It’s a bit awkward, really, telling people that I’m tired without ever having a suitably impressive excuse. I don’t have children. I haven’t been to a sunrise pilates class. And I don’t – as far as I know – have a sexy enough anecdote to explain why I only slept for a couple of hours last night. Or the night before. I’m just an uninteresting insomniac who hasn’t had a good night’s rest since Brad and Angelina got hitched in 2014.
My sleepless nights started at 22. At that age, I had better things to do than get eight hours sleep: Boys. Parties. Deadlines. But even once those distractions slowed, I noticed that sleep wasn’t coming as naturally. I (and many GPs and therapists) don’t know why, it was like I just quietly slipped out of sync with the other well-rested grown-ups and never managed to catch up.
Today, I still cannot sleep. I cannot get to sleep – if I send myself to bed at 10:30pm, it’s a win to have fallen asleep within an hour – and I cannot stay asleep. I typically wake three or four times a night for 30 minutes at a time. During the day, I’m at the mercy of caffeine highs, sugar crashes and whether I can sneak a lie down in the afternoon.
Being tired is incredibly boring. Most people don’t want to hear about it, many don’t get it and I have a feeling that admitting to exhaustion now comes with a dose of shame, too. Long gone are the days when it was a sign of an exciting, care-free lifestyle. Aspirational living now values, what I like to call, high-energy propaganda: “what I do in a day” videos with smug early risers in the gym at 5am and wellness trends hitched to the promise of “optimised” sleep.
Sleep is no longer seen as a biological necessity, it’s an aspirational currency, traded in pursuit of the busy, high-functioning lives we’re told to want. I’d just like to hit the NHS-recommended target of between six to eight hours.
But unless you’re a fellow sleep sufferer – the NHS says one in three are affected – allow me to stop you before you ask whether I’ve tried camomile tea or a strict bedtime. These so-called solutions and I go way back. Avoid screens for an hour before bed: tried it. Ensure your bedroom is cool: my window is always open. Keep the room dark: my beloved Drowsy sleep mask helps. Try mindfulness: it just winds me up. Ditch caffeine (did it) and alcohol (less successfully) and go to bed at the same time every night. None of them work for me.
I’ve done it all. Or, at least, it feels that way. Which is why I’m so frustrated by the notion that sleeping well is as simple as popping a few supplements, sticking on mouth tape and swapping scrolling for a book.
But – in a bid to improve things – over the past year, I have continued to try and approach my sleep like a problem to be solved – behaviourally, nutritionally, technologically – and watched how each played out. My hopes were perhaps a tad naive.
I started by speaking to Olivia Rosenvinge, a registered associate nutritionist at Holland & Barratt, hoping there might be a simple practical explanation, a missing dietary element that an expert could spot. Like many struggling with sleep, I’ve experimented with coffee cut-offs and magnesium supplements.
Rosenvinge was quick to manage expectations. While certain nutrients play a role in sleep regulation, she explained, long-term sleep problems are rarely solved at the dinner table. “Nutrition can support sleep, but it can’t override stress. If the underlying issue is lifestyle or psychological, food and supplements won’t fix that on their own,” she said.
If anything, the pressure to eat perfectly can backfire. “A lot of people are doing everything ‘right’ nutritionally and still not sleeping,” she said; a reality that can add yet another layer of stress to nights already heavy with expectation.
She’s right. When I have been disciplined, it has only felt more frustrating when I’ve not seen positive effects. Cutting down on alcohol (even one or two drinks can reduce sleep quality, says Rosenvinge), for example, which I did for a couple of months, didn’t revolutionise my sense of rest. Given my insomnia has stretched more than a decade, perhaps it was silly to think that ditching vino would solve my problems.
I wondered if there was a more substantial nutritional imbalance that could be at play. Enter magnesium, the supplement that Rosenvinge describes as a bit of a “buzzword”. Surprise, surprise, it doesn’t work in the way many of us assume.
“Magnesium may promote better sleep by helping the nervous system relax, regulating neurotransmitters like your Gaba [Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid is the brain’s main suppressive signaling molecule] supporting the sleep hormone melatonin and just generally easing muscle tension. It can make it easier to fall and stay asleep,” she explains. “Someone with generally low baseline levels of magnesium, would probably find the most benefit.”
Maybe that’s why I’ve not had much luck with the supplements I’ve tried. The type of magnesium matters – “for sleep and stress in general, you’d want to be looking at a magnesium glycinate” – and timing plays a part, too: “30-60 minutes before bed to align with your body’s natural sleep cycles,” Rosenvinge says.
But expecting a supplement like this to tip me into a Sleeping Beauty slumber is a reach. “Sometimes the effects can be quite subtle. People might find they have small improvements. That could be over a few weeks or a few months, but it takes consistency. But again, it comes down to your baseline levels.” Rosenvinge assures, even if I’m not noticing an immediate difference, magnesium supplements could be quietly supporting a more restorative sleep. Just, perhaps, not fixing whatever it is has prevented my sleep.
Instead of trying to just treat the problem, I liked the idea of stopping it at the root. Is there a way to work out what has been causing my insomnia after all this time? “One of insomnia’s best friends is perfectionism,” Heather Darwall-Smith tells me. Darwall-Smith specialises in the psychological origins of sleep issues and often works with people who have already tried many avenues. “The more people try to control sleep, the more they keep the problem going.”
Insomnia, she explains, is rarely simple and properly unpicking it takes time. “It’s so multifactorial,” she says. “Sometimes it’s a case of which lever to pull first.” That’s oddly reassuring. If my attempts to fix my sleep have felt futile, perhaps it’s because they’ve been disjointed rather than insufficient.
One of the most abrupt changes I’ve made is forcing myself into bed at the same time every night. The habit has stuck since becoming a belated resolution for 2025. Between my Garmin smartwatch and bedtime mode on my phone, I can see that I’m spending the recommended seven to nine hours in bed but, according to my devices, mostly awake. It’s one of the most frustrating realisations: that I’m doing the “right” thing and still not sleeping.
When she works with insomniacs, Darwall-Smith breaks it down into the “three Ps”: predisposing factors which could be anything from genetics to age, precipitating triggers such as a stressful event and the perpetuating behaviours that keep it going. “Over-control and militaristic routines keep sleep problems going,” she says. “Good sleepers don’t do anything.” As frustrating as that is to hear, particularly in a culture obsessed with optimisation, it tracks.
Thinking about sleep makes me tense. Dwelling on whether I’ve done enough on my way to bed to ensure this sleep is good doesn’t encourage rest. And so builds an undercurrent of resentment the more I try to perfect my experience. “If you’ve got a long-term sleep problem and you’re only focusing on the hour before bed, you’re closing the door after the horse has bolted,” Darwall-Smith says. She compares the body to a shaken bottle of Coke: pressure building all day, only to explode at night if you don’t release the lid steadily in the day.
Waking at 3am, she tells me, is classic stress waking. I’ve probably known that for a long time, given how frequently I see that time of day, just not enough to seriously interrogate what’s fuelling the anxiety.
Darwall-Smith makes a distinction that feels uncomfortably obvious once it’s said aloud: the difference between being tired, fatigued and actually sleepy. “If you’re sleepy, you can put your head down and go to sleep,” she explains. “But a lot of people are exhausted rather than sleepy.” Wired, overstimulated, running on stress.
So the question shifts. What is it that’s making me exhausted rather than sleepy? Stress, environment, caffeine, lack of daylight, a nervous system that never quite stands down. Sleep, she suggests, isn’t something you “do” at night so much as something that takes care of itself when the conditions are right in the day.
If you lie in bed wide awake, she warns, the brain quickly learns that this is a place of tension rather than rest. Bed becomes somewhere you brace, not where you let go. And sometimes — uncomfortably, for people like me who want answers — there is no single root cause. “We won’t always get to the bottom of why sleep is difficult,” she says. “That can be hard to accept.”
One question, she adds, is usually revealing: do you know how to switch off? Do you know how to rest? And if the answer is no, that might explain why I’m awake at 3am. Not because I’ve failed at sleep, but because I’ve not stopped shaking the bottle in the first place.
One thing I did feel optimistic about is that perhaps I’m not quite as sleep deprived as I believe. “People with insomnia consistently underestimate how much sleep they’re getting,” Darwall-Smith explains. “During light sleep you feel alert. We can hear and sense light, but are technically under the sleep barrier.”
It’s one reason, she says, that trackers can make anxiety worse – because they tell you that you’re awake. That makes me feel less guilty for turning off my trackers a few months ago but also unsettles me. The idea that I might be sleeping clashes with the insomnia badge I’ve grown used to wearing. And yet it makes sense. It would explain how I can still function and turn up to work despite apparently sleeping just three hours a night.
Perhaps the problem isn’t my sleep so much as my idea of what successful sleep looks like. “Often the body isn’t failing at sleep,” Darwall-Smith says. “It’s in a state of hyperarousal. It thinks it needs to stay awake to keep you safe.” In that light, waking during the night isn’t abnormal — it’s expected. Sleep, she explains, is meant to be flexible, not a solid eight-hour block uninterrupted by consciousness.
One person’s good night is another’s bad one. And it makes me wonder whether the cycles of sleep disturbance I’ve lived with for the past decade are less about the quality of my sleep than the quality of my waking hours.
A year on, my sleep hasn’t been transformed. I still wake in the night. I still have mornings that arrive too early and stretches where rest feels thin and unreliable. What has shifted, though, is the way I think about it. I’ve stopped treating sleep as something to be cracked, optimised or earned and, just as importantly, stopped reading bad nights as evidence that I’ve failed. I did learn, however, which kinds of effort made it worse (and methods I could finally stop forcing).
Letting go of the idea that there was a fix waiting to be unlocked turned out to be the most useful intervention of all. I no longer track my sleep, or punish myself for restless nights, or assume that the answer lies in one more tweak. I pay more attention to how I move through the day, whether that’s a ballet class or a walk; whether I’m tired or sleepy; and how rarely I give myself permission to slow down without trying to justify needing a rest.
In a culture that celebrates boundless energy and quiet endurance, admitting to tiredness still feels faintly transgressive. But after a year of consciously trying to fix my sleep, I’m less interested in it. My terrible sleep likely won’t find a cure. But not allowing that to bother me so much might nudge me towards feeling better about getting out of bed.
