ABC News(NEW YORK) — Arianna Huffington is the co-founder, president and editor-in-chief of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Huffington Post. She is a nationally syndicated columnist, radio host and the author of 15 books, including her latest, “The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time.”
Huffington was born in Greece and moved to the U.K. when she was 16. She studied economics at the University of Cambridge and became president of the debating society, the Cambridge Union.
Time Magazine has named Huffington one of the most influential people in the world, and Forbes has called her one of its “Most Powerful Women.”
Huffington, 65, recently invited Rebecca Jarvis to her offices for a conversation about her secrets to success, the importance of sleep and corporate America’s changing habits.
Here are five things you may not know about her:
She wrote her first book at age 23.
Published in 1974, “The Female Woman” was Huffington’s first book and first bestseller. The book was known for questioning certain ideals in the earlier feminist movement.
She says her second book was rejected by more than 36 publishers.
“I wanted to write a book on the crisis of political leadership, and it was a book nobody seemed to want to publish,” she told Jarvis on “Real Biz with Rebecca Jarvis.”
She can ‘sleep anywhere’ and gets eight hours of sleep a night, 95 percent of the time.
Huffington got a sleep wakeup call in 2007 when she collapsed from exhaustion. She has since made a good night’s rest a top priority and encourages employees at the Huffington Post to sleep on the job and nap in the company’s sleep pods. “Sleep deprivation is the new smoking,” she said.
She takes a candlelit, Epsom salt bath every night to ‘slow down my brain’ and prep for a good night’s rest.
“My ritual is to turn off all my devices 30 minutes before I’m going to go to sleep and charge them outside my room,” she said.
She loves country music.
“I just kind of started hearing it when I first came to New York and now my iPod is full of country music songs, some of them old, some new.”
To hear Huffington belt out her favorite lyrics, watch her interview with Rebecca Jarvis.
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