- Sleeping can be difficult when the world’s eyes are on you.
Outside some bizarre outliers, everybody needs to sleep — even the rich and famous. But celebrities are often prone to eccentric behavior, and the same goes for their sleeping habits.
Whether it’s due to medical reasons or the stresses of being in the public’s eye 24/7, many famous people throughout history have slept in strange and unusual ways.
Here’s a collection of 9 celebrities and other famous individuals with weird sleeping habits.
Winston Churchill — A Fan of the Siesta
The World War II-era British leader was a busy man and he slept only five hours at night. However, that wasn’t all the sleep he got.
At 5 p.m. every day, he would down a watered-down whiskey and a soda and settle down for a two-hour nap. He swore that this sleep schedule allowed him to do a day-and-a-half’s work in a single 24-hour period.
Curiously, this 5+2-hour sleep rhythm is also popular in many southern regions of the world. For example, the famous Spanish siesta follows a similar schedule.
Michael Phelps — Low-Oxygen Altitude Chamber
Michael Phelps is potentially the greatest swimmer to ever live. To keep up his physique, though, he slept in an altitude chamber that simulates the low-oxygen environment of 9,000 feet above sea level.
He didn’t crawl into the chamber for novelty, though. Due to the low levels of oxygen, his body had to work harder to deliver oxygen to his muscles which supposedly increased his endurance.
The man won 23 Olympic gold medals — it seems to have worked.
Leonardo da Vinci — A Frequent Napper
There are a lot of stories about Leonardo da Vinci and not all are true. If hearsay is to be believed, the Renaissance genius didn’t sleep much.
He would take a 20-minute nap every four hours. That would mean that he slept only two hours a day.
We can’t say this story is true. But it would explain how he had time to become an expert in practically all known science of the time.
Eminem — Tinfoil-covered Windows
In 2012, news broke of rap god Eminem’s supposed bizarre sleeping methods. He would bring a roll of tinfoil with him into hotel rooms and use it to completely cover all windows before bedtime to block out all light.
He had a good reason for it, though. The stress and time zone changes of intense touring caused him to suffer from insomnia.
Considering his earlier method to catch some Z’s was to abuse sleep medication, we’d say covering his windows with tinfoil is much healthier.
Emily Brontë — The Circle-Walking Insomniac
Eminem isn’t the only celebrity to find unusual cures for their insomnia. Novelist and poet Emily Brontë — of Wuthering Heights fame — was also prone to bouts of sleeplessness.
When she just couldn’t fall asleep, Brontë decided to forcibly tire herself out. She would walk laps around her dining room table until she exhausted herself and was ready to fall asleep.
Salvador Dali — The Key to His Art
When surrealist painter Salvador Dali, decided to sleep, we assume he slept mostly normally. But sometimes, he would intentionally deprive himself of sleep to fuel his creativity.
Dali would sit on the floor, holding a metal key in his fist above a metal plate. As soon as he fell asleep, the key would clatter onto the plate, waking him up.
Dali then rushed to his canvas and started painting. He claimed this method allowed him to capture bizarre dreamscapes while they were still fresh on his mind.
Mariah Carey — Surrounded by Humidifiers
Singer Mariah Carey is famous for her incredible voice and for subjecting the world to the horrors of “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” She goes to great lengths to maintain her impressive vocal range, even when she’s sleeping.
Carey has said that to keep her voice healthy, she has to sleep 15 hours a day — with 20 running humidifiers around her bed. She claims the humid conditions keep her throat in shape so she can keep singing.
Maybe it is so. But we’d hate to see what’s growing behind her bedroom curtains with all that moisture.
Napoleon Bonaparte — No Sleep or All the Sleep
Napoleon Bonaparte earned the trust of his soldiers by seemingly never sleeping. Whenever action called, the general and emperor was always ready for it.
What Napoleon probably didn’t tell his troops was that he stayed up because he simply couldn’t sleep. The stress of warfare turned him into an insomniac when he was on campaign.
He made up for it once the fighting was over, though. Napoleon reportedly slept 18 hours a day for days on end after he returned home from the battlefield.
Vincent van Gogh — Poisoning Himself to Sleep
Vincent van Gogh was another famous artist who just couldn’t sleep. To treat his insomnia, he would often soak his pillow and mattress with camphor.
The scent of the substance would help him fall asleep. There’s just one catch — airborne camphor is toxic to humans.
During his bouts of insomnia, van Gogh was essentially slowly poisoning himself every night. It’s theorized that the frequent camphor poisoning contributed to his eventual decision to take his own life.
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