As a nation we are preoccupied with our sleep. Perhaps it’s unsurprising, as one in five of us isn’t getting enough of it, according to Mental Health UK. And so an industry has grown around people claiming to have the solution – from experts touting bedtime routines to expensive and questionable products.
But expert sleep therapist and psychotherapist Heather Darwall-Smith thinks we’re looking at it all wrong. In her new book How to Be Awake (So You Can Sleep Through the Night) she argues that, “the harder you chase sleep, the further it runs away”.
Rather than thinking of sleep as an enemy to conquer, she suggests you see it as a mirror – “it reflects how you move through your days”.
With that in mind, The i Paper spoke to Darwall-Smith about some of her advice for how to make your day work for your night.
A note of caution: she emphasises that none of these are a quick fix. In fact, you should let go of the “quick fix” idea entirely.
“We live in a culture where we want whatever we do to flip a switch and everything will be ok,” she says. “But just because they will not work straight away, that doesn’t mean these techniques won’t work – it’s about building muscle rather than a sudden change.”
Darwall-Smith says there is a clear distinction, and learning to recognise it is a fundamental piece of your sleep puzzle.
“If you are sleepy, you can put your head down on the table and go to sleep,” she explains, “but if you’re tired, you can’t.” This is because sleepiness and tiredness are different biological processes.
Sleepiness is driven by a brain chemical called adenosine, which creates “sleep pressure” and influences our circadian rhythm. It starts to build up from the moment we wake and accumulates over the course of the day, decreasing when we go to bed.
Tiredness, on the other hand, “tends to be much more of a mental or physical fatigue,” Darwall-Smith explains. “It might come from emotional exhaustion, it might come from stress, it might come from not having taken a break. Tiredness sits alongside physiological arousal: the hyperarousal in the system which can make sleep difficult.” This is why you can feel exhausted but unable to drop off.
If you feel fatigued but not actually sleepy, a good night’s sleep (or ten) isn’t going to automatically solve the problem – it’s better to stay awake and spend time resting and relaxing. Once you can tell the difference, you can assemble the tools to deal with both of them.
Working with your circadian rhythm, or bodyclock, is a key route to good sleep. Our circadian rhythm is built into us on a cellular level – which is why Darwall-Smith’s only hard rule when working with a client is that they must get up consistently at the same time, every day.
“Getting up at the same time every day is almost like drawing a line in the sand. So many things are hung on that hook. We’re telling the brain that this is what we’re doing – you don’t need to be militant, just fairly consistent – and the ripple effect is huge.”
Our levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, are at their highest just after we wake. And 12-14 hours after your cortisol has peaked, your body starts producing the “sleepy” hormone melatonin. These hormones act as scales that swing us through the sleep-wake cycle.
“This is why having a consistent wake-up time matters so much,” Heather explains. “When you get up at the same time every day, you’re anchoring your cortisol peak, which in turn helps to stabilise your melatonin production in the evening.”
And from that one anchor point, other body rhythms begin to fall in sync.
The same wake time is the most fundamental piece of the puzzle, but how we fuel ourselves is also key.
“Our cortisol levels are rising the moment we wake up, so the temptation can be to get moving and rush out the door,” Darwall-Smith acknowledges. “But sitting down and having a protein based breakfast puts those breaks on immediately.” This means that you don’t continue to accelerate into an increasingly stressed state before crashing.
“What you eat matters too,” she adds. “You don’t want the blood sugar and energy spikes you’ll get if you just have carbs, sugar, and caffeine – you’re trying to put this calm, regular anchor in the sand and hang everything else off that.” Therefore focus on protein, slow-release carbs, and fibre to fuel you properly.
And if you can hold off on the caffeine until your day has properly started. Coffee stimulates us by dulling the adenosine receptors in the brain – but it doesn’t stop adenosine (the sleep pressure chemical) from being produced. So once the caffeine wears off, the adenosine rushes back in and causes us to crash. Not ideal.
One of the triggers for shifts in your sleep-wake cycle is light, says Darwall-Smith – we evolved to work with the natural rising and setting of the sun.
“Our eyes have specific cells in them which are recording the light, and they literally count how much light we’ve got across the day. Getting natural light as soon as we can is really useful for telling us we are awake.” If getting up at the same time every morning feels hard, especially at first, that natural light can help you feel more awake and adjusted. “Even if you are a real night owl, natural morning light when you wake up is really beneficial,” she adds.
While sleep is the solution for sleepiness, rest is the solution for fatigue. Rather than being a waste of time, these forms of rest help us manage stress and give our brains a moment to catch up. And without it, your sleep will also suffer.
“We really really need rest, because we’re like magpies,” Darwall-Smith says. “We’re going along, picking up all these thoughts and ideas all the time and ramming it all in our heads. What often happens is that when someone’s head finally hits the pillow and the brain goes ‘I’m going to sort it all out now’ and their mind starts spinning.” This is the hyperarousal that keeps you up and can override any sleep pressure you may have built up.
“We often blame poor sleep for exhaustion and lack of focus, but chronic stress is usually the real culprit”, Darwall-Smith explains. Engaging the vagus nerve is one of the best ways to help biologically regulate our stress responses.
“The vagus nerve is the biggest nerve in the body and it comes from the brain all the way down, touching literally every organ in the system,” she says. Activating the vagus nerve triggers our parasympathetic nervous system, which prompts our body to relax in various ways. This is known as the ventral vagal state, and is in contrast to when our sympathetic nervous system (aka our fight or flight response) is engaged when we’re stressed. If we move from stressed to overwhelmed, you can tip from a sympathetic state into a dorsal vagal state where your system shuts down and you feel numb, helpless and exhausted.
While we need all these states (stress, says Darwall-Smith, is not only unavoidable but good for us) having a break by triggering your vagus nerve is an essential type of rest. And you access it through breathing.
“If you breathe down through the diaphragm, you’re moving right the way down and you’re going to activate the vagus nerve. And the vagus nerve then sends a message of rest and relaxation to the whole body.” She recommends thinking about breathing like you’re unzipping and rezipping a jacket. Feel the breath at both ends for a second, and if you can notice what is around you. “The more stressed we get, the more narrow our vision becomes. So that moment of sitting, breathing, and looking around, is a really powerful break.”
Having fun isn’t just, well, fun – it’s fundamental. So make time in your day to have real, absorbing fun – whether it’s getting caught up fully in a TV show, seeing friends, or even laughing your head off at a TikTok.
“Play and leisure activate the parasympathetic nervous system, reduce stress, and promote all the feel-good hormones. And it helps us shift from problem-solving mode to more of a restoration mode. Sometimes we just need to let it all go and laugh about something.”
For this reason Darwall-Smith doesn’t see social media apps as the inherent enemy of sleep – she just recommends them in moderation, and part of a wider fun schedule. “When we’re on our devices, we tend to be quite insular. If we can have fun with other people then our attention is outwards, rather than inwards, and that helps too.”
Doing nothing sounds both boring and impossible. We’re all stressed and stretched and looking for something to distract us from that reality (see the above on fun).
But doing nothing for a short period every day gives your brain and body the opportunity to sync back up, especially if you are otherwise stressed.
“Our brains need that downtime. Everything seems to be going fast all the time and we’re hyper-connected but also isolated. We’re working counter to how we’re built and we need that spaciousness in our brains.” So take a train ride and just look out the window (not at your phone), or go for a walk without headphones, or just sit in a corner for a few minutes. You’d be surprised by how much more refreshed you feel.
And finally, if you are worrying about your sleep – whether it’s getting enough or getting good quality rest – Darwall-Smith says it’s important to remember that we are literally built to sleep. If we work with our bodies and let it do what it is biologically programmed to do, slowly the pressure we put on ourselves will lift and that elusive “good night’s sleep” will actually arrive.
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