YES, YOU CAN SLEEP BETTER

Techniques to combat insomnia

Famous for his evidence-based health advice, author and TV medic Dr Michael Mosley has now turned his attention to helping us all get more and better sleep. Insomniac Brigid Moss signs up for night school

I begin reading TV doctor Dr Michael Mosley’s sleep book at 4am. More often than not, that is when I wake up. Like almost 23% of people in the UK, getting five to six hours’ sleep is my norm*. Insomnia is my norm. Some days, I am so tired it feels like that fog you get when a new baby wakes you up three times a night. My son is now 13. As a result, I now have a complex and involved sleep routine. The room has to be completely dark or I need to wear an eye mask. I need silence or earplugs, as well as magnesium supplements and a cup of chamomile tea. But still, I don’t sleep. ‘Women sleep a bit longer than men – around 20 minutes more a night

– for reasons that are not entirely clear,’ says Dr Mosley. ‘And they feel worse when sleep deprived.’ He knows how I feel, as he’s a lifelong insomniac, too. His new book, Fast Asleep, is a run-down of the research-proven methods of improving your sleep. And after following his own programme, he says, ‘I still wake up sometimes at three or four in the morning, but I don’t agonise about it. I don’t fall asleep during the day, which I was doing a lot of before. I have a lot more energy.’ But will it work for me? I start by writing a sleep diary for a week. It’s quite detailed: you need to fill out the last time you drank caffeine and ate, how much alcohol you drank, what time you went to bed and got up, whether you napped, as well as rate the quality of your sleep and how tired you feel on a scale of one to five (to download one, go to fast-asleep.com). I discover that I sleep an average of five and a half hours a night, and wake between 4am and 6am most mornings.

This pattern of waking up early is the most common form of insomnia, Dr Mosley tells me. Is it okay that I always get up? ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘The main thing seems to be not to just lie there. Some people get up and get on with life, some go back to sleep.’

Putting a score on my level of tiredness, some days I’m only a one or two out of five. If I’ve had two very bad nights in a row, I’m a four and, one terrible Tuesday, I’m a five. Dr Mosley says another sign of sleep deprivation is ‘if you fall asleep in the cinema, at the theatre, or in front of the TV’. Yep. Yep. Yep. Napping isn’t bad per se, he adds, but to stop it affecting my sleep later, I need to keep it to 20 minutes to half an hour, and do it early in the afternoon.