Back to Sleep...

Last year I wrote a number of pieces here about my problems with sleep. I ended up using the cognitive behavioural therapy app Sleepio to try to learn better sleep habits, and was moderately successful. By choosing a limited sleep window from 11pm until 5am I was able to boost my sleep ratio, the percentage of my time in bed when I’m asleep.

But has my behaviour change been permanent, and am I still sleeping better? My impression is that I have gone backwards, spending much of the night awake. But if I learned one thing from Professor Colin Espie, the Sleepio guru, it is that our impressions of our own sleep patterns tend to be much too pessimistic - we say we didn’t sleep a wink when in fact we had a good few hours.

So I set out in search of some reliable data, wearing my Apple Watch overnight to take advantage of its sleep tracking capabilities. Here’s what the sleep data showed over three nights:

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As you can see, the readings confirm that I am not doing too well. My best night’s sleep was just under five hours, and my final wakening - the time I woke up and decided I was never going to get back to sleep - ranged from 3.15am to a little after 5am. My sleep efficiency, which had occasionally got above 90% last summer, struggled to get much above 75%. On the more positive side, having thought I was awake for long stretches of each night, the watch showed that most awakenings lasted just a minute or two.

So why have my slumbers declined in quality? Well, full disclosure, I’ve fallen into bad habits, ignoring some of the lessons I learned on the Sleepio course. It teaches you to go to bed at a set time, 11pm in my case, switch the lights off straight away and attempt to go srraight to sleep. If you want to read a book or watch a bit of television before nodding off that’s fine but do it in another room - your bedroom is for sleeping.

Instead, my bedtime has varied between 10.15pm and 11.45pm and I’ve resumed my habit of reading in bed or even watching TV on a tablet, often waking with a start an hour or two later with the book or iPad on my face.

And I’ve ignored Sleepio’s advice that, if you wake for more than 15 minutes in the night, you should get up, go to another room and relax for a bit before returning to bed. Instead, if I’ve been awake at 3am for more than a short while, I will give up, reach for my phone and disappear down a social media rabbit hole with no hope of returning to sleep. (That is when my wife is away - when she is at home I try extra hard toget back to sleep so as not to disturb her, and often do manage to get another hour or so.)

Feeling rather embarrassed about my lack of sleep discipline I called Colin Espie to confess my sins. He was very understanding - reading in bed wasnt so bad, he told me, as long as I never got through more than a few pages:

“If somebody who reads in bed struggles to read because they keep falling asleep reading in bed actually is a predictor of sleep for them.” And it’s true, picking up a book at bedtime is for me rather like taking a sleeping pill.

But I wanted to explore why I kept waking up in the middle of the night. One obvious answer is that insomnia is a symptom of Parkinson’s. At a meeting with several of my “Parky” pals in the pub this week it seemed nobody had had a good night’s sleep and at 5am the next morning I found myself exchanging WhatsApp messages with one of them.

Sleepless over Sophie

But, as I told Professor Espie, there was another reason why I was often wide awake at 4am - I was worrying about our Romanian rescue dog. Sophie is very scared and has been slow to settle in her new home and wondering what to do about it sets my mind racing in the small hours. But the professor had a solution for that - do your worrying at another time:

“What's recommended is to set aside some specific scheduled time for worrying. So you can worry as much as you like, as long as it's at the time that you set aside for it.” Even if you get to say 9pm and you don’t feel particularly worried, if that’s your “worry time” you have to get on with it. “It's a form of exposure therapy.”

As anyone will know who has been on a successful diet but then regained weight some months later, changing your behaviour permanently is very difficult. I am never going to be an eight hours a night man but I know I can sleep just a bit better - so from now on it’s lights out at 11pm with my 10 minute Sophie worry session done and dusted.