Us peeps from Aotearoa NZ are not so good at declaring what we are good at.

Ok, hang on a minute, even that sentence was a typical Kiwi approach of understatement. Maybe we like to keep things a bit of a surprise? Not sure, but whatever it is, there is collective expertise in talking ourselves down rather than up.

So, when you grow up with this mindset, it can be hard to own or name your talents. There’s this underlying cultural etiquette that you can feel in the vibes, the eyebrows, the break in eye contact, and mostly the vibes, that tells you to keep it low-key. The vibe is so strong that it can actually feel rude to name any of your talents.

There is a lovely humbleness to this Kiwi attitude too, but only in healthy doses. As there should be nothing wrong with stating, “well, I have been doing this thing now for over half my life, and yeah, I have something useful to offer.”

Oh wow, I just read what I wrote – there it is. The understated Kiwi expert! It sounds like downplayed mediocre at it’s very best.

Ok, folks, it’s something I’m working on!

So, now you have the context and I have laid down the vibes, back to the beginning.

It feels funny, pecularious even (a wonderful made up word that refers to things that have a mixture of hilarity and well, hello, THIS is peculiar), to say I am a sleep expert. But I have come to the conclusion that I might just be one. Ha! The person with narcolepsy might know a thing or two about working with sleep.

If you want to use a popular definition of expertise (that hit mainstream thinking with Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers published in 2008), then the idea of doing something for 10,000 hours will make an expert of you. Although adding up the hours doing something may not be the only ingredient in making an expert of someone, I can tick the sleep practice 10,000 hours box. Easy.

I googled (as you do) the stats on how long human beings sleep in a lifetime. And on average, the average human, in the average kinda lifetime, will sleep for approximately one-third of their life. Or in other words, about 26 years, 9496 days or 227,916 hours. If these numbers are taken as a general rule of thumb, we are all on our way to expert status.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say, I have discovered I have a certain flair for sleep activity (I know I do have a bit of an unfair advantage – but I like to think of narcolepsy as a talent – a). And as a result of this special talent, I have gleaned knowledge via lived experience, and many failed experiments managing sleep/wake activity. What better way to get good at something – even expert status – than trying, trying, trying again and again. Hours of practice, you might say!

As someone who loves learning new things and absorbs new ideas quickly, I have struggled to say any one thing I do is my passion, or the thing I am an expert at. Funny, all this time, I have just quietly been struggling with sleep, testing out how to do sleep better, how to manage my energy, what I can tweak and change to become a finely tuned sleep machine.

So, this is all a very long way of saying, hi, I’m Liesel and I have discovered I’m a sleep expert.