In my youth, I was such a champion sleeper that taking a nap was actively risky. I might fall asleep at 1pm and wake up the following Tuesday. At university I once slept through a 2am fire alarm where fire engines turned up.
But then, about two years ago: doom. Insomnia. I loudly blame the Covid infection I had, because I don’t want it to be the perimenopause. (But also I think it really might be because I had Covid).
A report this week showed a leap in time-wasters arriving at A&E, between 2021-22 and 2022-23, with minor ailments such as sore throats, hiccups, nosebleeds – and insomnia. Insomnia is neither an accident nor an emergency, but I am truly sympathetic to those desperate souls who arrive at A&E having had no kip. Without sleep, you feel like you are going to lose your mind. And in a sense, you are.
At a certain stage of sleep, your brain is flooded with cerebrospinal fluid, which washes away all manner of bad proteins that build up in the crevices of your brain during the day. These are bad proteins that can make you feel anxious and desperate about minor situations, and can cause small children to completely lose it around bedtime. Without that critical cleansing routine, you feel as bad as you can do late at night for the whole of the next day.
My insomnia comes and goes in waves. And one of the main side effects is getting mad as hell at all the dumb newspaper features that trot out the same obvious suggestions to people who can’t sleep. Don’t have your phone in the bedroom, try a milky drink before bed, practise good “sleep hygiene”. Blah, blah, blah. God, it’s annoying. Especially if you are underslept and cranky.
I am not relaxed about insomnia. I believe humans have the right to education and to live without fear of persecution, and also to eight hours’ sleep.
I have researched all possible sleep solutions with a determination that I haven’t felt since the race to nab pieces from the Isabel Marant x H&M collection in 2013. (Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the kind of doctor who will prescribe sleeping pills, so that was never going to be even a temporary answer.)
Nytol, the popular over-the-counter sleeping “aid” was no match for my sleeplessness, merely dumping me in zombie dozing-but-not-asleep state for six hours. So that got tossed into a drawer.
Instead, I went natural. I tried the hot bath and the cold bedroom. I did the This Works Deep Sleep Pillow Spray. I left my phone downstairs in the evening. I meditated and ate healthily. During the week I didn’t even think about a glass of wine. Actually, this isn’t true: I thought about the glass of wine but didn’t drink it. It all helped about 10 per cent.
I did, however, resist the advice that I hate the most, which is the suggestion that if you can’t sleep you should get up after 15 minutes and go and do something quiet in another room until you feel sleepy again.
One: that would wake me up permanently and for hours. Two: it would wake up my husband who would be so angry that poisonous green gas would whistle out of his ears. Three: it would probably wake my son, who would follow me downstairs and ask what movie we’re watching.
Luckily, I landed on a quote from Dr Guy Meadows of The Sleep School, who is circumspect about this advice, saying (I’m paraphrasing) that even if you’re not asleep, you’re still resting and that’s something. That’s my story anyway.
The solution
My answer to insomnia, or partly the answer, came indirectly from Gwyneth Paltrow’s “sleep guru”, Frank Lipman. I’m not a hater of Gwyneth Paltrow, but her solutions to problems do tend to involve spending thousands of pounds and doing crazy stuff.
Inspired by her guru, Paltrow recommends for better sleep a 12-hour fasting window between 8pm and 8am, a pre-bed foot massage, a copper-infused pillowcase, heated socks, meditation and a zero-tech bedroom. Okay, but how is she able to sleep for fear that the heated socks and the copper pillow will somehow connect and electrocute her?
This aside Lipman, who wrote the self-explanatory book Better Sleep, Better You in 2021, actually had some new things to tell me about sleep.
First, there is a neurotransmitter called Gaba, (gamma-aminobutyric acid – there will be a test later, folks), which in simple terms is the thing that allows you to relax and fall asleep. The older you get, the less Gaba there is. How can you get more Gaba? Magnesium.
Magnesium is found naturally in milk, nuts (particularly Brazil nuts), seeds, leafy greens and wholegrains. But, of course, you can also get it in supplements galore. Then I read that women my age are particularly prone to low magnesium levels.
With my desk chair still spinning, I sprinted down to Holland & Barrett and 10 minutes later walked back home clutching a bag clanking with pills and sprays. It took a week or two, but a dose of Magnesium Glycinate, (it must be this one, not citrate or any of the others), plus a good spritz of BetterYou Magnesium Sleep body spray on the inside of my forearms and order slowly began to be restored.
The BetterYou spray gets a bad rep: people complain that it is “sticky” and it “stings”. Yes, both those things are true but this is why you spray it on the inside of your forearms and rub them together, keeping it off your hands. The very light sting subsides with use and, (although this may be nonsense), I have heard that the sting indicates magnesium deficiency.
My sleep is still not perfect. For example, I did everything “right” last night and was still awake between 3.30 and 5am and now feel and look like hell. But my point is that every journey from insomnia to sleep is a personal one – you have to tinker with a sleep system in crisis an awful lot until you find what works for you. And if it’s the copper pillow that works? Good luck to you.