hours a night between the sheets, all would be well. And as so often, it is nostalgia for a myth.
It turns out that the key piece of research, trotted out again and again as proof that our recent ancestors slept much more, was actually published in 1913 by two psychologists at Stanford University in California, Lewis Terman and Adeline Hocking. The clue to why their paper might not provide a complete picture of early twentieth- century sleeping habits is in its main title: ‘The Sleep of School Children’. Yes, this was a piece of work trying to find the optimum amount of shut-eye for kids. It measured the sleep of American 6-year-olds (average 11 hours 14 minutes) and college students (average 7 hours 47 minutes), figures that match up pretty closely with the amount of sleep children and young healthy adults get in Britain today.
The belief that we are a nation reeling from an increasing epidemic of sleep disorders is too widely held to be undermined by mere evidence. The results of a survey published by the Mental Health Foundation in 2010 were held up as further proof in the papers: ‘Sleep-deprived Britain: Two thirds of us suffer from debilitating insomnia’; ‘How worn-out Britain finally woke up to its chronic sleep problem’. The poll appeared to confirm the accepted wisdom that our twenty-first-century lifestyle was destroying our slumber. More than a cursory glance at the research, however, revealed that the headlines were nonsense.
‘Some caution should be used when discussing the results of this survey,’ the researchers themselves advised, adding that the sample ‘cannot be truly representative of the UK population’. The reason for extreme circumspection was that the poll had been conducted on the website of Sleepio, an online resource specifically aimed at people with sleep problems. ‘Take just five minutes to answer our survey and you’ll get a free tailored report on the state of your sleep,’ worried readers were informed. What seems surprising (given the likely users of the site) is not that two thirds of those who filled out Sleepio’s questionnaire thought they had a problem sleeping, but that a third did not!
The evidence that Britain’s sleep patterns are much worse than they were a century ago is thin. The bulk of research shows that, on average, UK adults get a healthy seven-and-a-half to eight hours a night. Middle-aged, middle-class professionals juggling stressful jobs and demanding children probably manage a bit less, and that, of course, is the demographic of the people who edit national newspapers.
There are plenty of people out to convince us we should feel guilty about not getting enough sleep, just as two centuries ago there were plenty of people out to convince Britain it should feel guilty about getting too much. Our relationship with slumber has been turned on its head.
When the economy was primarily agricultural and ruled by the sun, the rhythm of sleep was in simple time — two beats in the bar, up at dawn and down at dusk. Variation was orchestrated by the four seasons. As Robert Macnish explained, ‘some of the circumstances which induce us to sit up late and rise early in summer, are wanting during winter; and we consequently feel disposed to lie longer in bed during the latter season of the year.’
With the birth of the metropolis, the rhythm became more complex, a syncopated beat that drifted away from the natural tempo of the rising and setting sun. On 28 January 1807, the world’s first street lighting with gas was illuminated in London’s Pall Mall. Three years later, Humphry Davy demonstrated the first arc lamp to the Royal Institution, as British inventors competed to achieve the light bulb moment.
We can argue whether it was Scotsman James Lindsay’s electrical device demonstrated to a public meeting in Dundee in 1835 that constituted the first incandescent light bulb, or if Sunderland inventor Joseph Swan should get the credit for developing the first successful ‘filament electric lamp’ publicly demonstrated on Tyneside in 1878. History books will tell you it was American Thomas Edison who patented the first practical and commercial design in 1879, but most overlook the fact that the world’s first light bulb factory was established by Swan at Benwell in Newcastle. In the late nineteenth century, it was Britain that was doing its best to disrupt the sleep patterns of the world.
The United States, however, can legitimately claim to have invented ‘24-hour convenience’, an oxymoronic concept which would soon cross the Atlantic to meddle with British body clocks. Its origins can be traced to Austin, Texas in the autumn of 1962, when the local college football team, the Longhorns, was having a successful season. One Saturday night after the game, a 7-Eleven store nearby found itself so busy with jubilant young fans that it never closed. The manager spotted a gap in the market and began opening the shop twenty-four hours a day, an idea that quickly spread to other outlets in Dallas, Fort Worth and Las Vegas, before sweeping the planet.
Defying the conventions of sleep became part of the youth revolution of the 1960s. Californian teenager Randy Gardner made the point by staying awake for eleven days in 1964, the longest anyone has been recorded going without sleep. ‘Mind over matter,’ he told reporters as he shrugged off to bed. In Britain the same year, the Beatles sang of ‘working like a dog’ when they should have been ‘sleeping like a log’ — ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ was the flip side of rocking around the clock.
Teenagers sought to overcome the demands of sleep; the Mod drug of choice was amphetamine, used to fuel all-night dances at clubs like The Twisted Wheel in Manchester. But they still had to go to work on Monday morning so, along with the uppers, were the downers, as a generation attempted to recalibrate their body clocks.
In the consumer revolution that followed, sleep came to be regarded as a commodity like any other. Science had begun to unlock its secrets: in 1971 the
Money soon began to pour into what was dubbed a new clinical discipline, much of it from pharmaceutical companies who were wide awake to the potential profits from sleep. Products promising users the power to defy nature, to control their sleeping and waking, became big business in a world encouraged to feel anxious about its hectic lifestyle. The scientific community, though, was torn: some believed the new designer drugs were an answer to the suffering associated with 24/7 demands; others feared corporate greed was driving a dishonest and dangerous pill-pushing racket.
Ian Oswald and colleagues of mine at the BBC’s
It all ended in London’s High Court in May 1994, the culmination of a long-running libel trial. Justice Sir Anthony May ruled in favour of Upjohn but, illustrating the passions generated by the issue, both Ian Oswald and Upjohn physician Royston Drucker were also obliged to pay damages to each other for libellous remarks. The case exemplified the furious debate that had begun to rage over humankind’s quest to become the master rather than the servant of sleep.
There are now an estimated 13 million prescriptions for sleeping pills issued each year in Britain, as the nation looks to the medicine cabinet for help in dropping off. At the same time, sales of ‘energy drinks’ to keep people awake have been soaring. Analysts reckon Britain spends a billion pounds a year on cans and bottles fizzing with stimulants. Coffee is also a billion-pound-a-year product, with corporate cafe chains barging their way on to every high street for a slice of the action.
It has become relatively normal to begin the day with a jolting Americano and to close it with a dose of Zopiclone: from A to Z where once it was simply dawn ‘til dusk. This cocktail of tranquilisers and stimulants, however, has left Britain a restless place, nervous about messing up the balance between alertness and tiredness. To the rescue have come an army of sleep consultants, experts to advise us on ‘fatigue management solutions’.
The MetroNaps EnergyPod, for example, is marketed as the answer for stressed-out city executives who currently ‘seek rest in places not intended for it: at their desk, in a conference room, a parked car or even a bathroom’. Instead, they could rejuvenate with a power nap in a machine apparently based on years of research and thousands of design hours. Lie back on what looks like a dentist’s chair, your head enveloped by a huge dome, and let the soft lights and music guide you on a short round-trip to the unconscious world. The brainchild of a banker who said he kept finding colleagues asleep in lavatory cubicles and store cupboards, the pods have apparently been installed in a number of London city firms, bosses persuaded that the monthly rental is less than the increased productivity.
The phrase ‘power nap’ reinforces the idea that success comes with the ability to control sleep. Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were all power-nappers,
