The Daily Telegraph - Features
Talking about how little you sleep is counterproductive – it’s time for action
My friends and I have a game that we like to call “Eight Hours’ Sleep Or…” It’s not a particularly imaginative name and certainly won’t keep the creators of Pictionary or Scrabble up at night, but it’s as good a way as any to while away the spare two and a half minutes we tend to catch between work and parenting.
The idea of the game is to find something you would rather have than eight hours’ sleep a night. It goes something like this:
“Eight hours’ sleep or being best friends with Taylor Swift?”
“Eight hours’ sleep.”
“Eight hours’ sleep or being pursued by Brad Pitt?” “Eight hours’ sleep.” “Eight hours’ sleep or an end to mansplaining?’
“Eight hours’ sleep.”
“Eight hours’ sleep or being able to eat all the cheese without any negative impact on your health?”
“Eight hours’ sleep.”
“Eight hours’ sleep or an unlimited supply of confidence and money?”
“Eight hours’ sleep.”
And so on and so forth, until you realise that nothing on God’s Earth will ever trump the idea of eight uninterrupted hours of sleep, of waking up feeling rested, recovered and raring to go into the day ahead.
It has been a relief, then, to discover that my group of friends and I are not alone. A major survey of bedroom habits by Good Housekeeping magazine has found that more than 85 per cent of women would choose a good night’s sleep over having an orgasm. Only 52 per cent of men feel the same way, perhaps because of the “gender sleep gap” – yes, there is such a thing! – with 61 per cent of women saying their sleep quality varied, compared with only 53 per cent of men.
Anyway, I think what we can all take from this is that sleep is very, very hard to come by these days. Stress, hormones, the lure of sitting up late at night scrolling on a little screen that sits in the palm of your hand and contains all of the horrors of the world… And then there is the fact that sleeplessness has become a sort of status symbol, a way of telling people to back the hell off and go easy on you, without actually having to tell people to back the hell off and go easy on you. Saying “I’m tired” over and over again is the most wonderfully passive-aggressive way of signifying that you are busy and pressurised and do not have time for the trifling trivialities everyone seems to be bringing to your doorstep.
We say we want eight hours’ sleep, but do we really? If we had eight hours’ sleep a night, then what would our excuse be?
Personally, I’m done with being sleepless in south London. It’s so boring talking about how tired I am all the time, such a waste of energy in itself. And in the past year, I have realised how counterproductive my obsession with sleeplessness is. The more I worry about sleep, the less I actually sleep. I realised this last spring, when I spent a couple of hundred quid on an Oura Ring, which is a sleep tracker that wellbeing experts swear by. I went to bed with it every night, and got annoyed by the flashing red and green lights that seemed to emanate from it in the dark. Every morning, I woke up and looked with horror upon the graphs that told me how exhausted I was, and what this might mean for my long-term health (nothing good). Eventually, I realised that the presence of the tracker was in itself having a detrimental effect on my sleep. It was fuelling my insomnia, so I took it off, and decided to take radical steps actually to prioritise sleep, as opposed to just talking about the lack of it in my life.
Now, I devote the evening to sleep. I have sacrificed what remained of a social life for it. I don’t go out. I refuse all dinner invitations, choosing instead to eat early with my 10-year-old. I am in bed before her, my phone switched off and on charge, a good book in my hands as I get comfortable in my 200-thread-count Egyptian-cotton sheets. My friends know that if they text me after 8pm, they are unlikely to get an answer until the next morning. I spend at least 90 minutes reading, and have usually drifted off by 11pm. I have rules: no more than one coffee a day, and never later than 11am; if I wake in the middle of the night, reading for 15 minutes is a much more effective tool than simply closing my eyes and trying to get back to sleep; having my own duvet is essential, as I like to turn it round again and again to find the cool side; and if my husband starts snoring, he is immediately out and into the spare room. This may seem draconian, but I don’t care. Because nothing – and I mean nothing – is more important than a decent night’s sleep.
Indeed, now I am in my 40s and in menopause, I can see that it is the most important thing of all when it comes to emotional wellbeing.
You can go on anti-depressants, you can sign up for therapy, you can do as much exercise as you want: but if you are not prioritising rest, the chances are that you will not start to feel better. It doesn’t have to be eight hours. But in my experience, anything below six and you are going to struggle. You are going to be cranky, shorttempered, and extra-sensitive. Any resilience you have will be gone by mid-morning. There will likely be tears. This is nothing to be ashamed of: it’s just simple human biology.
Of course, I suspect many women would sleep much easier if they knew they lived in a world where they were entitled to both eight hours’ kip a night and an orgasm. But that’s another column entirely, and until that moment comes (pardon the pun), you’ll find me of an evening tucked up in bed in my nightie, sipping on a nice mug of Ovaltine.
Having my own duvet is essential – and if my husband snores, he is off to the spare room