01/09/2026
Peers of a Feather: Sleep Deprivation, Hadithism & the Nightmare of Endless Certainty.
Beneath the absurdity is a serious point: sleep deprivation and religious obsession can become a vicious feedback loop.
The exhausted is portrayed as someone whose ordinary problems—tiredness, poor sleep, noisy neighbours—have somehow been transformed into an encyclopaedic emergency involving rituals, occult remedies, apocalyptic politics and selectively remembered religious texts.
Sleep deprivation is not a trivial inconvenience.
A chronically exhausted person can become irritable, anxious, cognitively impaired and emotionally volatile.
Concentration deteriorates.
Judgement becomes poorer.
Everything feels louder, darker and more urgent.
If someone already possesses a worldview that encourages constant vigilance, suspicion or fear, exhaustion can pour petrol onto the fire.
When the brain desperately needs eight hours of sleep, giving it another twenty arguments about invisible threats of jinn is hardly a wellness programme.
“Hadithism” The problem begins when individual hadiths which form underbelly of Sunnism Shiaism Sufism Salafism are treated as an unlimited instruction manual for every imaginable anxiety—without sufficient attention to historical context, textual criticism, competing interpretations, ethics or the broader purposes of religious law.
At its worst, that approach can produce a kind of spiritual bureaucratic nightmare: another narration for this, another prohibition for that, another ritual for the thing that frightened you yesterday.
Instead of helping a person distinguish between genuine moral responsibility and ordinary human problems, everything becomes a potential religious emergency.
And sleep?
Sleep gets treated as though it were somehow spiritually suspicious when the real enemy may simply be poor sleep hygiene, stress, caffeine, anxiety, or a neighbour who thinks 2 a.m. is the perfect time to renovate the kitchen.
Religion should not become an engine for permanent psychological exhaustion.
Any interpretive tradition—religious or otherwise—that leaves people terrified, sleep-deprived and obsessed with increasingly elaborate threats deserves ruthless intellectual scrutiny.
You do not defeat sleep deprivation by adding more fears to the bedside table.
You do not solve every problem with another quotation. Sometimes the most radical intervention is also the most boring:
Turn off the phone.
Question the interpretation.
Stop catastrophising.
And go to sleep.
