IF YOU’RE SOMEONE WHO struggles with sleep, you’re bound to have tried every tip, technique and product that promises to make you drift off peacefully. I know I have! How many times have you adjusted your room temperature, used blackout blinds, taken a sleep supplement, exercised early, meditated and avoided caffeine – yet you’re still wide awake in the small hours? As an insomniac of many years, I’ve tried every sleep trick around, from relaxation techniques, breathing exercises and supplements to doctor-prescribed pills. But I still struggled to sleep. Well, the prescription pills usually worked – but who wants to be taking pharmaceuticals every night? My insomnia was a wired-but-tired feeling that left me staring at the ceiling while the hours ticked away in a frustration of wakefulness. Until the dreaded screech of my alarm clock summoned my zombiefied brain and body out of bed.decidedly tricky and my patience for absolutely everything fairly thin. Eventually, I decided there must be something horribly wrong – such as the sleep disorder, fatal familial insomnia – a usually, but not always, genetic condition in which you can’t fall asleep and, eventually, die. It was while Googling this terrifying term that I discovered Daniel Erichsen (), a former hospital sleep physician turned sleep coach, who had recorded an eminently sensible video on YouTube, explaining to stressed-out insomniacs, like me, that we were highly statistically unlikely to have this incredibly rare disease. He suggested, instead, that anxiety about being awake could be a cause. This was the first time a sleep expert had said there was nothing actually wrong with me for not being able to sleep. It was a revelatory experience, so, I delved into the hundreds of YouTube sleep lessons he has online. What I discovered was that I’d been approaching insomnia the wrong way by looking at it as something that needed fixing.
