In Search of Sleep: An Insomniac's Quest to Understand the Science, Psychology, and Culture of Sleeplessness

By Bregje Hofstede

"Bregje Hofstede is an extraordinary writer."—Rutger Bregmans, author of Utopia for Realists and Humankind: A Hopeful History

Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing meets Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep in this fascinating deep-dive into the science and history of sleep.

In Search of Sleep is both a self-help manual for insomniacs, and a sweeping critique of the hustle culture that blinds us to the real reasons we lie awake at night: from politics to pandemics to poverty.

Amsterdam-based writer Bregje Hofstede struggled with insomnia for 10 years, but advice from doctors and books always felt lacking in perspective. Wasn’t insomnia more than just an individual struggle? Might it also be a rational reaction to our increasingly turbulent world?

Unlike the vast majority of books about sleep, In Search of Sleep examines insomnia as both a physical and psychological condition and an early warning sign that something is off in society. As Hofstede points out, studies show that insomnia increased during the pandemic and that people with less money sleep the worst. She also shows that sleeplessness is tied inextricably to loneliness, while meaningful relationships can provide the security we need to slumber.

Interweaving neuroscience, cultural anthropology, history, and interviews with experts, In Search of Sleep invites us to see insomniacs as oracles, not oddballs, and offers a unique way forward for the sleep-deprived and the dreamless. If we are aware of both the small and large forces that keep us awake, then we can begin to take political action, reimagine the role of sleep in our own lives, and rid ourselves of insomnia for good.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greystone Books
• Release date: Mar 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781778400179

Bregje Hofstede

Bregje Hofstede is a journalist and author whose books have been nominated for international prizes and translated into multiple languages. She lived with insomnia for over a decade before putting her research on sleep into practice and moving to a small village in France, where she lives frugally, connects with neighbors and the natural world, and sleeps.

Book preview

00:00

Stargazing

I SAW THE MILKY WAY for the first time when I was eleven. It was a summer’s night in the Peloponnese, a sparsely populated part of Greece, where I was on holiday with my family.

In the evening, after a day at the beach, we walked up the hill to a small ramshackle restaurant nestled between the olive groves. It was late, we were hungry, and the setting sun gave us legs like giraffes so we could reach the top more quickly. As we ate Aunt Niki’s roast chicken, night crept up the hills. By the time we licked our fingers clean, our terrace between the olive trees had been transformed into an amber raft on a jet-black sea.

We switched on a flashlight and waded into the night.

It was a darker dark than I had ever experienced before. There was no one around, the bumpy road was unlit. The intense black enveloping us was so full of the sound of cicadas that it was as if the one were part of the other. Deafening darkness.

The bright beam of light that danced across the path in front of us illuminated my parents’ footsteps, but shuffling along only a few paces behind them, we could barely see the ground under our feet. My sisters and I each demanded a turn with the flashlight and we took turns carrying it until, clumsily snatched and grabbed back, it fell on the path and went out.

We groped around for it. It was still warm from the extinguished light, like the cobbles, but it wouldn’t turn on again. When the light’s afterglow had disappeared from our retinas, it was as if the torchlight had crumbled and floated upwards. Countless stars appeared above us, and right in the middle was a white smudge.

My father forgot how annoyed he was about the broken flashlight and explained what we were seeing. That glittering band spanning the sky might look like a stripe, he said, but it is actually made up of hundreds of billions of stars. They are part of the Milky Way, the galaxy our sun also belongs to. It forms a huge spiral, and the stripe you see is part of it. The sun is one of the billions of stars in that spiral. And the earth is a small piece of rock rotating around that one star.

I struggled to believe what he said: that the Milky Way was always there, just you couldn’t see it at home. It seemed crazy that something so incomprehensively big, which was also emitting light, could be hidden from view by streetlights, headlights, porch lighting. That something so trivial could make something so fundamental invisible.

I slept well back then. Without thinking. Sleeping was like breathing.

Twenty years later I was walking through Amsterdam one summer’s evening. I was on my way to buy groceries, just before closing time. Mopeds buzzed past in the dirty-yellow dusk.

At the supermarket, I studied the brightly lit shelves for something to get me through the night. Yet again, I hadn’t slept well in weeks. My eyes were dry from fatigue. I had read that eating something high in protein before bed could help. The more protein, the slower your digestion, and the less likely you are to wake up from a rumbling tummy. I didn’t know if it was true, but I was willing to try anything.

I blinked as I read the labels.

Protein. Fat, saturated and unsaturated.

I was thirty and afraid of the night in a way I never had been as a child. I was looking for something to hold on to. Pills, powders, earplugs, bedtime tea, good habits. Each solution was a beam of light I followed until it went out, forcing me to go looking for something else.

That evening I bought Greek yogurt with extra protein: 12.5 grams per serving.

Somehow I knew I wouldn’t find the solution to my insomnia in grams. Somehow I knew I was overlooking something. But I had no idea what else to do. I had tried every tip I could find.

I walked out with my purchase and didn’t look up. There was never much to see between the streetlights. At most a moon, hardly any stars, definitely not the Milky Way.

I now know that about 40 percent of the global population never sees the Milky Way. There is too much light pollution. All sorts of things block our view of the stars: satellites, streetlights, the collective glare from all of our screens, lamps, and neon advertisements.

It irks some people. They set up groups such as the International Dark-Sky Association. They point out the negative effects of all that stray nocturnal light on various animals and claim the right to see the stars at night. Including the Milky Way, that fragment of the galaxy we are part of ourselves.

Essentially, they claim the right to see the bigger picture. I slept badly for years. I spent most of my twenties engaged in trench warfare with the night, with any ground I gained being relinquished soon afterwards. It felt like it would never end. On bad days the fatigue was a wall I could barely peer overtop of.

Sleep became an interest, perhaps even an obsession. It was like I’d been dumped by a boyfriend I’d never cared much about—until he left, and I found out I couldn’t live without him. And however much I tempted him, he wasn’t coming back.

I only got over that insomnia when I accepted that my problem had nothing to do with sleep. Nor with the way I tackled sleep itself, with the practical elements of the night: bedtime tea, sleeping pills, my bedroom, with my sleep hygiene as I prepared for bed. I was focusing exclusively on the night, but the problem was the whole twenty-four-hour period: my days and how I spent them. Only when I started seeing my insomnia as a sign, an invitation to take a closer look at myself and see the larger context, did I work out how to navigate my nights again.

I learned to ask myself what was subconsciously bothering me so much that it was keeping me awake—that’s what I had to do something about. It wasn’t my nights that needed scrutinizing, but my days. Actually: my life. It’s such an obvious insight I’m almost embarrassed to write it down. But still, this conclusion only became clear to me after puzzling over it for a long time, despite how much I read about sleep. It’s a conclusion you rarely see others come to, because it doesn’t fit into today’s scientific outlook, with its preference for the neurological and mechanical. That outlook can teach us a lot about sleep, but it is incomplete. Chronic sleep problems are often not simply the result of poor sleep hygiene, so cannot be solved by some bedtime ritual or other, or a new mattress. Bad nights are the result of your days. And what’s more, of the world in which those days take take place.

It took me almost a decade to work this out, and if someone had told me ten years ago that I would have to reconsider all twenty-four hours of my daily life to be able to sleep at night, I wouldn’t have believed them. That’s why I’m pleased to share my journey with you.

In reality it took years; here I have condensed it into a single symbolic twenty-four-hour period. Those twenty-four hours start with a sleepless night, and the associated psychological battle with sleep. Then in the morning light of neuroscience I discuss the biology of lying awake. The afternoon marks a turning point: the insight that insomnia can be a signal that there’s not something wrong in your brain, but in your life in more general terms. Finally I devote the evening hours to how to respond to that signal, by reconsidering how you relate to fundamental issues such as money, time, where you live, your ego, and the people around you.

If you have picked up this book, you are probably, like me, no stranger to the wee hours. A nice place to visit every now and then, on a night out with friends perhaps, but a hellhole if you are stuck there indefinitely on your own. You have probably, like me, tried anything and everything to sleep better—but still you lie awake. In that case, I invite you to follow me on my journey through the night. And to look further, beyond sleep hygiene. Because if I have learned one thing in all my restless nights, it’s this: with sleep problems too, it is crucial to see the bigger picture.

The Battle Against Sleep

01:00

All Animals Sleep

WHEN I COULDN’T SLEEP, I would sometimes watch animal videos from the corner of the sofa in my room in Amsterdam.

Otters are my favorite. They float on their backs in the water, their paws folded across their chests; the fur on their tummies clumps together in wet strands. In pairs, they sleep holding hands so as not to drift apart. There is a clip of an otter floating on her back with her pup stretched out across her tummy. The pup is sleeping, rocked by its mother’s breathing and the vast waterbed below.

I had to search a bit harder for sleeping elephant seals, but they were worth the effort. In the video, an elephant seal steers its two thousand kilos through dark blue water intersected by oblique stripes of splitting sunlight. As soon as it is deep enough—safe from killer whales and sharks—it turns onto its back, folds its hands across its tummy and motionlessly descends through the dark water. The voice-over calls it the falling-leaf phase. After twirling down for fifteen minutes, the leaf becomes an animal again and starts moving, using powerful strokes to push its way back up for air.¹

Some animals can sleep standing up. The flamingos at Artis Zoo, for example, which I often used to cycle past, sleep standing on one leg, with the other one buried in the warm down on their tummies.

In fact, there is no known species of animal that doesn’t sleep. Even dolphins, which have to stay conscious to breathe, sleep with just one half of their brain, while the other half stays awake so they can continue to periodically surface and draw breath. Sleep is evidently so crucial that it finds a way.

Scientists believe that sleep must have come about with the first forms of life. It is an evolutionary constant that no species escapes. A spider tucks in its legs and its metabolism slows down. Earthworms assume a special sleeping position: slightly bent, like an ice-hockey stick. Even the simplest single-cell organisms have active and passive phases that correspond with the diurnal rhythm of our planet.²

However, for a great many people, sleep does not come automatically. If you join a supermarket lineup, one in five of the customers in front of you will have a sleeping problem.³ In a class of secondary school students, half spend the night tossing and turning.⁴ And about one in ten of us meet the strict clinical criteria for insomnia.⁵

If I could compete with the earthworm when it comes to sleep, I would never have written this book. If you could sleep easily, you probably wouldn’t have picked it up.

In one way or another, human beings, the only animal species proven to have insomnia, made sleep complicated.⁶ For example, by branding sleep as lost time: a temptation we shouldn’t give in to.

If I really couldn’t sleep, I would sink into the sofa, open up my laptop and say to myself: you know what, forget it. I’ll do something useful instead. I’d sit there like that: grumpy and exhausted. Like a child who says, "I don’t want to go to your stupid party anyway!"

02:00

Sleep as a Waste of Time

@elonmusk

the color orange is named after the fruit

I stared at this message, which appeared on my timeline without any context. It was followed by hundreds of responses, including:

@moment_in_time

Go to sleep lol

@yoboibleach

Elon what the Frick tis 3am and u tweet that does Elon ever sleep?

No, Elon never sleeps. The CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX is known not only for his ingenuity and his working pattern, but also for his inimitable nocturnal tweets. Fans regularly respond with the message: Elon, go to sleep.

But to the entrepreneur, sleep is a waste of time. In an interview with the New York Times, Musk said he regularly works 120-hour weeks and that his nights are usually a choice between no sleep or Ambien, the well-known sleeping pill.¹

People have been trying to master sleep for centuries, albeit in different ways. There was a time when Musk’s attitude was the norm. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for example, giving in to sleep was seen as a sign of weakness, while being able to stay awake was a desirable talent. There are still people today who don’t pursue sleep, but instead view it with derision.

Donald Trump, for example, has been cultivating his top dog image for years, regarding sleep as way beneath him. He only sleeps for six hours a night. At least that’s what he wrote in his first bestseller, Trump: The Art of the Deal. But that was in 1987. In 2004 he published a new book, Trump: Think Like a Billionaire, in which he claimed to sleep for a maximum of four hours a night. It only makes sense to sleep longer than that if you want to be insignificant, an also-ran in life. In his latest book, Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life, Trump says he only needs three hours a night. (I am still waiting for him to announce he didn’t sleep at all during his presidency.)

Because that’s how passionate he is. According to Trump, If you love what you’re doing, you are probably not going to sleep more than three or four hours.² Tiredness is a motivation problem, at least if internet headlines are anything to go by: These 7 Successful Entrepreneurs Almost Never Sleep. Five Bizarre Sleeping Habits of Successful People. How Much Sleep Do Millionaires Get? This Is How the Elite Count Sheep. How Many Hours Do Celebrities Sleep?

Not many, if you believe the lists. Jack Dorsey (Twitter): four to six hours a night. Tom Ford (the fashion designer): three hours. Richard Branson (Virgin): five to six hours. Winston Churchill got by on four hours; Napoleon rarely slept any longer.

It is difficult to say how much people slept before modern times, but estimates suggest around seven hours.³ Not quite the eight hours recommended by the World Health Organization, then. An idyllic time when people could sleep to their heart’s content, undisturbed by work, noise, or pain, never existed. The idea that sleep is a waste of time isn’t new either.⁴ But it was the eighteenth century when people really started looking down on sleep. This wasn’t a coincidence: the notion that a real man only needed four hours suited the demands of the Industrial Revolution. Those who had built expensive steam engines and factories could recoup their costs most quickly if they were running day and night. Cotton factories and iron forges were in production round the clock. That worked best if the people who kept them running worked as much as possible like the machines they operated: with an iron rhythm. The machines ran at all hours, and the alarm clock came into fashion to force sleep into a corresponding straitjacket.

It wasn’t just factories that ran day and night; shops in big cities started staying open well past nightfall, setting in motion a change that gained further momentum around 1880 with the rise of the lightbulb. Wherever they flashed on, it suddenly became easy and affordable to banish darkness.⁵

In fact, the only thing still in the way of a perfect economic system was that strange habit people had of losing consciousness for hours each night. Couldn’t we do something about that?⁶

The inventor of the lightbulb, Thomas Edison, thought we could. In the many interviews he gave during his lifetime, he was keen to state that people didn’t need multiple hours of sleep at all. A few minutes, or the occasional hour, is enough. And now he came to think of it, why did people still go to bed anyway? That habit had come about because people couldn’t think of anything better to do with their time before his invention of the lightbulb. In the future, that absurd pastime would be a thing of the past. Sleep, according to the businessman, is an absurdity, a bad habit. We can’t suddenly throw off the thraldom of the habit, but we shall throw it off.⁷

Of course, he would stand to benefit from that. And he was not the only one with major interests in the ideal of the tireless employee. The longer the day, the more time to produce and consume. When the great inventor said that eighteen-hour working days should be introduced, the newspapers eagerly relayed that information.

Until well into the twentieth century, authors of popular self-help books also argued that sleep was useless and claimed you only needed very little of it. Two hours is plenty, they wrote. In his 1948 bestseller, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, star author Dale Carnegie wrote that we have no idea how much sleep a person needs. We don’t even know if we have to sleep at all!⁸

Over time, the amount we sleep has decreased globally, as has everything you can’t make money from. According to the World Health Organization, on average we have relinquished a fifth of our sleep over the course of the last century. Back in 1998, the WHO warned that half of all adults in industrialized countries were suffering from disturbed sleep. The official recommendation is eight hours per night. Anything under seven is seen as sleep deprivation, and harmful.⁹

However, around two-thirds of Dutch people sleep for seven hours or less per night. Almost a third get six hours or less.¹⁰ Similarly, 65 percent of Americans sleep seven hours or less; 40 percent sleep just six hours or less.¹¹ In Britain, adults are losing out on a night’s worth of sleep every week, averaging less than seven hours a night.¹² According to one poll, over half of U.K. adults sleep less than six hours per night; almost seven out of ten find their sleep is frequently disturbed.¹³

It’s not only the nights that are fading away; the daytime nap is dying out too. In 2006, the Spanish government banned the siesta in governmental offices. The Japanese inemuri—a nap at one’s desk, on a train, or wherever the mood strikes—is increasingly being rejected or even prohibited. In China, the right to a nap at lunchtime (xiu xi) was part of the constitution in 1950, but that right is also being eroded, and the break has been reduced from three hours to one.¹⁴

And that’s why no office is complete without a coffee machine. The black drink—the second-most-traded commodity on the planet, after oil, according to sleep researcher Matthew Walker—ensures you no longer realize how tired you are.¹⁵

That doesn’t mean your exhaustion has simply disappeared. It is just hidden.

Imagine your head is an hourglass that starts filling up from the