For my 10th birthday, since turning double digits was a big deal, my dad asked me what I wanted. I told him “no bed time,” to which he agreed. This was on a Friday morning. I eventually passed out on Saturday night in the living room, somewhere on the floor. Mind you, this was before smart phones, and the only electronics to which I had access were my PS2 and the family’s desktop computer, neither of which I had ever been very fascinated with. No, my vampiric stint was simply spent doing what I’d always wanted to keep doing as soon as my draconian bedtime was announced: Building LEGO; drawing; watching movies; whatever. Anything but sleep. When I finally woke up, my dad asked what the best part of staying awake was. I simply replied: “not having to go to bed.”
Throughout my entire life, I’d always seen bedtime as an enforced punishment, and something that I did everything in my power to refuse. Not until I started getting older did I realise that my lifelong membership to the fraternity of night owls was finally coming back to bite me. As I was nearing 30, the effects became increasingly noticeable, and running on three hours sleep—an effortless practice, thus far—was no longer an option. After consulting Dr Google and several other YouTube specialists, many of who encouraged me to, effectively, “Count sheep, and if that doesn’t work, get out of bed and do something else,” I felt rather insulted. I’d spent almost 30 years counting sheep and, put plainly, there are no more sheep to count. I am all out of sheep.
I started getting worried when my memory started betraying me. My time in the gym suffered. My once ebullient personality had begun to deflate like a punctured tire. I kept scanning the internet for answers.
Words like "depression", "frontal cortex malfunctions", "Alzheimer’s", "obesity", "heart disease" and, finally, "cancer" scared me into seeking professional help in climbing this Sisyphean mountain.
“I’d spent almost 30 years counting sheep and, put plainly, there are no more sheep to count. I am all out of sheep.”
“There was once a study conducted where doctors performed brain scans on several prisoners in solitary confinement in the US, and each individual prisoner all shared one thing in common. The week prior to their arrest, each had gotten 80 per cent less sleep than what is necessary for the human body,” says Jamie Moore, personal trainer and sleep coach who had previously worked at the premium J Club fitness centre in Dubai. “When you are so chronically under slept, the amygdala kicks into overdrive, which, in turn shuts down the prefrontal cortex, aka the CEO of the brain. This can result in aggression, paranoia, anxiety, poor decision making, and lack of impulse control.”
Marcello Massimini, a neurophysiologist at the University of Milan, added that sleep deprivation actually amps up the brain, rather than sedates it. “I’m sure if you bump your friend when he’s sleep deprived, he’s going to jump higher,” Massimini says when I spoke to him earlier in the year. That feeling of being-tired-yet-wired can lead to a sleep deprived brain being ‘jumpier’ than one that is well rested. So, if this pattern continued, a future stint in prison was only a matter of time. Great.
Having been diagnosed with ADHD in my youth, I figured that feelings of boredom, daydreaming, and inability to sleep were simply just another symptom of that. However, according to Dr Vatsal Thakkar, a professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine: “Eleven per cent of school-age children have now received a diagnosis [of ADHD]. I don’t doubt that many people do, in fact, have ADHD; I regularly diagnose and treat it in adults. But what if a substantial number of cases are sleep disorders in disguise?”
In the American school system, diagnosing kids and subsequently prescribing them with drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall has become a long running joke—a sick one, at that—where seemingly every second kid you meet reveals: “I’m on Adderall because I have ADHD.” Consider the attention span of a young child, nevertheless a boy: if you allow them eight hours of daily phone use, TikTok-scrolling, and video games, only to tell them: ‘another case of ADHD, I see. Here, take some amphetamines masquerading as a pharmaceutical aid,’ while subsequently asking, ‘why aren’t you sleeping at night?’ If middle-aged adults have a problem putting down their phones before bed, then imagine the struggles of an eight-year-old. This is a potential generational disaster just waiting to unfold.
Every day, as bedtime approached, I realised I was beginning to develop a form of performance anxiety, where the stage was my bed and the performance was sleeping. I could be exhausted all day, but the second I got into my bed, boom, eyes wide open. “Inability to sleep can become a phobia,” bestselling author and phobia specialist, Christopher Paul Jones told me over the phone. “Much like the fear of anything, your bed can become this immovable force, in turn, striking fear in you as soon as you try to approach it.”
If it was a phobia, the fear began to grow, exacerbating to the point where I’d be thinking about it all day, dreading the moment I’d be forced to perform this seemingly undoable task.
I would read about it, watch YouTube videos, flood my mind with images of myself being unable to sleep and, at times, literally shaking with fear as soon as I’d get closer to bedtime.
One statistic that didn’t help was listening to a TED talk from renowned sleep expert, Professor Matt Walker, who said, “Men who sleep five hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who sleep seven hours or more. In addition, men who routinely sleep just four to five hours a night will have a level of testosterone which is that of someone 10 years their senior. So a lack of sleep will age a man by a decade in terms of that critical aspect of wellness.” Are you kidding? This sucks!
I was reminded of an instance a few years back, where my dad had just begun taking TRT (Testosterone Replacement Therapy). It’s common knowledge that your testosterone levels progressively decrease as you get older, so when my father decided to get his levels checked, he thought to check mine too. Mind you at the time, in my head, I was the pinnacle of physical health: I worked out, I had a low body fat percentage, tracked my calories, and was on an aggressively healthy diet. But upon checking my testosterone levels, the doctor said, “You have the testosterone of someone 15 years older than you.” That’s not possible, doc, I’m ripped, I said to myself. As my dad listened bemusedly to the reasons for my ‘low T’ levels, after checking off all the potential culprits, he finally asked “How’s your sleep?”
“It’s fine.”
“Define fine.”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged bashfully. “A couple of hours a night.”
“And how’s your memory?”
“Now that you mention it, terrible.”
The doctor sighed. My dad got his supply of TRT, and I was prescribed a week’s worth of sleeping meds. My dad, also a surgeon, has been a night owl his entire life, a trait viewed as a superpower in his field of work. But now, nearing the age of 60, it had finally caught up to him. After a few weeks of TRT, I asked if he’d noticed any major difference.
“I didn’t know it was possible to sleep like this. I feel like a hibernating bear.”
He also looked 10 years younger, and was notably more present in conversation.
“You also need sleep before learning to actually prepare your brain, almost like a dry sponge ready to initially soak up new information,” Matt Walker explains in the same TED talk. “And without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain essentially become waterlogged, as it were, and you can’t absorb new memories.” He added that, much like those in my father’s profession, people who boast about their ability to function on no sleep can face serious consequences later on in life, specifically, Alzheimer’s. Two such examples were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Both proudly spoke about their aversion to sleep, only for them both to succumb to that nefarious disease—something Walker notes as a direct result of sleeplessness.
“Roger Federer gets 12 hours sleep per night; Usain Bolt broke his 100m World Record after waking up from a nap; LeBron James credits his career’s longevity to sleep—but I imagine sleep is easier if you’re not sat at your desk all day.”
What makes the above more interesting is that, whether or not you agreed with their politics, both figures were very industrious during their tenure in office. But as Walker goes on to explain, “Sleep loss costs the UK economy over £30 billion a year in lost revenue, or two percent of its GDP.” This begs the question: how much more could they, or anyone else, have achieved with the assistance of a good night’s sleep?
It was reported that tennis icon, Roger Federer gets 11 to 12 hours of sleep a night; before he broke his own 100 metres world record, Usain Bolt revealed that he had just woken up from a nap; when asked about his secret to remaining at the top of his game at age 39, basketball star LeBron James gave a quick answer: “sleep.”
But, like myself, what are you supposed to do when your bed has become associated with anything but sleep, and as soon as you get under the covers, you toss and turn for hours? After all, I imagine sleep is a bit easier if you’ve been competing in high level sports all day, rather than sitting in an office.
“If you are staying in bed awake for too long, you should get out of bed and go to a different room and do something different,” Walker says. “The reason is because your brain will very quickly associate your bedroom with the place of wakefulness, and you need to break that association. The analogy would be that you’d never sit at the dinner table waiting to get hungry, so why would you lie in bed, waiting to get sleepy?” Fair enough.
Although this remains an unsolved puzzle within myself, it has improved (if only ever so slightly) by adhering to all of this advice. Still, the research is clear: as a society, we are in a sleep loss epidemic, though I’m not sure I find any solace in discovering that I’m far from alone. I’m reminded of a quote taken from the Instagram account, Humans of New York, where a nameless Manhattan stock broker is asked what advice he would give to his younger self. “Everyone should live in the south of Europe for at least six months, just to realise that there’s more to life than endless hours of work. A walk and a good night’s sleep do more than you think.” It’s food for thought, but until then, I guess I’m stuck counting sheep.
