an’t sleep?
No, me neither.
I know what it’s like,
lying there hour
after hour as you
gravitate ever closer
to tomorrow. To start
with, there is hope:
maybe this night
will be different;
maybe you’ll drift
off in the deliciously
early hours before
midnight. Seventeen
glances at the clock
later and you know
it’s not going to happen. Outside the traffic
has almost stopped. There’s a pulse in your
stomach and your heart seems to have taken
up residence in your throat. The clock relays
its hideous messages: 2:47, 3:13, 4:09. As your
sleeplessness deepens your mind becomes
stuck on a massive feedback loop, insomnia
feeding anxiety, aggravating insomnia,
feeding anxiety...
Tonight – according to the most recent
research by the Sleep Health Foundation
- this situation will play out for between
33-45 per cent of Australians. It’s a
knackering prospect. But for entrepreneurial
trendspotters, it’s also a burgeoning business
opportunity. From smart pillows to sleep
trackers, apnoea devices and medications,
the sleep industry is a fast-growing sector,
with a predicted global worth of $80bn by
- To put this into perspective, coffee – the
world’s most sought-after commodity bar oil –
is worth $100bn.
The latest sleep advancements are as
varied as they are outlandish: Neuroon,
a cross between Oculus Rift and a sleep
mask, monitors biometric data to regulate
sleep according to your circadian rhythm.
Ukranian-made headset Luciding is supposed
to encourage lucid dreaming and thus nurture
a more serene night. And, in Japan, Coca-Cola
recently launched “sleep water” enriched
with l-theanine, an amino acid that aids
restfulness. The result is that we’re beset by
information on how best to maximise our
night’s rest, compiled from an exhausting
profile of biometrics, exercise habits, diet
and alcohol intake. Yet caught up as we are
in this rush to find a cure, we’ve failed to ask
one crucial question: do any of these new
developments actually work?
Nocturnal Creatures
Having trouble sleeping is nothing new, but
in 2017 insomnia has never been more à la
mode. Recently The Guardian announced
that, among time-pressed professionals
prepared to pay through the nose for fitness
classes and cold-pressed juices, sleep tops
the list of wellbeing concerns. A good night’s
rest is now “the ultimate status symbol”.
Elsewhere, it’s been suggested that getting
more sleep may have advantages for your
career, with ‘sleep courses’ promising to turn
around exhausted employees’ prospects
through breathing exercises.
Of course, sleep hasn’t always been so on
trend. For a long time, being partial to a good
night’s kip was seen as a sign of weakness.
Kevin Rudd was said to get by on four hours a
night, a declaration of machismo that echoed
the cigar-chewing, tommy gun-toting bravado
of one Winston Churchill, who also claimed
to survive on the same amount. It isn’t that
attitudes have relaxed today; rather, that the
round-the-clock working culture of the last
few decades seems to have finally caught up
with us and is now hampering our ability to
switch off. “Anxiety is certainly a root cause
of insomnia,” says Jerry Siegel, a professor of
psychiatry. “Some insomniacs just operate at
a higher level of arousal throughout the day,
meaning they don’t get sleepy.”
This increased level of arousal is arguably
just one symptom of our “always on” culture,
in which modern and ambitious white-collar
workers are expected to arrive at work early,
leave late and check their emails from their
pillows. Sleep doesn’t get written into the
schedule. According to the Australian Bureau
of Statistics, 5 million of Australia’s 7.7 million
full-time workers put in more than 40 hours
per week.
The effect can have a negative impact on
our home life, removing our buffer against the
stressful events of work. Essentially, with the
thin line between work and home blurring,
the ability to compartmentalise thoughts has
been lost, with anxiety over tomorrow’s tasks
often the last thing we think about at night.
Now, having identified a pressing problem,
the wellness industry has morphed and
expanded to exploit it.
With the average person spending 30
per cent of their life asleep, seeking to
maximise efficiency here makes as much
sense as trying to boost productivity
elsewhere, be it at work or in the gym. In
today’s lingua franca of kilojoule and step
counting, the health conscious among us
are learning that sleep is just one more
metric to be recorded. “Most people have
a pretty sophisticated take on their diet –
they understand kilojoules and BMI,” says
Dr Kevin Morgan, professor of psychology
and director of the Clinical Sleep Research
Unit at Loughborough University. “But until
recently, a lot of us would have struggled to
string two sentences together about sleep
and how it works, despite it being one of
the key pillars underpinning our health.”This is changing fast. And while there is yet
to exist a quantifiable cure-all for a lack
of sleep, it means that for innovative tech
companies and health obsessives alike, the
antidote to insomnia remains both enigmatic
and attractive.40 %
Of Aussie men are on the internet before bed –
59 % of these have two or more sleep problemsINSOMNIA RATES AMONG
AUSTRALIAN MEN
18-24 25-34 35-49 50-64 65+ TotalPercentage who’ve experienced
insomnia in last 12 monthsAGE GROUP4 %0 %24681016121814205 %11 %
9 %
7 %^8 %SOURCE: ROY MORGAN