Explain
Sleep in terms of a phone battery
Sleep is just a battery pack you plug yourself into because your internal operating system has had a meltdown from trying to load four hours of YouTube documentaries about the industrial history of the paperclip.
You start the day at a healthy 100 per cent, but by lunch, you are already down to 60 per cent because you wasted half your charge on a passive-aggressive email and the sheer effort of avoiding eye contact with the office intern. By three o’clock, you are flashing a mournful red icon, desperately rationing your remaining energy to make it home without accidentally shutting down on the Northern Line. You finally plug into the wall at midnight, staring at the ceiling while your hardware desperately tries to defragment your brain’s cluttered browser cache of forgotten passwords and that one embarrassing thing you said in 2009.
If you skip the charging cycle, you spend the next day in low-power mode, where your screen brightness is set to dim, your processor speed is barely enough to open a spreadsheet, and you physically cannot function without a constant stream of external power cables in the form of a double espresso. You are essentially a knackered iPhone 6 being held together by a frayed charging lead and the collective hope of your colleagues. It is truly a marvel that any of us manage to reboot at all, considering most of us are running on 4 per cent and a slice of toast.
Where the analogy breaks downPlugging a phone in for ten minutes will get you through the afternoon, whereas ten minutes of sleep just makes you want to lie in a ditch until the next bank holiday.