The problem with sleep

About 10 months ago, I stopped sleeping. I felt permanently wired. Unable to switch off.

I’ve always been a sleeper, used to at least 8 hours and love a lie in. Suddenly I found myself surviving on 1 or 2 hours of sleep a night. I couldn’t believe I was managing it but day after day, I’d fall asleep in the early hours of the morning, then wake up again 1 or 2 hours later. Sometimes I would inconveniently pass out at the time I should have been getting up, occasionally falling out of bed a few minutes before I needed to leave for the school run.

Looking back, I now understand that two very stressful things had happened at once and then life got even more difficult and my brain couldn’t deal with it.

Thankfully, my sleep has got better over the past couple of months.

But it’s still not totally sorted. This week I saw an online discussion about screen time. I looked mine up and it was 5 hours. I started to write a response about how yes, it seems like a lot, but I have insomnia so actually, I’d been reading a story on my phone from 5am to 7am and then I carried on with it over breakfast and at lunchtime.

It sounded perfectly reasonable as an excuse to me.

And then I read the next chapter of my current book: Stolen Focus by Johann Hari (this is an affiliate link). It was all about sleep.

Suddenly, my ‘oh it’s fine’ didn’t feel fine at all.

According to Hari’s research, we’re sleep deprived.

“Duh!” I thought.

And then I read this: “Our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people.”

We push ourselves to work harder, longer, take fewer breaks. We mentally chastise ourselves when we don’t feel we’re being productive. We don’t give ourselves a break. And then when we do have leisure time, we don’t ‘waste’ it on sleep: we stay up.

I wondered whether I had started convincing myself I wouldn’t sleep if I went to bed so I was now staying up on purpose. After all, I’ve been operating on far less sleep than I thought I needed. What did it matter about those missing 2 or 3 hours?

Apparently, quite a lot.

Those days when I was convinced I was operating fine on barely any sleep, apparently I was experiencing ‘local sleep’.

No, I’d never heard of this either. It’s when you seem to be awake, but part of your brain is asleep. You’re not all there.

And we’re all doing this, day in, day out. Convincing ourselves we’re doing fine, when we’re actually partly asleep.

Those missing 2 or 3 hours? They’re when the magic happens.

REM sleep kicks in around hour 7 or 8 and this is when we dream our best dreams, the ones where peculiar things happen to you. Apparently, this is our brain running through stressful situations so that when we’re awake, we’re more equipped to deal with them. It’s a kind of simulation that preps you for the real world.

I also learned that our brains do something counter-intuitive when the lights go out: we wake up.

We get a sudden rush. It’s so that when the sun goes down, we’re alert enough to find our way home and do tasks before bed. Except that now the sun doesn’t go down because we keep the lights on.

When I lie down in the dark and my brain says, ‘but I’m not tired yet’ it’s drawing on an old habit. It’s not asking me to carry on doing things. In fact, it needs me to do the opposite. And it definitely isn’t asking me to put the light back on, or watch one more episode until I’m so exhausted I fall asleep on the sofa.

My phone always has a story for me to read. It’s helpful like that. Except that it wants me to keep scrolling (or the people who make the apps do) so that I keep engaging, and it’s keeping me sleep deprived.

I’ve started leaving my phone downstairs when I go to bed.

But I also know, that tech is only part of the problem.

After a few weeks of not being able to sleep, I put out a ‘help’ post on Facebook. I was amazed at how many of my friends said they also had insomnia.

When I went to the doctor about it, they did some tests and said I was just vitamin D deficient. I now take vitamin D supplements but it did nothing for my sleep.

And there seems to be no interest in helping what seems to be quite a large section of the population get more sleep.

It’s not seen as an issue. Even though we’re all sleepwalking to some extent and sleep deprivation has a similar effect on our ability to carry out tasks as being drunk.

We’re less effective in a world that blames us for not being productive in conditions which make us inefficient. No wonder we’re stressed.

I highly recommend Stolen Focus. I haven’t finished reading it yet but I’m hooked and taking notes. If you keep wondering why your attention span seems to be getting shorter, have a read.

Addendum

Since publishing this 10.5 hours ago, it’s been pointed out that there have been issues with Hari’s work in the past. You can read about them on Wikipedia. As with everything, you take a critical view of one person’s research and experience. Who of us can take 3 months off to unplug? Every source is going to be biased, it can’t not be. This is one person’s account of their experience and their takeaways from the people they interviewed. Some of it chimes with me, some doesn’t. I still say it’s an interesting read.