Can’t get no Sleep
Otherwise known as can’t stop going back to sleep. A kind of insomnia
Festive period, 2020. Good films on the telly. Cheese needs eating, wine needs pouring. They say Christmas is cancelled, but several weeks into the above entertainment regime and my sleep schedule is scunnered.
Am I so fragile that a few late nights spell disaster? Um, yes. It’s not so much the late-ish nights (bear in mind, I’m no thirty-something so we’re not talking all-nighters or getting rat-arsed). It’s the new morning routine of wake-snooze-wake-snooze-snooze that is turning me into a shell of my non-holiday self.
I’m a reluctant early riser. Maybe you can relate? For various reasons largely outwith my control, I’m also an erratic sleeper. This fractured sleep (that’s a whole other article) means without a compelling reason to rise, I will keep nodding off until my duvet is surgically removed. When kids were young, they were the compelling reason. And children don’t mess around: if you don’t WAKE UP on command they prise your eyelids open till you do.
Now, with youngest aged 16 and sporting stubble, a stay-at-home order and a lazy whippet who would rather join me under the covers than go walkies, that snooze button beckons.
Oh, the snooze button. Just five more minutes, OK half an hour. The more times I hit snooze the more shit I feel. The more shit I feel the more I hit snooze. I even know WHY this feels so bad. Yes, Matthew Walker, I’ve read your bestseller, Why we Sleep. It’s a great book, but you are a massive killjoy.
Why we Sleep lays out, in exhaustive and exhausting detail, all the ways we are chronically underslept. It’s not just the amount of sleep (too little), it’s the quality of sleep, and a depressing list of things we do to sabotage that. He is here for your coffee, your G&T, your Instagram scrolling, your bedside light — and, like some latter-day Wee Willie Winkie, he is even here for your evening run (no exercise less than two to three hours before bedtime kids).
As for your alarm clock:
“No other species demonstrates this unnatural act of prematurely and artificially terminating sleep, and for good reason. Compare the physiological state of the body after being rudely awakened by an alarm to that observed after naturally waking from the sleep. Participants artificially wrenched from sleep will suffer a spike in blood pressure and a shock acceleration in heart rate caused by an explosive burst of activity from the fight-or-flight branch of the nervous system.”
And the snooze button? That’s real bad:
“If alarming your heart, quite literally, were not bad enough, using the snooze feature means that will repeatedly inflict that cardiovascular assault again and again within a short span of time. Step and repeat this at least five days a week, and you will begin to understand the multiplicative abuse your heart and nervous system will suffer across a life span.”
Put like that, it makes toddlers forcibly prising eyes open seem positively humane.
So why set an alarm at all?
I tried that too. Waking up naturally sounds fabulous. I dream of the day when I sit up in bed revived; birds tweeting outside; skin glowing, hair attractively tousled and wearing candy stripe jammies. So far so cornflakes ad.
The truth is more ugly. In fact it has rolled over and gone back to bed. I come wired with an internal snooze button — and suspect, if you live in the modern world, you do too. The familiar shrill of the alarm is here to stay.
Maybe one day, when I live on a remote mountainside, with a babbling brook nearby, I will crack the circadian rhythm thing. But for now, in my tech-filled home/office/school/cinema/24-hour-cafe, waking with the lark is but a dream.
Sleep experts like Walker have lots of annoying, I mean helpful suggestions for filtering out the tech, caffeine etc. But it’s hard, so hard. And like all charge sheets of Ten Things you are doing to Ruin your Life Right Now, it’s overwhelming.
Like all other over-stimulated, underslept modern humans, the negative snooze cycle continues.
The more I sleep, the more I sleep. And the more I sleep the more fractured it gets; the more bad dreams seep in and anxiety cracks through the light of day. Setting an alarm and getting up at 6am every day does not come easy. Negotiations start the night before (you deserve a lie-in; it’s been a hard week). The alarm is placed on the other side of the room (yes, I’ve listened to the experts). And when the alarm sounds? It’s like peeling off my own skin just getting up to stop it chirping. Every. Single. Time.
But if I ignore the sleep sirens, it gets me up on the right side of bed. I pull on my running gear, I start the day with hot water and lemon and meditate. By now, I am Wonderwoman. Having won at life by 6.30am, there is more chance of going for that day’s scheduled run. It doesn’t work every time. When sleep is disturbed — as it often is — the sirens pull me back to bed and the whole circus starts again.
Here is what I discovered about sleep this holiday. If I chip away at my self-imposed wake-up time for more than a few days, everything crumbles. If I keep hitting snooze (real or imagined) my borderline sanity suffers. I feel like shit, I don’t meditate (if it doesn’t happen first thing it’s not happening). I don’t run. I’m less productive. Anxiety spirals. I’m a massive cow to everyone I love. And weirdly, I end up fighting sleep during the day.
Maybe it really is time to overhaul my sleep habits. Even — sniff sniff — my beloved coffee.
But wait! Buried in a tear-soaked, data-heavy chapter of Matthew Walker’s Why we Sleep is this nugget.
“There is much we can do to secure a far better night’s sleep using what we call good ‘sleep hygiene’ practises . . . but if you can only adhere to one of these each and every day, make it: going to bed and waking up at the same time of day no matter what. It is perhaps the single most effective way of helping improve your sleep, even though it involves the use of an alarm clock.”
And according to Dr W. Chris Winter, aka The Sleep Whisperer and author of The Sleep Solution, it’s wake-up time that matters most.
“Tip number one would be if you’re struggling with your sleep, most important is to have a set wake time, meaning that there’s a lot of people out there that when they have a difficult night of sleep, they give themselves a little get out of waking up free certificate. If the night is bad, they sleep in until around 9 or 10am. If the night is good, then they’re up at 7am to go to the gym.
It’s really important to control that wake time. You want to have a conversation with your brain: “Look, sleep well or don’t sleep well. I don’t really care. Either way, we’re going to get up at 7am.”
If you do one thing. Yes. I can do one thing. Even though I’d sell my dog to puppy thieves in exchange for sleep most days. I can have a set wake time, even if it means a spot of heart shock.
Maybe sleep is one of those things where the shopping list of stuff to change is so crushing you do nothing. But what if changing one thing — it’s wake time for me but maybe it’s caffeine or screens for you — has a domino effect on sleep?
For my non-scientific study of one, I reinstated my wake time of 6am just three days ago. There have been tears. BUT, today I put decaff coffee in my shopping basket (for afternoons, not mornings to be clear).
Sleep? I’ve cracked it. You just have to do ONE THING. Next thing you know you’ll be waking up in cute candy stripe jammies with a smile on your face.
This is your 6am alarm call. Stand clear, defibrillators at the ready.
Twelve Tips for Healthy Sleep (with my caveat, choose ONE THING)
https://www.medicalert.org.uk/news/2018/03/19/Twelve-Tips-for-Sleep/
