I haven’t slept at all tonight,” he says, running through the list of questions he’s been lying awake asking himself. In Manchester, marketing agent Joe Harper, 31, is refusing to abandon his bed just yet. “Didn’t work,” he concedes, finally wandering downstairs to the family lounge to watch TV. Lewis was convinced that some difficult maths would help lull him to sleep. “Trigonometry,” he croaks, in a 2.40am voice note. In Essex, Freddie Lewis, a 17-year-old college student, has been using his hours awake to do some homework. But when you know you’re going to feel tired and terrible tomorrow, the insomnia causes the anxiety.” Every long-term insomniac knows the listable reasons. “So frustrating,” she tells me, “because anxiety causes the insomnia. As Adlington can testify, one of the worst aspects of the condition is its self-sustaining nature. People find their insomnia stressful, ridiculous, useful, cruel. Quite a few have come to shrug and accept their condition. Many are seeking treatment, trying tricks, open to wheezes, superstitions, suggestions. Some of those who respond to my request on the Guardian website are close to despair.
In particular, those who would be willing to further interrupt their nights to describe the sensations and frustrations of insomnia, helping to paint a picture of sleeplessness in Britain in 2021, one night-time voice note at a time. She is documenting her experience of a wakeful night because, a few months ago, I went in search of insomniacs. What does it feel like, being awake, alone, out of options, in the smallest and quietest hours of the night? “Like being an animal in a cage,” Adlington says, murmuring into her phone. Somewhere between 3am and 4am, she picks up her smartphone and, speaking softly, begins to dictate a voice message. The 36-year-old silversmith cannot fall asleep but is hesitant to clamber out of bed for fear of waking the rest of her household. A frozen lake in Norway …Ī little way north, in Durham, Lucy Adlington is alert, awake, and stuck. He has just been to the cinema to see No Time to Die and as he closes his eyes for the night, he decides to start at the beginning, mentally recreating the movie in as much detail as he can manage. Why not? Chan is among that enormous proportion of the British public – one in three, according to an NHS estimate – who suffer from routine bouts of sleeplessness. Now, on a random night in October, the 52-year-old from Liverpool tries to get to sleep by imagining that he is James Bond.
P aul Chan has tried hot tea, hot baths, hot-water bottles, a cold breeze from an open window, mental maths, brainteasers, very slow breathing in bed and very brisk walks around his bedroom.
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