In the Hands of Morpheus. A Critical Discourse Analysis of Sleep

In recent years, sleep has become an increasingly popular topic in medicine,sociology and the media, and there has been an immense proliferation of selfhelpbooks and seminars providing expert advice on the proper ‘management’of sleep. The construction of sleep as a resource to be maximally exploited bymeans of a positively valued lifestyle on the one hand and as a potentialhealth threat on the other is problematic: it suggests that the last non-productivethird of our lives is being turned into a regulated, output-oriented activityand that health is the result of proper sleep (cf. Baxter/Kroll-Smith 2005: 52,cit. in Williams 2005: 120). Drawing on the theoretical framework of CriticalDiscourse Analysis, this paper critically examines the reconceptualization ofsleep as a tool in achieving better health and productivity by quantitativelyexamining a corpus of 103 texts from the Internet and extracts from 6 selfhelpbooks