Mandy Oaklander | September 26, 2026

If you’ve ever tracked your sleep, you know how stressful the experience can be. Every wake-up feels like a failure. In his new piece for TIME, sleep psychologist Joshua Tal explains how an unhealthy preoccupation with achieving perfect sleep can produce the insomnia it was meant to prevent.

TODAY’S TOPICS

Stop grading your sleep
What’s in a dermatologist’s bathroom?
The right way to get something out of your eye

SATURDAY READ

We turned sleep into homework. Now we’re losing sleep over it

By Joshua Tal

Malte Mueller—Getty Images

A few months ago, a new patient sat down in my office and started talking before I had finished my hello. She hadn’t slept well in months, and it showed. She was short with her husband, tired at her desk, and dreading her own bed as if it had betrayed her. My patient turned her phone toward me the way you would hand over bad bloodwork. A sleep score: 61 out of 100. “Look how bad it is,” she said.

I see it all the time. An ordinary bad week or two of sleep turned serious by constant monitoring. For a growing number of my patients, rigid discipline and the effort to sleep perfectly can tip a rough patch of poor sleep into a diagnosis of clinical insomnia.

How did we get here? For decades, sleep was an afterthought. It was the first thing people cut when ambition or parenting demanded more. Thomas Edison called sleep “an absurdity, a bad habit,” and believed his lightbulb would free us from needing it at all. Then, over the last decade, we swung hard the other way. Arianna Huffington’s collapse and Matthew Walker’s best-selling book Why We Sleep turned sleep into a public-health alarm. Wearables placed a number on what used to be a feeling, and adequate sleep became a status symbol. Within a few years, the trend bloated further into “sleepmaxxing,” the latest iteration of optimizing sleep as aggressively as a workout.

Read the full essay here.

Get Ahead of Aging Before It Gets You

Men's skin ages fast once collagen drops. Most guys notice too late — when the eye bags, dark spots, and wrinkles have already set in. Particle Face Cream is a 6-in-1 fix. Two minutes a day. Trusted by over a million men. 30-day guarantee. 20% off, code BH20.

Try It Risk-Free

AT HOME WITH AN EXPERT

A dermatologist’s five-product routine

Dr. Debra Jaliman

Dr. Debra Jaliman’s patients sometimes arrive with shopping bags full of skin-care products. At her own bathroom sink she keeps just five essentials. The New York dermatologist has sensitive skin and little appetite for an elaborate routine. “I feel like I’ve been talking about skincare all day long, and I just want to go home and eat marshmallows,” she says.

Her lineup: a gentle cleanser to wash away makeup, excess oil, and the day’s grime; vitamin C serum to help even skin tone; sunscreen every morning, rain or shine; hyaluronic acid serum for hydration; and azelaic acid cream to help with redness and discoloration.

It’s not necessary to copy her exact products, she says— find a few that suit your skin, and stick with them. “You could have the best products on the shelf, but if you’re not actually using them, what good are they gonna do?”

100+ coding prompts top engineers use to ship 5X faster

Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor are on every engineer's stack. Most still treat them like a search bar. Top engineers work from a system, these 100+ prompts are that system. Sign up for The Code and get the prompts free, plus a 5-minute daily newsletter to keep sharpening your edge.

Claim your free prompts

WHAT WE’RE READING

Taylor Swift has a new song called Patient Zero. Anna Gibbs at Slate explains the surprisingly fraught public-health history behind the term.
Got something stuck in your eye? Sarah Sloat at the Guardian asks eye doctors how to get it out safely—and why rubbing can make things much worse.
Regulators in Colorado received reports that a marijuana-based sleep aid was causing liver damage for 15 months before they took action, suggesting that tighter safety regulations are needed, write Christopher Osher and Evan Wyloge for ProPublica and the Denver Gazette.

Your K-Cups Sat in a Warehouse for Months

Grocery store pods spend months going factory → warehouse → truck → shelf, losing the flavor oils that make coffee taste like coffee. Angelino's roasts, packs, and ships within days — 50+ flavors, compatible with Keurig®, from 39¢ a cup. New customers save 15%, no code needed.

Try Fresh-Roasted Pods