The Health-Wealth Divide: Part 3 of 6—Sleep

In this episode of The Pressures of Privilege, host Diana Oehrli confronts one of the most overlooked health crises facing high-net-worth individuals: the slow, invisible erosion of sleep. Despite having every conceivable advantage — custom mattresses, blackout curtains, wearable trackers, and the freedom to architect their own schedules — wealthy people are sleeping worse than ever. Diana explains exactly why, and more importantly, how to stop the cycle. Drawing on research from the Royal Society, the Mayo Clinic, and her own unfiltered experience living across multiple time zones, navigating twenty years of sobriety, and wearing two sleep trackers that hijack her mood before she's had her first cup of coffee, Diana breaks down the four distortions of privilege that silently sabotage rest: late-night eating and social obligation, chronic jet lag as a lifestyle, alcohol as the wealthy person's sleep aid, and the obsessive tracking culture that has given rise to what researchers now call orthosomnia — sleep perfectionism. Listeners will learn how to apply the three-hour food-to-sleep rule even when dinner reservations are late and the social stakes are high, how to recognize when a wearable device is generating anxiety rather than insight, how to create a nighttime routine that travels across time zones without losing its grounding power, and how to build personal rules around alcohol that are based on what the body actually needs rather than what the culture expects. What Diana makes clear is that this is not a conversation about sleep hygiene. It is a reckoning with how wealth makes sleep feel negotiable, and a guide for reclaiming it as the non-negotiable foundation it has always been. By the end of this episode, listeners will understand that sleep is not something to optimize. It is something to protect. Chapters (00:00:00) - How Wealth Disrupts Sleep(00:02:18) - The Sleep Destruction That Comes with Wealth(00:07:25) - How to Sleep Better With Wealth