The Quest For Sleep

How to combat the constant struggle for sleep in a world that never switches off.

- Lucy E Cousins

Not just the currency of new mothers, nightshift workers, and uni students, sleep (and the quest for it) now seems to be affecting nearly all of us. A recent survey found that 77 percent of Australians didn’t sleep well, while a further 28 percent of Aussie women couldn’t recall the last time they had a good night’s sleep.

Considering the widespread effects of sleep deprivation on our body and mind, we might soon be calling the nation’s tiredness a national emergency. So, why are we finding it increasingly hard to knock off eight solid hours of shut-eye a night? Apart from the well-publicized effects of late-night screen time, lack of bedtime routines and chronic stress, one reason is that we might all be suffering from orthosomnia. Cognitive behavior researchers coined this scientific name to explain the anxiety we feel in our constant search for sleep. In other words, our obsession with sleeping well could actually be affecting our ability to do so.

However, sleep specialist and author of the book Sleep Sense, Dr. Katharina Lederle, believes another problem is that we don’t realize how sleep deprived we are in the first place. That’s because, she says, over time, even a small to moderate decrease in sleep duration can cause the same decline in performance as a whole night with no sleep.

“[Humans] don’t adapt to insufficient sleep and many of us, for one reason or another, only sleep for six hours,” she says. “We get used to feeling tired, thinking we’ve adapted to less sleep. It’s almost as if we lose the sense for feeling how sleepy we really are.”