WHY SLEEP IS A FEMINIST ISSUE
As the morning alarm penetrates Amarachi Clarke’s consciousness, she forces her eyelids open, resisting her body’s plea to keep them shut. Despite the struggle to get out of bed, Amarachi hasn’t actually been asleep for hours. Instead, since the depths of the pre-dawn morning, she’s occupied that strange, liminal space of insomnia, lying in the dark while her mind dances. She begins the day exhausted, as she always does. The 38-year-old has suffered with insomnia since she was 17. Back then, she filled her nights listening to a radio show as the inky-black slipped into daybreak. This morphed into a pattern that has dominated Amarachi’s adult life: a relatively seamless transition into sleep; a sharp, sudden awakening around 2am; and an inability to drift off to sleep again, as to-dos for her life and business – she founded a craftchocolate company in 2015 – stream through her mind.
It doesn’t help that Amarachi knows the benefits of sleep go far beyond avoiding the feeling you’ve been hit by a bus. The knowledge that clocking up seven to nine hours of quality sleep a night is good for your health is baked into our collective consciousness,
