How I finally beat my insomnia

And bizarrely, a blast of bright light last thing at night was part of the solution

ONE of the advantages of being a TV presenter, particularly if you’re someone who likes to self-experiment, is that you find out lots of unexpected things about yourself.

Though not all of this is good news. Thirteen years ago I discovered through a random blood test that I had type 2 diabetes and went on a journey (with camera crew in tow) to see if I could cure myself.

More recently, I’ve been making a series about sleep and discovered why I have insomnia — and that I have another life-shortening condition, obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA).

OSA is believed to affect 100,000 people in Ireland. Essentially it means that you repeatedly stop breathing while you’re asleep, because your throat and tongue muscles relax, blocking your airway.

Your brain, ever alert, wakes you up just enough so you shift on to your side and start breathing again. This can happen more than 30 times an hour. Those affected tend to make gasping, snorting or choking noises, as they try to get air into their lungs.

Not surprisingly, if you have OSA, then despite sleeping for eight hours or more you will probably feel really tired during the day and may suffer from memory lapses. But it can also have a terrible impact on your longterm health. However, less than 15% of people who have it know even they have it, let alone get any treatment.

WHILE I knew that I was sleeping badly and often felt tired in the day, I thought that was because I’d often wake up during the night and find it hard to get back to sleep.

Then last year I went to Australia to make a series on sleep: this included taking part in a revolutionary trial being run by Flinders University at its sleep health institute in Adelaide.

The idea was to take 30 people who have struggled with their sleep for years and use cuttingedge technology to diagnose their problems — then see if a tailored sleep programme could help.

We all had to spend a night being observed in a sleep lab: we had electrodes attached to our heads to record our sleep, and were also filmed and observed during the night.

Professor Danny Eckert, an expert on sleep disorders who led the team, told me that my data showed I had moderately severe OSA, and it was particularly bad when I was lying on my back.

This was a nasty shock because, as well as making you feel tired, if you have untreated OSA then that greatly increases your risk of heart disease and stroke.

And it turned out that I was not alone: a third of the volunteers in the trial were found to have OSA, and many, like me, had been blissfully unaware of it.

So what are the risk factors for OSA? Most people who have it also smoke, drink (both cause your upper airway muscles to relax), or are significantly overweight and have a large neck — but none of these are true of me.

However, OSA is also more common in older men (tick) and may have a strong genetic component (tick, my dad had it).

As for treating it, while weight loss can be helpful, my BMI is already in the healthy range.

The team knew I wasn’t keen on a CPAP machine (which involves wearing a mask while asleep, which pushes air into your airway to keep it open), so they suggested a couple of alternatives.

First, I was fitted with a mandibular advancement device, a type of mouthguard that pushes your jaw forward. This stops your tongue flopping back and blocking your airway.

The second device they recommended was a strap that’s worn around the neck which detects when you’re lying on your back — it then emits a buzzing sound to alert you to shift over onto your side.

You could also try cheaper, lowtech approaches, such as sewing a tennis ball into the back of your pyjamas or buying a bed wedge. However, it turned out that my sleep problems weren’t confined to OSA.

All the trial participants had to swallow an electronic pill, which measured our core body temperature. This fluctuates over the course of 24 hours, but is normally lowest around 4am, when you should be at your sleepiest.

But my core body temperature is at its lowest around 1am, three hours earlier than normal.

That could explain why I find it hard to stay awake much beyond 10pm and why, when I wake at 3am, I find it so hard to get back to sleep (my body clock thinks it is dawn and time to wake up).

So the answer for me was to expose myself to bright light last thing at night.

As Professor Leon Lack, a psychologist at Flinders explained, this would help shift my body clock later and mean I was less likely to wake up at 3am feeling so bright and alert.

He also recommended I try ‘bedtime restriction therapy’, which in my case involved going to bed at 11pm every night, and getting up at around 5.30am every morning for at least four weeks.

The idea is to teach your brain to associate being in bed with sleeping, rather than lying awake. Once you start sleeping better you can gradually increase the time you spend in bed.

It’s tough, at least initially, but is also an effective way of treating long-term insomnia (for more detail about all this see my new book, 4 Weeks To Better Sleep).

All this has made a huge difference to my sleep; I’ve now got my OSA and insomnia under control and as a result I feel full of energy during the day.

Best of all, I can take part in and enjoy family activities, where previously I might have felt so drained I’d withdraw into myself.

As for the rest of the trial participants, more than 80% experienced life-changing improvements in their sleep.

One of them said to me: ‘I’m now getting sleep that is so good it should be illegal.’

The results of the trial were so impressive they’re going to be published in a leading sleep journal later in the year.