I spent a decade in the dark, sitting in windowless sleep labs while patients lay tethered to headboxes, and if there is one thing I learned, it’s that people are being sold a lie. You don’t need a £3,000 smart mattress or a subscription to an app that tells you how “badly” you slept—which, by the way, is rarely a clinical measurement. Most people come to me searching for expensive ways to improve bedroom environment, convinced they need more gadgets, when in reality, they are just sleeping in a room that feels like a sauna. I’m not here to sell…

I spent ten years in a darkened sleep lab, watching patients struggle to drift off while tethered to a dozen electrodes, and if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the wellness industry loves to overcomplicate the simple. You’ll see influencers charging hundreds for “float tanks” or high-tech isolation pods, claiming they hold the secret to mental clarity, but they are often just selling you an expensive way to hide from a life that is too loud. We talk about the importance of sensory deprivation as if it requires a specialized ritual or a piece of expensive hardware, when…

I spent a decade in sleep clinics watching patients lie awake, staring at the ceiling, convinced they were failing at relaxation because they couldn’t “quiet their minds.” They’d come to me after downloading a dozen expensive apps, frustrated that they still couldn’t master how to practice mindful meditation without their brain performing a frantic inventory of every mistake they’d made since 2004. There is this pervasive, exhausting myth that meditation is about achieving a state of perfect, crystalline emptiness—as if your brain is a vessel you can simply scrub clean. It isn’t. That idea is clinical nonsense, and quite frankly,…