Darian Leader - Why Can’t We Sleep? Understanding Our Sleeping and Sleepless Minds

Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst and the author of Introducing Lacan, Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?, Promises Lovers Make When It Gets Late, Freuds Footnotes, Stealing the Mona Lisa, Why Do People Get Ill? (co-written with David Corfield), The New Black, What Is Madness?, Strictly Bipolar, Hands and Why Cant We Sleep?. He practises psychoanalysis in London, and he is a founding member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research and a member of the College of Psychoanalysts UK.

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First published 2019

Copyright Darian Leader, 2019

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-241-98444-4

For Imre and Janet

I am an excellent sleeper, says Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams. Not everyone is so lucky. At least one in three adults complains of lack of sleep, and the prescription of sleeping pills has been increasing dramatically over the past few decades. Sleep clinics, which were once a rarity, are now a feature of most major hospitals, and in the United States can even be found in shopping malls and spas. People take pills not only to sleep but then to stay awake the next day, just as so many of us rely on coffee and energy drinks to maintain an artificial state of arousal during our waking hours. Once considered a natural state, sleep has now become a commodity, something that we must fight to acquire and which we are never quite sure of possessing.

Almost every day, newspapers, internet sites and TV shows spotlight some new story about sleep: how much of it we need, what will happen if we dont get it, how much the economy loses through tired workers. Sleep experts broadcast their advice and opinions, as if some new philosophers stone has been found. Basic aspects of the human condition such as anxiety, sadness and failure are now presented as the consequences of a lack of nourishing sleep. Rather than seeing insomnia, for example, as the result of a depressive state, causality is inverted: we are depressed because we havent slept.

Facts about sleep that have been known for more than a hundred years are now being marketed as cutting-edge research. The link between sleep and memory was studied carefully in the nineteenth century, yet the old theories are back as if they have only just been discovered. This new excitement around sleep science will no doubt fade with time, yet we need to ask why it is happening now. Are we just so desperate to find some kind of universal explanation for our woes that we turn to the one part of human life that cant answer back? Or is there a new epidemic of sleep problems caused by the digital age we inhabit?

As we lie in bed, emails, texts and social media posts stack up, and it seems as if the demands of the outside world are limitless. Many people check their phones before going to sleep and even during their sleep and then reach for them again at the moment of waking. Sleep science tells us that the blue light from our screens will interfere with the process of falling asleep, but it is surely the demands themselves that have a greater effect. There is no let-up. We are continually being told things, shown things, asked things, obliged to do things and reminded when we have failed to. Like the sleep mode on our phones which is a form of being on we are now never really able to be off.

Does this mean that there is a new urgency to do precisely that: turn ourselves off? The irony here is that if we suffer from the fact that we cant stop the relentless chain of demands, sleeping has now been added to the list. It is as if a light bulb with an electrical current running through it is told to turn itself off by the current itself. The constant flow of messages and imperatives that shape our environment is now bloated by the message to turn off the flow. Where spas and wellness centres were once the destination where privileged people were supposed to go to find peace, it is now sleep itself that is marketed as ones own individual retreat.

The economic opportunities here are substantial. If spas were for the wealthy few, sleep is for everyone, rich and poor alike. Adverts for mattresses, once a rarity, now regularly punctuate commercial breaks and web feeds, and the sleep aid industry will generate an estimated $76.7 billion this year alone. If one early study at Edinburgh University in the 1950s claimed that there wasnt that much difference in sleep time between using a wooden board and a fancy sprung mattress, today the dull rectangle is sold as the necessary gateway into sleep. Your insomnia is caused less by your worries than by the fact that your mattress is not gold standard.

This burgeoning of the mattress industry is made possible by the powerful pressure put on us to sleep in the right way. Just as the media constantly tell us what food we should eat and what exercise we should take, we are now instructed on how and when we must sleep. And the more that such norms are disseminated, the more that deviations from them become seen as disorders or illnesses. If a few decades ago there were only a handful of sleep disorders that one could suffer from, today there are more than seventy. And with more disorders come more cures, more experts, more revenue.

What gets forgotten here is both obvious and invisible. We can be told how we must sleep, but not how to process the instruction itself. If we read an article that explains why an eight-hour sleep is essential for our health and advises us on what to do to achieve this, wont the pressure to sleep correctly actually get in the way of our sleep? This is indeed what insomniacs have been telling us for many years: the more we are enjoined to focus on sleep, the thought itself will keep us awake. And yet we live in a world where we are relentlessly coerced to live healthily, to manage our bodies, to do our best to sleep deeply and restoratively.

On waking, it is this imperative that greets us, as we calculate how long we have succeeded in sleeping. For those who believe in human evolution, the image is sobering: where perhaps centuries ago we might have woken from sleep and begun the tasks of the day, now we wake up and check a clock, to measure our sleeping hours against a norm. And the more there is a norm, the more there will be those who fail to fit it. The diversity that we are supposed to celebrate elsewhere is expunged here, as variations in how we sleep become disorders of sleep. Many people thus wake to a sense of failure, starting their day with an internal judgement that they have not succeeded in a task, and worrying about how this will affect them.

The calculus of self-reproach and salvation that the new health discourse creates echoes uncannily the role that the Church once played. Just as the Churchs prescriptions would directly impact ways of life, shaping both the psyche and the flesh with its codes of conduct and judgement, so today we change the ways we live and think according to what we learn from biomedicine, the dominant belief system of the Western world. How much fruit we eat, how we exercise and how we sleep are to a large extent influenced by this discourse. And where the Church would count sins and transgressions, so we count our pieces of fruit, our laps, our steps and our hours of sleep.