I tried adult sleep training

Could less time in bed, staying up late and a radical approach to night-time waking help Zoe Mcdonald recover from her stress-induced insomnia?

Can less sleep actually cure your insomnia? Zoe Mcdonald trials the new sleep programme

Iam resigned to my insomnia, born during a bout of anxiety three years ago, triggered by the breakdown of my marriage. Some nights, I sleep fine. But two to three nights a week, I struggle to get to sleep at my usual time of 10pm or 11pm, wake again at 2am or 3am, fighting panicky paranoia, the nagging gremlin that says: “That’s it now for the night. You’re awake, AWAKE!”

I worry about a whole range of other things too, from having offended somebody (I always think I’ve offended somebody) to global warming. My brain hopscotches from one to the next: “And have you thought about THIS… If you think that’s bad, check THIS.” I wake up foggy headed and snappy, desperate for caffeine.

As well, I am hardwired to wake up unnecessarily early most mornings, a hangover from 5.30am wake-ups in the early years of Fred (now eight) and Flo (five). I’ve tried ‘sleep hygiene’ advice, such as keeping my phone outside the bedroom, a caffeine curfew after 2pm (killer!), herbal sleeping tablets, pre-sleep meditation on Calm.com and a pillow so heavily scented with lavender and rose oil my hair smells like pot-pourri most days. None of it has worked.

So it was with some scepticism that I agree to try The One-week Insomnia Cure, a new book by Professor Jason Ellis, a health psychologist and professor of sleep science based at Northumbria University. He hit the headlines two years ago when he published the results of a trial that offered people suffering from ‘acute’ insomnia a free one-hour cognitive behavioural therapy consultation. Nearly three quarters said they slept better within three months of following the advice given.

‘CBTI’ uses CBT techniques to help you re-learn healthy sleep habits (the ‘i’ stands for insomnia). As I start reading the book, one thing in particular resonates: he says sometimes the very things insomniacs do in an effort to combat the problem serve to compound it.

For me, it is going to bed early. I never feel properly sleepy until after 11pm, but my exhaustion, bad quality of sleep and early waking habit, paired with the myth that we all need eight hours a night, means I sometimes head to bed as early as 9pm.

WHEN I CALL PROFESSOR ELLIS, HE SAYS THAT THIS ‘EARLY TO BED’ MISTAKE IS ONE OF THE MOST COMMON HE

SEES in his clinic. He explains it like this: imagine your sleep need as a ball of dough. Unless you really are spending very little time in bed, an early night simply stretches your dough over more hours, so it gets thinner, and holes begin to appear. This is what’s happening to me: my sleep is holey.

Managing dysfunctional sleep is complex, says Ellis. “Often, what triggers the onset of the problem isn’t the

Sometimes the very things INSOMNIACS do in an effort to COMBAT the problem serve to COMPOUND it

same thing that perpetuates it. As a result, it needs to be tackled on a number of levels, with a variety of measures.”

Common triggers are what you’d probably expect: divorce, work stress, any stress. He gives the example of one patient who’d been made redundant, became anxious, couldn’t sleep. Other factors kept the cycle going: her habit of surfing recruitment sites on her laptop at 2am, for one. Like her, my insomnia started with a big stress, but now things are calmer, my sleep hasn’t settled.

Ellis’s programme is really two weeks: you spend the first one doing a sleep diary in order to calculate your new sleep quota and bedtime (see box, right).

DOING THE DIARY, THE MAIN THING I’M STRUCK

BY IS HOW ERRATIC MY SLEEP IS. I spend eight-anda-half hours in bed some nights, less than six on others, can’t get to sleep some nights, keep waking on others.

I calculate my sleep efficiency (the proportion of time I’m actually asleep) over the week as 71% – we should all be aiming for 85-95% – and some nights are as bad as 50%. The average of the hours actually spent sleeping each night – my sleep quota or sleep I need – is an unremarkable seven. Based on this, I can calculate my new bedtime. As my children wake up at 6.30am most days, I need to go to bed, to sleep straight away, at 11.30pm, no earlier. In the second week, the new rules kick in. Including that if you wake, you have to get out of bed and sit in a hard chair for 30 to 45 minutes and do something restful, such as reading or knitting. Night one, I go to bed at 11.30pm, wake up once but go straight back to sleep. Night two, I wake up too early, at 5.30am. I get out of bed, sit in a chair to read an article I’d saved from the paper. But once I’ve read it, I’m fully awake, so I get up.

Night three, and it’s time to introduce the toughest measure; no work or screens within two hours of bed. I forgo my fix of The Crown and resist the urge to check social media. I clean the kitchen more thoroughly than normal and read a bit of my new Zadie Smith book. As directed by Ellis’s book, I also start a journal, writing four lists: everything I’ve accomplished today; everything I have to achieve tomorrow; everything I’ve put into place for tomorrow, and how my day went. It makes me feel instantly calmer, as if I’ve downloaded my anxiety.

That night, I wake up at 3am, so have to get up. It’s hard. Even though I’ve been worrying in bed, it feels like a huge wrench to climb out from underneath my fluffy downy duvet and Toast sheets to sit on a chair. After 30 timed minutes, I gratefully go back to bed and sleep. When I wake the next night, I make the mistake of heading for the sofa to sew some buttons back on a cardigan and find myself nodding off there.

Despite that blip, I’m waking up way fewer times by the end of the week. Most days, I still wake at 5.30am, then go straight back to sleep for an hour. I do the sleep

efficiency calculation again: it’s gone up to 90%. I feel more refreshed when I wake up. It’s working!

Two weeks on, and I’m still finding it a huge relief to know it’s fine for me to stay up – the new calm evenings have become a treat. I have slipped up with evening screens a couple of times but it has only served to reinforce Ellis’s ban because my sleep suffered immediately. Who’d have guessed that the key to cracking insomnia could be going to bed later?

The One-week Insomnia Cure: Learn To Solve Your Sleep Problems by Professor Jason Ellis (Vermilion, £10.99)