Woke: When will we finally sleep?

Writer: Emilia Meenakshi Emmrich
Editor: Zhifan Ye
Photographer: Romy Newman

It’s a truth widely acknowledged that the students of Havergal College are, generally, desperately in need of sleep. The reasons for our collective exhaustion are varied, as are our coping mechanisms. Like many my age, I often find myself  inundated with Internet advice on the latest ‘soothing balm’, ‘essential oil’, or ‘meditation app’ that will ‘totally help me fall asleep within seconds, I promise.’ These offerings, however, come with a hefty price tag. Sleep is considered one of the most individual, psychological of struggles, a private battle to be overcome with the shiniest new offering of the self-help industry. As corporate wellness has found out, restlessness pays. This is not a condemnation of sleep gadgets, let alone those that sleep easier because of them, but a critique of the way these trends shape our discourse around sleep.

 Even here at Havergal, we usually talk about sleep as a quirk of our lifestyles. The origin of our restlessness is typically attributed to personal and seemingly inevitable workloads, if not the self-inflicted horrors of endless scrolling or procrastination. Sleep deprivation can be easily treated as the result of personal choices, not of a societal failing. 

Yet, there are issues of privilege and oppression which are deeply interlocked with sleep, issues that no white noise machine can drown out. Undeniably, sleep is a class issue. If time is money, hours spent resting versus commuting or working a late shift can determine whether or not a working-class family makes rent that month. When workers struggle to sustain themselves off of minimum-wage jobs, sleepless nights become a matter of survival. This is not to mention the quality of sleep, which depends heavily on the safety, noise levels, and light pollution within one’s surroundings, which ultimately reflect their living conditions. Particularly for the unhoused population, a good night’s rest is a luxury that a growing number of people in Toronto cannot afford. 

Sleep’s relationship to class also has an inseparable connection to race, as migrants, Indigenous people, and people of colour as a whole in Canada are particularly vulnerable to living in poverty. Though limited research is available on the connection between racialisation and sleep deprivation among Canadians, research in the United States has shown that Black, Chinese-American, and Latin-American people have higher rates of sleeplessness than white people, likely due to both poverty and added stressors that come with racialised oppression.

Many of us at Havergal have the privilege of checking out of sleepless nights as soon as March Break rolls around, making it easy to forget how intersecting hierarchies shape who has the privilege to sleep and whose sleeplessness is considered business as usual.