I cannot tell you which of these things worked: I can only tell you that one of them did

Insomniacs say it’s the only malady in the world that people who don’t suffer it treat with naked glee. “Really? I sleep like a baby!” they will exclaim, as if the good sleeper has actually won a competition against the bad sleeper, one they didn’t know they’d entered.

I was always more like a machine than a baby. Any soft surface or soothing noise and I’d be out, as if someone had unplugged me. Once, I fell asleep under the lovely buzz of a hairdryer, and when I woke up the hairdresser was calling an ambulance. But like hay fever or depression, never having had insomnia is no reliable protection against getting it.

I don’t get it badly; I’ve never had it two nights in a row; I’ve never had less than four hours’ sleep. It’s just a regular tale of that exquisite frustration, nothing else like it: you don’t want to be awake, yet somehow you are. Usually at the front end of the night, occasionally in that maddening 4am shift, when you’re sure it’ll pass any minute. And then you hear a plane and know it must be five, and for some reason it is Boris Johnson’s fault. And after an age, it is six, and now you know it’s pointless, except you do fall asleep at 07.55 and wake up with a crease across your face and late for everything.

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Established thinking around sleep hygiene is vexed: some of it is really obvious (a sleep environment that is comfortable, peaceful and dark; no naps); some of it is contested (a regular sleep routine; keeping a monastic, no-clocks-no-phones bedroom); and some of it is silly (don’t think worrying thoughts just before you go to bed: of course, if you could choose what time to have a worrying thought, you could choose not to have one at all, and then worry would be eliminated. Likewise, alcohol).

What I found, much like having a baby, actually, is that the general advice was of such limited use I ended up taking scraps of wisdom and patching it together in a random way. I cannot tell you which of these things worked: I can only tell you that one of them did, and the others didn’t do any harm.

1 Total darkness, up to the point of an eye mask, and make sure it’s satin, because you’ll feel fancy.

2 Not drinking alcohol for two hours before bed (caffeine doesn’t make any difference, unless you’re sensitive to it).

3 Not eating after 9pm.

4 Taking some exercise every day, even if it doesn’t seem high intensity (there is a rule against going to the gym too close to sleep time, but I have never knowingly done this).

5 Limiting conversation just before sleep to the most delightful and least thought-provoking, which for practical purposes means bitching about other people.

6 And keeping a sleep diary. It’s stupid, really, but when I look at a load of numbers - the Fitbit app logs REM, light sleep, deep sleep and wakefulness, then makes them into a graph – I feel as though I’m in charge. Because it’s the powerlessness that gets you in the end .

What I learned



Composer Max Richter has an eight-hour sleep-inducing composition on Spotify.