What fifteen years in spa and beauty houses taught me about sleep

If you spend fifteen years laying women down on a treatment bed, you learn to recognise a sleep problem before the client says a word. She arrives on Thursday evening after work. She is not tired, she is differently tired. The skin on the neck is thinner than usual. The shoulders sit high, not from stress, from habit. When I cleanse her face, she barely registers it. There is this particular kind of exhaustion that is not sleep deprivation, and yet has everything to do with it. Sleep that is formally long enough, but doing nothing anymore. Nobody talks about it in the first appointment. By the fifth, everybody does. What I learned from this is banal. Sleep is the cheapest treatment. It costs nothing, it works everywhere, and it is precisely the thing we take least seriously on a Thursday evening.