SLEEP LESS, SLEEP BETTER?

The other evening, Susan and I were lamenting our threadbare sleep. Whenever I’m out with a friend, we discuss our sleep. Yesterday I spent the day walking with a friend who had just mailed some sort of antihistamine crossed with an opioid (only available in the US apparently) to a desperately sleepless friend.

Actually, my sleep isn’t quite so bad these days: I’ve learnt to make use of – and enjoy – my wakeful episodes and I’m no longer beset by fatigue after a bad night.  Indeed, I’ve written all about this (and other sleep/night related subjects) in my upcoming book, titled Sleepless. The subtitle in the US is Unleashing the Subversive Power of the Night Self, and in the UK it’s a slightly more subdued Discovering the Power of the Night Self.

I interviewed many researchers in the three and a half years it took to write Sleepless.  I also scoured letters and journals going back hundreds of years in a bid to understand how women of the past slept, survived and thrived, often on very limited and broken sleep (all those babies, sick and dying family members, lice, fleas, straw mattresses, cold etc).  More importantly, Sleepless explores the way our brain changes at night and the therapeutic nature of darkness.  It’s also a highly personal account of my ‘recovery’ following a series of bereavements, and the healing role played by night, darkness and (perhaps counterintuitively) insomnia.

You can pre-order now (UK) or here (US) or from any bookshop. Publication day is January 17^th in the UK/Australia/NZ and February 13 in the US/Canada.  Susan and I will be holding an online launch via zoom for our Age Well community on the evening of Wednesday 31^st January.  More to come nearer the time.

Or you can catch me talking live at the Sevenoaks Bookshop (Kent) on the afternoon of Sunday 28^th January, or at The Bookshop, East Grinstead (Sussex), on the evening of Thursday 1^st February or at the Stony Words Festival in Milton Keynes on Saturday 3^rd February. Follow the links for tickets.  More dates\events to follow.

To whet your appetite, I’ll share a couple of studies that arrived too late for the book but are indicative of some of the (many!) areas I cover:

Let’s start with the misleading headlines about disrupted sleep causing Alzheimer’s…  Poor quality sleep has long been linked to Alzheimer’s although it was never clear whether Alzheimer’s caused our sleep to splinter or whether shortened splintered sleep led to Alzheimer’s. In a recent study, researchers used brain imaging technologies to investigate the relationship between sleep disturbances, amyloid plaque deposits (thought to cause Alzheimer’s) and brain connectivity. They found that one particular neural network was affected by sleep deprivation, but only in participants who already had significant accumulations of amyloid plaque.

This suggests that short sleep doesn’t cause the build-up of sticky amyloid plaques, but that plaque disrupts sleep by interfering with a particular brain network. Or as the researchers put it: ‘Sleep disturbance was associated with hyperconnectivity, only with the presence of Amyloid plaques…. Sleep disturbance may lead to altered connectivity …when Amyloid is accumulated in the brain.’

So there’s no need to lie awake worrying that our lying awake worrying will cause dementia. It (probably) won’t.  Of course, we still need to sleep. And one of the most significant things I discovered in the course of writing Sleepless is just how important complete darkness at night is.

According to Dr Samer Hattar, one of the world’s preeminent experts on this topic, bright light between 10pm and 4am is particularly disruptive. Hattar speculates that exposure to light and dark at the wrong times of the day and night does more than disorder our circadian rhythms – it affects our mood and memory.  Too much darkness during the day and too much light at night – regardless of how much, or when, we sleep – threatens to throw much of our brain off balance.  He believes the light/dark cycle affects us more than we think, comparing its pivotal role in our health and wellbeing to that of movement and exercise. In other words, it’s as important to get our light/dark right, as it is to exercise every day.

A study published last month goes even further. Of the 86,770 participants involved, those who spent the most daylight hours outside had the best mental health – they were happier, calmer and more resilient. But – crucially – researchers also found that darkness at night was as important for our wellbeing.  ‘Getting darkness at night is as important as getting bright light in the day. These signals are what we evolved under and they help to organise our physiology optimally,’ author and researcher Dr Sean Cain told me. ‘Regular and clear light/dark signals lead to a strong internal clock that’s better able to keep our entire bodies aligned the way they should be.’

Cain suspects that our focus on screens might be a bit of a red herring. ‘It’s likely that our home lighting does far more [damage] than our screens,’ he said. ‘We should be using very dim, warm light at night, but preferably darkness. Certainly we should be in darkness while sleeping.’

In fact, Cain suggests radically turning down the lights three hours before we want to sleep. LED lights seem to be particularly problematic because of their high blue (and green) content.  I’ve switched to twilight red bulbs, which contain no blue or green light, for my bedside lamp.  But I’m also partial to candle-lit evenings, using bees-wax candles to avoid pollutants.

Unfortunately we’re all so accustomed to bright light and so determined to be as productive as possible for as long as possible, that I rarely find anyone happy to sit with me in candlelight for three hours before bed.  But on the occasions when I’ve done it, sleep has come sooner, lasted longer and felt more deeply satisfying.  If you decide to try very low-lit evenings, please let us know how you get on and whether it improved your subsequent slumber.

Cain’s study focused on mental health, concluding that ‘Greater night-time light exposure was associated with increased risk for major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, PTSD, psychosis, bipolar disorder, and self-harm behavior.’ But where the brain leads, the body follows. As NHS England points out on its website, those with poor mental health are at a much greater risk of poor physical health, dying on average 15-20 years earlier than the general population.

So turn off the overhead LED lights and keep your evenings in a dim amber glow. Spend as much time as you can getting natural light during the day. And ensure your nights are spent in complete darkness. It really is time to embrace the dark.

Thank you to Antoinette Koutsomihalis, an award-winning, Sydney-based astro-photographer, for this post’s picture. Antoinette is one of several utterly inspiring women who appear in Sleepless, sharing her journey of grief, darkness and the healing power of a night sky. She was a huge inspiration to me – and I salute her courage, creativity and sheer grit! You can see her stunning night shots on Instagram at @toni_kouts.

Looking forward to seeing lots of you online on the 31st January or at one of my upcoming events.

As ever, thank you for making it to the end of this post! I wish you a restful night of calming darkness…

Annabel