Wide awake in the small hours - is tech to blame?

Exploring the science of sleep

Well it didn’t send me to sleep

I woke yesterday morning, saw that it was still dark and feared the worst. I leaned over to check the time on my phone and groaned - as quietly as possible so as not to wake my wife. It was 2.45 am, another night when it looked as though I was facing defeat in the battle against insomnia. In the last year I have experienced a common symptom of Parkinson’s, an inability to get a full night’s sleep. Recently, a bad back has exacerbated my sleeplessness.

I nod off quite easily - indeed, put me on a sofa in front of the television in the evening, or in a theatre or cinema and I have an embarrassing ability to emit loud snores after ten minutes. A few years back I went to see Mad Max 3 with my son who complained afterwards that I had managed to sleep for 20 minutes during what is possibly the noisiest film ever made.

No, my problem is that I wake at 2,3 or 4 and then struggle to get back to sleep. But this time I had a new weapon in my anti-insomnia armoury. I had noticed a new series called Sleep Sound with Jamie Dornan on the Audible platform. Apparently the combination of the soothing tones of the Northern Irish star of The Fall and Belfast with various soundscapes was guaranteed to have me snoring within minutes.

I plugged in my AirPods and pressed play. An hour later, after Jamie had taken me to a beach in Mexico, a choir practice in an ancient Estonian city and a train journey across the Hungarian countryside, I was still wide awake.

I tried another tactic - listening to some hi-fibre podcast. In the past Talking Politics with the Cambridge academic David Runciman has worked a treat - I love it during the day but at night I am soon dead to the world. Sadly this podcast, along with Runciman’s delightfully deadpan reading of the beer adverts, has now come to an end.

So I turned to The Rest Is History, the hit podcast with Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. Surely an episode on China’s Cultural Revolution would sandbag me within minutes? Sadly it proved so fascinating that I was 45 minutes in before I started snoozing. 15 minutes later my wife’s early alarm went off and I struggled downstairs to make her a cup of tea before she caught her train to her job in Cambridge.

But the long hours awake in the night weren’t entirely wasted. One of my worries as I lay there in the dark was what I was going to put in this newsletter this week. Then I realised I had an obvious subject - technology and sleep.

There are all sorts of questions waiting to be answered. Are smartphones a cause of insomnia, as we doomscroll in bed late at night? Or do the many apps and sleep trackers now offer a cure for the epidemic of sleeplessness? How far has the science of sleep evolved and are its leading exponents still preaching that we need 8 hours a night to function properly? And, most important of all, has anyone got an answer to my sleep problem?

I sat in bed with my cup of tea composing a tweet asking to be put in touch with sleep experts - and responses came flooding in. I have already spoken to two very interesting sleep scientists and have more interviews scheduled. I am also considering embarking on an online course which promises to get me sleeping better.

So I am now planning not just one article but a series on sleep. Watch this space, and don’t let those eyelids droop - I promise this will be worth staying awake for.