'Clean sleeping' has turned bedtime into a competition and I am going to win.

There is a new competition and I am going to win it. It’s a tough one. But I feel I have it in me.

It’s to do with sleeping.

There are hashtags going around: #cleansleeping and #sleptclean.

They’re about turning phones off before bed. Using silk pillow cases. Having an LED light to wake you up. Wearing an eye mask, ear plugs, little dabs of lavender oil on the wrists and ankles. All to create and better night’s sleep.

I don’t use any of these things. But I bet I’d still win at sleeping.

The reason sleeping has got it’s own hashtag? Because it’s been discovered. 

It’s been discovered as the secret to “thriving”. The secret to being beautiful. The secret to actually-booking-the-dentist-and-printing-out-your-travel-itinerary-because-you’ve-been-talking-about-it-forever getting shit done.

No matter that we’ve been doing it since the beginning of the human race. Only now can it be seen in its true miraculous, miracle-working form.

It’s been, almost… reinvented.

Why? Because Gwyneth Paltrow and Arianna Huffington say so.

And the hashtag has risen. Cue: Competitiveness.

(Who has the best photo to accompany the hashtag? Who is doing it right and beautifully and with a smile? If you use the hashtag, but you’re clearly using your iPhone in bed, THEN YOU HAVE FAILED. That’s a number one rule of the Clean Sleep Mean Girls club.)

Thrive Global is the latest initiative from Huffington, businesswoman and founder of the news website The Huffington Post. It provides courses to get you from “surviving to thriving” and part of this is learning how to sleep. Huffington also released a book in April this year, named The Sleep Revolution. 

“When I look back on mistakes I’ve made…they all have one thing in common. I was tired,” chief marketing officer at J.P. Morgan Kristin Lemkau writes on the Thrive site.

Huffington herself had a similar realisation, after discovering the way productivity declined when she was only getting three to four hours of sleep each night. (Unbelievable, no?)

Now, you can buy an Arianna Huffington’s Travel Essentials Kit for US$164.95 off her website. It comes in charcoal, pink and white.

Simple ways to stave off the blues. Post continues below.

Then there’s Paltrow who, in her new book Clean Beauty, predicted sleeping will be the biggest beauty trend of 2017.

(Hate to boast about it folks, but I was way ahead of the curve on that one.)

If sleep having it’s own hashtag; being named as a beauty trend; and being sold in travel-sized packages is not enough, there is one thing that proves we have reached peak sleep-hysteria.

There are small wooden beds… For iPhones. (I wonder if they hashtag their progress, too?)

Yes, the Phone Bed Charging Station is also for sale on Thrive. 

It “makes putting our smartphones to bed a regular part of our nightly ritual. First we tuck our phones in, and then ourselves,” the sales pitch reads. “By giving our phones their own bed – outside our bedroom – we can say goodnight to our day and get the sleep we need to wake up fully recharged.”

Like I said, I am confident I can win at this new sleeping competitiveness.

I will win at sleeping with my phone still buzzing next to me. My pillow case anything but silk. And my feet and hands smelling nothing like lavender.

I’ll be so trendy and beautiful and “thriving”. But I’ll be breaking all the #cleansleeping rules. Bring. It. On.