阿里安娜•赫芬顿的睡眠革命

When I first spot Arianna Huffington, a young aide is standing beside her holding a pen flashlight so that the boss can make notes in a darkened room. Huffington is fine-tuning her speech for the Discovery Leadership Summit in Johannesburg, about sleep (good) and smartphones (not so good). Sleep is her new business. It seems quite a leap from building the Huffington Post media company, and yet there’s a pattern here. Huffington’s gift is for spotting the zeitgeist, then monetising it.

我第一眼看到阿里安娜•赫芬顿(Arianna Huffington)时，一名年轻的助理正站在她身边举着一只小型手电，使自己的老板在光线很暗的房间中仍然可以作笔记。赫芬顿正在修改她将在约翰内斯堡的“发现领导力峰会”(Discovery Leadership Summit)上发表的演讲稿，主要内容是关于睡眠(有益)和智能手机(不那么有益)。睡眠是她开拓的新商业领域。这相对于打造传媒公司《赫芬顿邮报》(The Huffington Post)而言似乎是一个很大的跳跃，但这当中有模式可循。赫芬顿的卓越才能在于把握时代特征，并将其货币化。

The moment she opens her mouth, her Greek accent startles you. You’d never guess that it’s half a century since the 16-year-old raised in a small Athenian flat arrived in England. (She later upgraded to the US.) The accent, she tells the conference, “has been the bane of my existence, until one day I met Henry Kissinger and he said, ‘You can never underestimate the effect in American public life of complete and utter incomprehensibility.’”

在她开口说话的那一刻，她的希腊口音会吓你一跳。你永远也猜不到，16岁的赫芬顿离开雅典的小公寓来到英国已经是半个世纪以前的事。(她后来又从英国到美国。)她对参会人士说，“这个口音曾是我生活的苦恼之源，直到有一天我遇见了亨利•基辛格(Henry Kissinger)，他对我说，‘你永远不会低估完全不可理解在美国公共生活中所能产生的影响。’”

Yet when we sit down later — and after I have fended off her charming attempt to talk about me instead of her — Huffington explains that being Greek is a business asset. “Maybe being an outsider, I’m comfortable disrupting conventional ways of being. I don’t have any allegiance to the current way of doing things.”

但当我们随后一起坐下聊天——在我抵抗住了她让我谈论自己而不是她的富有魅力的尝试后——赫芬顿解释称身为希腊人其实是一种商业优势。“也许作为一个外来者，我对于打破常规毫无压力。我丝毫都不固守现有的做事方式。”

She was perfectly placed to disrupt her first target, the media. Handily, she had money: in 1997 she amicably divorced the Texan oil billionaire Michael Huffington, after he told her he was bisexual. An author of many books, she had used her people skills to befriend half the American cultural elite. (She has been called “the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus”.) And she foresaw, before almost anyone else, a future in which mostly unpaid writers would create new online media brands. In 2005 she founded The Huffington Post. The friends she recruited to blog for it ranged from Nora Ephron to Norman Mailer. In 2011 AOL bought the site for $315m. Huffington reportedly netted $21m, but stayed on as editor.

对于她“扰乱”的第一个目标——媒体——而言，她具备极其有利的条件。一个显著优势是，她很有钱：1997年，她与德克萨斯石油业亿万富翁迈克尔•赫芬顿(Michael Huffington)友好离婚，因为此人对她声称自己是双性恋。作为一名写过很多书的作者，她运用自己的人际交往能力与半个美国文化圈的精英们交上了朋友。(她曾被称为“自伊卡洛斯(Icarus)之后最善于向上流动的希腊人”。)而她比几乎所有人都更早地预见到，未来大多没有报酬的写手们能够创造出新的在线传媒品牌。2005年她创立了《赫芬顿邮报》。她招揽来为其撰写博客的朋友包括诺拉•埃夫龙(Nora Ephron)和诺曼•梅勒(Norman Mailer)。2011年美国在线(AOL)以3.15亿美元的价格收购了该网站。据称赫芬顿净赚2100万美元，并留任编辑职务。

When Donald Trump began running for president, the Huff Post initially covered his campaign only in the entertainment section. Later it appended an editor’s note to every article about Trump, calling him “a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther”. But when I ask whether his victory surprised her, Huffington says no. She points me to her 2010 book, Third World America. “It’s about the fact that many parts of America have become third world. They are the people who voted for Trump.”

当唐纳德•特朗普(Donald Trump)开始竞选美国总统时，《赫芬顿邮报》最初仅在娱乐版块报道他的竞选活动。后来该报给每则关于特朗普的报道都附上一篇“编者按”，称特朗普是“一个惯性撒谎者，嚣张的仇外者，种族歧视者，厌恶女性者，以及出生地阴谋论者”。但当我问到特朗普的胜利是否让她感到惊讶时，赫芬顿表示并没有。她向我指了指她出版于2010年的书《第三世界的美国》(Third World America)。“这本书讲的是美国很多地方已经变成第三世界的现实。给特朗普投票的正是这些地方的人。”

This year, possibly perceiving the pointlessness of journalism earlier than most, Huffington jumped from media to sleep. She herself had been a sleepless overachiever until 2007, when she collapsed and woke in a pool of blood from a broken cheekbone. She changed her sleeping habits, moving devices out of the bedroom and redefining bedtime as a phase of unwinding. Now she uses rituals such as hot baths and the writing of a nightly “gratitude list” to leave behind the day “with all of its problems and unfinished business”.

2016年，或许是因为她又比大多数人更早地意识到了新闻业的无意义，赫芬顿从传媒跳到了睡眠领域。她自己在2007年以前一直是一个几乎不睡觉的高成就者，直到她最后崩溃，醒来发现自己躺在一滩血中，颧骨骨折。她改变了自己的睡眠习惯，将电子设备从卧室中移了出去，并将睡眠时间重新定义为一个放松心情的阶段。现在她践行的日常仪式包括泡热水澡，以及每晚写下一份“感谢清单”来放下白天的“所有问题以及未完成的事务”。

It took her a while to see that sleep was a business opportunity. In 2014 she published the book Thrive. When she went around promoting it, “I found that this [sleep] is the one thing people wanted to talk to me about more than anything else in the book.” (Huffington, unusually, can listen as well as talk.) So she wrote The Sleep Revolution and, last month, launched her “wellness company” Thrive Global. Central to its business model will be selling sleep.

她过了一段时间以后才发现，睡眠是一个商业机会。2014年，她出版了《茁壮成长》(Thrive)一书。在四处推广该书时，“我发现，睡眠是人们最想和我讨论的话题，超过书中的任何其他内容。(赫芬顿罕见地既能倾听他人发言，也能侃侃而谈。)因此她写了《睡眠革命》(The Sleep Revolution)一书，并于近期创立了自己的“健康公司”Thrive Global。该公司业务模式的核心即是销售睡眠。

I suspect this is a good idea. Most of us are tired. Charles Czeisler of Harvard Medical School estimates that average American sleep on work nights has declined over the past 50 years from eight-and-a-half hours to seven. Sleeping beside one’s smartphone, as many people now do, doesn’t help.

我猜这是一个好主意。我们中的绝大多数人都很疲惫。据哈佛大学医学院(Harvard Medical School)的查尔斯•切斯勒(Charles Czeisler)估计，在过去的五十年间，美国人在工作日夜晚的平均睡眠时长从八个半小时缩短到了七小时。睡觉时把智能手机放在身边，就像很多人现在所做的那样，无助于增进睡眠。

The problem is arguably embodied by Trump, who claims to sleep four hours a night. Huffington says he displays classic characteristics of sleep deprivation: impulsiveness, paranoia, an inability to process information. “He needs to get more sleep,” she says, “and he needs to charge his phone away from his bedroom so that he doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night and retweet Mussolini or attack the former Miss Universe.”

这个问题无疑在特朗普身上得到了体现，他宣称每晚只睡四个小时。赫芬顿称，特朗普表现出了睡眠不足的典型特征：冲动，偏执，以及无法处理信息。“他需要更多睡眠，”赫芬顿说，“而且他需要把手机放在卧室以外的房间充电，以保证他半夜醒来不会在推特上回复墨索里尼或者攻击前环球小姐。”

But now, adds Huffington, ever more people are realising they have a sleep problem. In an unfortunate choice of metaphor, she says: “There’s a collective awakening.” Even Goldman Sachs and McKinsey use sleep specialists.

赫芬顿补充称，如今越来越多的人意识到他们有睡眠问题。她打了一个不甚恰当的比喻：“一场集体性的觉醒正在发生。”就连高盛(Goldman Sachs)和麦肯锡(McKinsey)都开始聘用睡眠专家。

Huffington remains in part a journalist — that’s how she sniffs out the zeitgeist — and the moment I finish interviewing her, she starts interviewing me about my sleep habits. I admit to feeling exhausted.

赫芬顿在某些方面仍然是一个记者——正是靠着这一点她能够敏锐地嗅出时代趋势——在我快要结束采访的时候，她开始采访我的睡眠习惯。我承认自己感到疲惫。

Four weeks later, I can report that Huffington has changed my life. Chez Kuper, bedtime now means bedtime: a phase of leaving the day behind. I cannot bring myself to write a “gratitude list” but I have stopped doing work-related reading in bed and no longer sleep beside my smartphone. And I do feel slightly less exhausted. I may go down in history as an early convert.

四个星期以后，我发现赫芬顿已经改变了我的生活。在库柏家，现在睡觉时间就意味着睡觉时间：一个放下白天纷扰的阶段。我自己做不到写“感谢清单”，但我已经停止了在床上阅读与工作有关的材料，并且睡觉时不再把智能手机放在身边。如今我确实感到没有那么疲惫了。我或许会作为一个早期皈依者被载入史册。