Your nights of blissful sleep start here!
Ask some people how they fall asleep and the response will be: ‘I don’t know . . . it just happens.’ And they have no idea how lucky they are. For nearly half the world’s population, the frustration and debilitation of broken nights is all too familiar.
An estimated 15 per cent of people are living their days — year after year — in the mentally muffled, scratchy-eyed state induced by chronic insomnia.
It’s a desperate situation. sleep deprivation makes us crave fatty foods, sugar and carbohydrates. It affects our mood and decisions, making us less likely to exercise and more likely to drink alcohol.
studies show long-term insomnia increases the risk of serious illnesses such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, depression, obesity and even certain cancers.
In our fast-paced, super-stressed lives, insomnia has become a worrying epidemic and one that modern medicine is woefully ill-equipped to manage. But I think I have the answer.
As one of very few university professors with a specialism in sleep, I am at the cutting edge of sleep research. I have drawn on my 18 years of clinical experience and research — and pulled together the very latest tried-and-tested techniques — to create a simple plan that could, and should, free you from the hell of insomnia.
I kicked off my plan in saturday’s paper with a free sleep diary. If you missed it and would like one sent to you, email your name and address to helpline@dailymail.co.uk or call 0808 272 0808 (7am to 7pm, Monday to Friday) and we will send it without delay. I urge you to start filling it in as soon as possible.
Today, I will help you understand what might be causing your sleep problem and how to use your sleep diary to get the best from my course.
If you work through my recommendations all this week in the Mail and diligently fill in your sleep diary twice a day — for details, see the back page of this pullout — you’ll end up with a personalised insomnia plan.
This is the kind of highly effective guidance you’d get from a course of one-to-one sessions with a qualified sleep specialist. By this time next week, you could be sleeping better and deeper than you have done for years.
FIND THE ROOT OF YOUR PROBLEM
INSOMNIA can strike anyone at any time and though most sleep problems are short-lived, my real concern is how easily they can turn into long-term issues if you don’t take measures to control them.
studies show the first episode of sleep disturbance is often triggered by a stressful event. It might be something such as divorce, bereavement, the onset of an illness, a change in job or a new baby in the house.
This ‘precipitating event’ will typically trigger your fight-or-flight response — boosting the production of stress hormones and reducing the amount of time you can sleep.
It is nature’s way of keeping you alert to manage a crisis.
Typically, these hormone levels will gradually subside as you adapt and learn to cope with whatever triggered the stress, and your former sleep pattern should return.
However, if you’ve started to adopt a few bad habits — maybe drinking alcohol before bed, pumping yourself up with caffeine in the day or having naps on the sofa — a more sinister form of insomnia can begin to develop independently of the original trigger. This is my main concern and something I urge people with sleep problems to guard against.
Very often, poor sleep can become the focus of fresh, new layers of stress as you worry more and more about the impact tiredness might be having on your life.
Before long, as the initial trigger fades into the background, the insomnia itself takes centre stage.
It is often fuelled by increasingly complex behaviours you might have adopted in your attempts to snatch more sleep when you can and in your worries about the long-term consequences of perpetual fatigue.
That’s why CBT-I (cognitive