I can’t think of anything more annoying than the self-satisfied smirk that comes from the chorus of influencers – not to say doctors – who all imply that we must sort out our sleep. Or else.
The “or else” heads a compendium of ailments that no self-respecting person would want to claim. High on the undesirability stakes: dementia, Alzheimer’s. Close behind: heart disease, diabetes, and a higher rate of the commonest cancers. And so the intonation of future misery continues.
And there on the receiving end of these head-shaking kill-joys is the majority of women. Here’s the infuriating part: the progress through life for the female sex is littered with the natural messiness and demands of actual life. Most of us can testify that life isn’t designed around tucking ourselves up early. Not in my life script. Probably not in yours either.
Why Women Have Always Been Bad At Sleep – And For Good Reason
Even as children, the idea of sleep as a fixed destination was negotiable at best. We took and gave our goodnight kiss, said our prayers and listened to our mother’s footsteps going back downstairs. After which we chattered under the sheets, tip-toed back to our toys, or read by torchlight. Sleep came a little later. It always did.
At university the wheels came off entirely. Most of us simply reversed day and night – whether dancing, talking or working through till dawn. My proud record was three nights running: two all-nighters back to back for different essay deadlines, then staggering to a party on the third night, only to find myself locked out of my digs. But that is another story. The point is that I abused my circadian rhythms without apparent long-term damage. It’s probably the only period in life when we feel genuinely indestructible – and our obliging bodies tend to agree.
The Working World’s Dirty Secret: Sleep Is For Other People
All-nighters become more of a killer, but if your upward path depends on doing what everyone before you did, you do them anyway. Before working from home became even a ghost of a possibility, anyone in the early phase of a career was expected to demonstrate dedication through sheer hours. The Higher Ups left you in no doubt about their expectations. The consultancy and banking world had a name for their lowly, harassed juniors: Grunts. Out of curiosity I looked it up. The term originates from the military – specifically from stringing a pole between two trees and digging a trench along one side for use as an outdoor latrine. Make of that what you will.
There are many wonderful depictions of this stage – perhaps the finest being Andrea’s experience with Miranda in The Devil Wears Prada. The reality, though, has a face you’ll probably recognise:
A partner at a top legal firm dimly recalls a pertinent case from his own early days. Too abstruse for the computer, naturally. Which means you’re in the basement sifting through old files at an hour when sensible people are asleep.
A young consultant is tearing their head apart, wrestling a PowerPoint into something a client might actually sit through rather than stare at in polite horror.
As for myself, working as a researcher in television: I once drove to an inner-city London estate – reputed to be a no-go area – to physically track down an interviewee who had stopped answering his phone. Found him. Couldn’t find a way back. On another occasion I unfurled an entire editing tape at 3am and spent the rest of the night trying to reverse my error. That’s the job. You do it.
The insanity of ambition, however, reaches fever pitch on Wall Street. Conditions there are sometimes murderous – and that is not entirely a figure of speech. The Wall Street Journal’s Alexander Saeedy reported that Bank of America employees were regularly working 19 to 20-hour days, despite HR policies nominally banning the practice – policies introduced a decade earlier after an intern in London died of a seizure following several consecutive all-nighters. It came to a head again when a banker working roughly 100-hour weeks died. Even those in their 40s in investment banking routinely survive on fewer than six hours a night. The ambitious say: that’s life. It’s also a life that the sleep whisperers have chosen, against all evidence, to overlook.
The Language of Optimisation. Spare Me.
Which brings us to the gap between prescription and reality – a gap that no amount of magnesium spray is going to close.
Somewhere along the way, the wellness industry decided that human beings were essentially Formula One machines requiring routine checks and adjustments. Every health page online and off is thick with the language of optimisation: optimal sleep windows; sleep hygiene; circadian alignment. As if, properly configured, we might wake each morning with the dewy complexion of a modern Sleeping Beauty and the cognitive clarity of someone who has never had a deadline in their life.
Let me offer the sleep diary the experts never show us – preferring rather to inhabit a world that doesn’t exist.
If you’re lucky enough to have a job, you’re stumbling out of bed before your sleep cycles have finished doing whatever they’re supposed to do. At night your circadian rhythms rarely get their way either. Silence may descend – children in bed, kitchen more or less sorted – but sleep? Absolutely not. This is get-it-done hour: the last-minute draft, the presentation, the Excel sheet for someone further up the pecking order. The fact that it will be for someone else’s consumption keeps you awake even after you’ve signed off.
For freelancers and small business owners the hours compress further. Work gets done. Then future work must be found – and that tends to push past midnight. Add HMRC’s inspired decision to introduce quarterly rather than annual reporting, the clients who delay payment until you’re nearly in a state of financial collapse, and the chasing calls that no AI agent can quite make for you. The time has to come from somewhere.
Off to bed, then. If you’re lucky. If you’re not, there’s the washing machine, the lunch boxes, and the vague countdown in your ear: 11pm. Midnight. Six hours before the alarm. Six hours is, for the record, below the statutory recommendation.
As for the morning – it rarely resembles the leisurely ritual recommended by those infuriating life gurus who operate as though you have clearly failed to organise yourself unless you are drinking a collagen sachet, stretching, taking a cold shower, or performing a battery of other improving acts before the school run.
My sister-in-law, who works in finance, has been on a 5.30am wake-up call most of her adult life. My brother drives to the station at roughly the same hour, balancing a bowl of cereal and braking for stray animals crossing the verge. During our years at Channel 4 and the BBC, my husband and I were in the car and heading to location before six. And if you need to speak to Australia, China, Singapore or Japan, you’re up before most of them anyway.
Coming to lower-paid workers – who are too often ignored in this conversation – the maths simply don’t work. You cannot care for the elderly from a desk. You move house to house, shift to shift, managing late-night roads between nine and eleven, then rising again with the dawn. I know this because when we had carers helping me, I used to quiz them about their hours. It was simply their life. They take their sleeplessness for granted. As scandalously do we.
Menopause: When Sleep Disappears.
Just when you might reasonably expect your body to settle into something approaching a reliable pattern, it decides to do the opposite. For menopausal and post-menopausal women – and this is a very large number of us – sleep doesn’t just become difficult. It becomes a stranger. Night sweats arrive without warning and without apology, pulling you out of whatever fragile sleep you’d managed to negotiate. The 3am wake-up – alert, overheated, and furiously awake for no discernible reason – becomes a nightly appointment you didn’t make and can’t cancel. Anxiety, which has no respect for the hour, tends to turn up at the same time.
The cruelty of this is the timing. These are often the years when the demands on a woman are at their most complex – ageing parents, grown children still requiring various forms of rescue, careers at their most pressured, relationships requiring actual attention. The body withdrawing sleep at precisely this moment feels less like biology and more like a particularly bad joke.
The sleep evangelists, characteristically, have advice for this too. Cool the room. Try magnesium. Consider HRT. Some of this, it must be said, is not entirely useless – and we will come to it. But the cheerful suggestion that menopause-related sleeplessness can be resolved with a better bedtime routine is roughly as useful as telling someone bitten by a rabid dog that they’ll be perfectly fine without treatment. They won’t.
So – Who, Precisely, Is The Sleep Prescription For?
Not for mothers. Not for carers. Not for the junior banker or the freelancer or the woman on the 5.30am train. Not for the woman lying awake at 3am waiting for the hot flush to pass. It is, in the main, available as a genuine lifestyle choice to those with the structural luxury of controlling their own hours – and perhaps, though one hesitates to say it quite so bluntly, to those whose domestic lives are managed by someone else entirely.
To everyone else: your indignation is entirely justified. And here, finally, is what can actually help.
What Actually Works: A Realistic Guide For The Sleep-Deprived
None of what follows comes with a guarantee or a smug before-and-after photograph. Think of it as a collection of things that have either worked for me or for people I trust – offered in the spirit of solidarity rather than instruction.
Start, if you will, with the simplest and most overlooked: the siesta. Much of South America, southern Europe and large parts of Asia have understood for centuries what we in our Protestant efficiency have chosen to forget – that the post-lunch dip is not a personal failing but a biological event. A twenty-minute nap in the early afternoon can restore cognitive function, lower cortisol and reset the nervous system more effectively than most things you can buy. The fact that the modern working world has largely abolished it says rather more about our priorities than our physiology.
Then there is the question of screens. Blue light suppresses melatonin – the hormone that tells your body the day is over – in ways we are only beginning to fully understand. Blue light filtering glasses for evening use have become something of a quiet revolution among people who were initially sceptical. There is also a free programme called f.lux that warms your screen colour automatically as the evening progresses, which sounds like a small thing until you notice the difference. If you are going to spend the evening working – and we have already established that most of us are – you might as well make the light kinder.
The hot shower paradox deserves a mention because it is one of those facts that feels like it shouldn’t be true: a warm shower an hour or so before bed lowers your core body temperature as you cool down afterwards, and it is precisely that drop that signals sleep. The body occasionally surprises you.
Blackout blinds. A weighted blanket – roughly ten percent of your body weight, the gentle pressure thought to increase serotonin. And if the transition from wakefulness to sleep is the particular problem, a Dodow is worth trying – a small device that projects a slow-pulsing light onto the ceiling and guides your breathing into a rhythm that eases the nervous system towards rest. It sounds faintly absurd. It works for a significant number of people who thought it would be faintly absurd.
On the subject of sleep masks: the newer versions have moved some distance from the eye patches of elderly air travel. There are now masks that combine light-blocking with mild acupressure and temperature regulation – addressing several of the body’s signals at once. Worth investigating if you are someone for whom the problem is less falling asleep than the quality of what follows.
Magnesium glycinate – not the cheaper oxide form – taken before bed has growing evidence behind it, particularly for those who wake repeatedly through the night. It is one supplement that the more sceptical end of the medical establishment has largely stopped dismissing.
For the menopausal and post-menopausal among us, the 3am cortisol surge and its companions are hormonal events requiring hormonal responses. HRT, for those who can take it, has transformed the sleep of a great many women who came to it reluctantly. The conversation with your GP is worth having – and worth returning to if it is waved away the first time. Melatonin, available on prescription in the UK, can help reset a cycle that has broken down entirely.
If the budget stretches to it, an infrared or Finnish sauna is one of the more effective – and more pleasurable – investments in sleep quality available. The rise and fall of core body temperature it produces mimics precisely the conditions needed for deep sleep. I have always thought the honest comparison is not with a luxury purchase but with the cost of a holiday – and unlike a holiday, a good sauna serves you for decades.
The Eight Sleep Pod – a temperature-regulating mattress cover – operates on the same principle at a lower entry point, adjusting your sleeping surface throughout the night in ways that support deeper sleep cycles. It is not cheap. It is, among those who have tried it, consistently well-regarded.
The Body Is More Resilient Than They Want You To Think
During the Second World War, millions of people worked around the clock, slept in shifts and managed on considerably less than the prescribed eight hours. A remarkable number of them lived into robust old age. The body, it turns out, is a great deal more resilient than the sleep industry finds it convenient to admit – and the anxiety generated by not sleeping may well be doing as much damage as the sleeplessness itself.
Do what you can with what you have. The rest, as it were, can wait. And if all else fails, there is always eternity.
Keats, no stranger himself to the 3am ceiling, put it more eloquently than any of us have managed since:
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the “Amen,” ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,—
Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oilèd wards,
And seal the hushèd Casket of my Soul.
John Keats, 1819
Good Night. And Good Luck.
