It has become one of Western culture’s most cherished neuroses that we exist in a constant state of sleep deprivation: which is not to say that this is not the case. Hours are notched up where once we might have totted up calories. Friends compete to determine who has passed the more fitful night. Magazine covers that were wont to holler “hot sex” now lure us in with promises of “deep sleep”.
And oh, how we love a spot of breaking sleep tragedy or hypno-machismo. In December 2011, António Horta-Osório, chief executive of Lloyds Banking Group, was famously forced to take several weeks’ leave after a bout of particularly torturous insomnia. This summer, Bank of America Merrill Lynch intern Moritz Erhardt, 21, died after working until 6am three days in a row, having slogged throughout the night eight times in two weeks. Offered the chance to renounce their shackles after his death, none of his peers took up the opportunity.
Burberry’s chief, Angela Ahrendts (£1.02 million plus benefits and bonus), clearly sees herself in the four-hours-a-night Thatcher mode. At 4.35am she rises, without an alarm, boasting that if she scores more than six hours’ rest she gets a headache. While media mogul Arianna Huffington, who once shattered her cheekbone by falling asleep at, and on to, her desk, is forever encouraging women to “sleep their way to the top” – in the most blameless, but stressfully counterproductive, of fashions.
As a culture, we are fixated with sleep and, correspondingly, beset with sleeplessness. Almost 40 per cent of people endure at least one symptom, with a quarter of these experiencing chronic traits at any one time. Insomnia is widely considered an epidemic, with scientists increasingly unearthing dire implications for sufferers’ physical and mental health, weight and life expectancy. Popular culture blames our 24/7 lifestyles, technology, and our inability to switch off, brains as buttons.
Prof Colin Espie at Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Clinical Neuroscience looks deeper: “Most people have an easier life than they would have 100 years ago. Then, the pressures were very real. Child mortality was high, there were fewer treatments for illnesses, greater poverty. The problems we have now are more self-inflicted. We put ourselves under a huge amount of pressure and fail to take full advantage of having more free time to live a full and healthy life. We are victims of failed expectations and disappointments, and we end up with a lot of essentially psychological problems.”
He continues: “No aspect of daily functioning is unaffected by sleep – from concentration and energy, to mood, productivity and social interactions. The results of 2012’s Great British Sleep Survey revealed that long-term poor sleepers are seven times more likely to feel helpless, five times more likely to feel alone and twice as likely to have relationship problems as good ones.”
“CBT has been shown to help around 70 per cent of sufferers and is what we call an 'evidence-based therapy’, meaning that it has been shown to be effective in controlled clinical studies. Sleepio.com works by training people to use these proven CBT techniques over a six-week course. So, yes, I do think insomnia can be fixed, but CBT is the only proven means.”
Reference:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/wellbeing/10304984/Is-there-any-way-to-cure-insomnia.html
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