Justin Higgins: “Hi Arianna, what life advice do you have for young adults?”

Arianna Huffington: “Hi Justin. For far too long, we’ve been operating under a collective delusion that burnout is the necessary price we must pay for accomplishment and success. As my recent book The Sleep Revolution documents, recent scientific findings make it clear that this couldn’t be less true. Not only is there no tradeoff between living a well-rounded life and high performance, performance is actually improved when our lives include time for renewal.

So my advice to young adults is this: shake yourselves out of this delusion by making sleep a priority. I’m often asked what advice I would give to my younger self if I had the chance. My answer? I wish I could go back and tell myself: “Arianna, your performance will actually improve if you can commit to not only working hard, but also unplugging, recharging and renewing yourself.” That would have saved me a lot of unnecessary stress, burnout and exhaustion.”


Arianna Huffington is the founder of The Huffington Post, the founder and CEO of Thrive Global, and the author of 15 books, including, most recently, Thrive and The Sleep Revolution.

Originally published at medium.com