A lot of the wellness movement addresses aspects of our lives previously considered basic and fundamental, like breathing or sleep. This spring, Arianna Huffington celebrated the tenth anniversary of what she calls her “great blessing.” On April 6, 2007, Huffington collapsed and broke her cheekbone. After a journey through many traditional medical disciplines, her diagnosis was just burnout — no cancer, no stroke, no sneaky diabetes. She was just very, very tired. “I was just literally burning the candle at both ends,” she says now. “And what I find interesting is that if you had asked me that morning, ‘How are you, Arianna?,’ I would have said, ‘Fine,’ because it was normal running on empty. Think about how aware we are of how much battery remains on our smartphone, but we don’t have that same awareness about ourselves.” Huffington wrote a book about just how important sleep is, offering a prescription (the rhythms of which will be familiar to anyone who has recently sleep-trained a baby: a totally routinized wind-down time including warm baths, soft lights, and a blackout shade). Later, she left the Huffington Post and started Thrive Global, an organization dedicated to wellness. Thrive publishes a blog, organizes wellness programs for companies like Uber, and sells products on its website, like the wooden Thrive phone bed, which comes with a set of tiny satin sheets for your iPhone to sleep on. “You know, there is something so satisfying …,” Huffington explains one day in her crowded Soho office as she tucks her phone in beneath a satin sheet. “We’re going to launch one that looks like a little race car.” She smiles and fusses with her iPhone’s pillow. “After all, you have to teach children to tuck their phones in, too.”
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