becomes imperative to the capitalist project that the populace is unrested, as isolation and fatigue enhance the algorithmic capture of attention and expedite economic growth. While laying off the melatonin supplements will not upend this exploitative structure, we can confront this confiscation of our time by resting without sleep aids. Defiance of the demand for human distillation into data can start with getting a full night’s rest, no sleep aids needed.