I suffered from Insufficient Sleep Syndrome for almost a DECADE - and lost my job, friends and family. Here are the tricks experts recommend to get enough shut-eye - including the maximum temperature your bedroom needs to be...
I suffered from Insufficient Sleep Syndrome for almost a DECADE - and lost my job, friends and family. Here are the tricks experts recommend to get enough shut-eye - including the maximum temperature your bedroom needs to be...
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Your eyes snap open and go straight to the clock for your daily morning 'sleep maths'. How much rest have I had?. The internal calculator whirls: you've been asleep five and a half hours, maybe six. All you know is it isn't enough. So you plod through the day with a fuzzy head and sore eyes, fuelling yourself with coffee and sugary carbs grabbed on the go – before staying up past midnight and going through the cycle again. Welcome to Insufficient Sleep Syndrome, or ISS.
![[The current National Sleep Foundation guidelines recommend most adults sleep for seven to nine hours a night]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2025/01/26/21/94539169-14327419-image-a-64_1737926837657.jpg)
As a nation, we are not sleeping well. According to research published in 2023 by Nuffield Health, just 35 per cent of British adults get a 'good' sleep at night. Of the 8,000 surveyed, 11 per cent were only getting between two and four hours a night.
One in ten of us suffer from chronic insomnia, defined as poor sleep for at least three nights a week for more than three months. But ISS has slightly different characteristics to insomnia. Heather Darwall-Smith is a UKCP-accredited psychotherapist, sleep specialist and author of How To Be Awake, out next month.
'Unlike insomnia, where you struggle to fall or stay asleep despite your best efforts, ISS is more about sleep being consistently sacrificed,' she says. ISS is a peculiarly modern beast. Since the pandemic, the boundary between our work lives and personal time has largely evaporated.
Miranda Levy (pictured) is the Insomnia Diaries: How I Learned To Sleep Again. It's common now to be looking at emails just before bed – and the anxiety caused by a tricky message hardly helps with dropping off. Then there's late-night streaming, endless scrolling on social media or online shopping.
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