EDITOR’S LETTER
We all know what a bad night’s sleep feels like… foggy brain in the morning, endless cups of coffee trying to stop yourself from crumpling in a heap throughout the following day, and an overwhelming feeling of grumpiness at the world and those around you. Life stops being enjoyable when you can barely keep your eyes open, and you stop being productive – either at work or at home.
When our youngest son, Gabriel, turned one he suddenly went from being a beautiful sleeper to a night-time screamer. For an entire year, my husband and I (and his older brother) endured hours of our little boy crying endlessly throughout the early hours. We tried everything – letting him cry it out, bringing him into our bed, sleeping on the floor beside his cot, buying him more dummies, getting rid of the dummies, buying more cute and cuddly toys to keep him company… But nothing worked.
As a result we were about as sleepdeprived as you can get. We were both working, but we were barely coping. And our five-year-old son, Harry, who had just started school, would sense our exhaustion and tell us he didn’t hear his brother’s night-time howling, but the circles under his eyes told a different story.
A few years on we jokingly refer to this time as our “year from hell”. We can laugh about it now but at the time it felt like we were living an endless nightmare. I remember falling asleep on the bus on the way home from work one evening and ending up miles from our house, in the dark and unsure where on earth I was. Another time I tried to pay for the groceries with my library card and couldn’t comprehend why my PIN number wouldn’t work, staring blankly at the checkout person as she gently tried to point out my error.
My lack of sleep was down to being a new mum, but what about those whose body clocks don’t allow them to get the normal amount of sleep? An emerging area of research is discovering the effect that your sleep rhythm – whether you’re a night owl or an early bird – can have on your day-to-day life, and your overall health.
If you’re one of those who can’t fall asleep until after midnight and then struggle to be up early for work or other commitments, Genevieve Gannon’s brave sleep experiment and advice from sleep experts on pages 60-64 is a must.
Perhaps I’ll read it to my youngest son for his bedtime story…
“If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough.” – Oprah Winfrey