WHAT TO DO IF YOU WAKE AT NIGHT

ONE type of insomnia is struggling to get to sleep at night. Another is waking up early in the morning. But the most common form is waking in the middle of the night, particularly as we get older.

This is partly because our sleep gets lighter as we age, but it can also occur if we feel the need to go to the toilet during the night.

That’s no problem if you fall straight back to sleep again, but if you find yourself lying in bed wide awake, worrying about not going to sleep and besieged by negative thoughts, it is important to give yourself a strict 20-minute time limit. If, after 20 minutes, you are still awake, you should get out of bed and out of your bedroom. Good sleep depends on you associating bed with sleep and sex, nothing else — and particularly not with worrying.

If you lie awake in bed, night after night, wrestling with your demons, this will trigger all sorts of unhelpful associations in your brain and body. The main thing is to try not to worry about the fact that you are awake when you would much rather be asleep.

Instead, head for another room to sit and while away the time until you start to feel sleepy. This is not an excuse to watch TV or scroll through social media.

Ideally, you should spend this time listening to soothing music or a dull podcast, or reading a book you have already read before.

For many years, I fell into an infuriating pattern of falling asleep quite easily at 11pm, then, no matter how tired I was, I’d wake up about four hours later (typically at 3.30am).

I’d lie there for what felt like hours, worrying about not being able to get back to sleep and how tired I would feel in the morning. Finally I’d drift off, only to be dragged awake again by the alarm clock at 7am.

Then, a few years ago, while researching a documentary about life in Victorian slums, I interviewed Roger Ekirch, a professor of history at Virginia Tech, in the U.S. He told me that my pattern — falling asleep, waking for a while, then falling asleep again — was how many people slept in pre-industrial times.

Apparently, people would go to bed around 9pm, sleep for about five hours, then get up at 2am. They would do household chores, visit friends or ‘enjoy a bit of intimacy’ before heading to bed again for a ‘second sleep’.

Prof Ekirch believes that the pressures of the Industrial Age and the arrival of electric lights changed all that and sleeping continuously became the new normal.

Slowly, as the practice of sleeping continuously became more widespread, the idea of a ‘first’ and ‘second’ sleep faded from public consciousness.

Buoyed by these discoveries, I decided that rather than fight my ‘old-fashioned’ sleeping patterns, I’d work with them. So rather than lie there fretting, I get up and go to another room, where I listen to music, meditate or read a really boring book.

I have a pile of books downstairs and I sit and work my way through them as I wait for my sleep drive to reassert itself. When I start to feel sleepy, which is normally after about 40 minutes, I go back to bed for three or so hours of ‘second’ sleep.

If you can accept that you won’t always sleep the whole night through, you should soon start to feel more rested and less stressed.