Is this the secret to getting a good night’s sleep?

March 19, 2026 — 6:30pm

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I wish people would stop emphasising the necessity of getting a good night’s sleep. These constant warnings are preventing me getting a good night’s sleep.

I lie there, making calculations. It’s now 11pm. I’ll wake at 6am, whether I like it or not, roused by Sydney’s traditional alarm clock: the roar of planes overhead, gunning themselves to land as soon as the airport curfew ends. So that’s seven hours’ sleep, bang on the minimum, which is fine providing I go to sleep right away.

But all that counting has revved up my brain and it’s now 11.10pm, which means – the maths is becoming more complex – I will have only six hours and 50 minutes sleep, and that’s nowhere near enough. And now another five minutes have passed, most of it spent making that calculation about the six hours and 50 minutes. Then another five minutes, worrying about the previous five minutes and why I’m so bad at maths.

Soon it will be only six hours’ sleep, and I’ve read about the dire impact of just six hours’ sleep. If you only have six hours’ sleep you develop cognitive decline, mood disturbances and a weakened immune system. Add another hour of sleeplessness and you’ll turn into Margaret Thatcher – a famously brief sleeper – and find yourself sacking coal miners, banning free school milk and sending troops to the Falklands.

Far better to go to sleep. But how? More maths, more counting. More wondering about when Thatcher became the UK prime minister. Was it 1978 or 1979? Should I get up and Google? While up, should I also Google “the dangers of having only five hours’ sleep”?

Did people sleep better when they worried less about sleep? In the effort to calm down at night, I’ve been reading James Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, an 18th-century classic that is somehow both soporific and endlessly diverting.

Inside its pages I find the story of Boswell’s friend Lord Monboddo, who awoke every morning at 4, “and then for his health got up and walked in his room naked, with the window open, which he called taking an air bath; after which he went to bed again, and slept two hours more”.

I’d try his method myself, although I assume Lord Monboddo had his curtains open, tempting a cool breeze with which to charm his nether regions. In the context of the Sydney suburbs, and a bedroom fronting onto the roadway, this might be too much for my neighbours.

Johnson, after hearing Boswell’s account, was upbeat about Monboddo’s nocturnal routine. He surmised the Scottish lord was merely making himself uncomfortably cold, so that once he climbed back beneath the sheets, the warmth of his bed would offer “a grateful sensation”. In any case, Monboddo himself appeared unconcerned about his interrupted, two-stage pattern of sleep.

Perhaps he was on to something. The parenting expert Sarah Ockwell-Smith, writing in The Gentle Sleep Book, argues it’s unreasonable to expect either babies or adults to sleep through the night. She says it’s only in the past 200 years that people have had the expectation of a “single block” of sleep.

She cites evidence, much of it from Ancient Greece, of the widespread practice of “segmented sleep”. People would have a “first sleep”, beginning two hours after sunset and lasting about four hours. They’d then get up and, according to Ockwell-Smith, would take some time to eat, pray or have sex. They’d then go back to sleep.

She quotes Professor Russell Foster, a neuroscientist from Oxford University: “Many people wake up at night and panic. I tell them that what they are experiencing is a throwback to the bi-modal sleep pattern.”

As I work through these thoughts I’m even more awake. Maybe I’m experiencing a bi-modal sleep pattern. Should I jump up and prance around naked in front of my bedroom window? Should I raid the fridge, polishing off last night’s lasagne, which was rather tasty? Should I search around for someone with whom to have sex, a project that seems unlikely to have a positive outcome? Perhaps, selecting from Ockwell-Smith’s list, I’d be better off praying. Please, Lord, can you help me go to sleep?

By now it’s 12.22am, which means – oh, the maths is too hard – I’m already hurtling towards cognitive decline.

Why do we notice our bodies only when they break?

Richard GloverBroadcaster and columnist

Broadcaster and columnist

I recall hearing about “The CIA Sleep Method”. People say it was developed by the Central Intelligence Agency so their spies could get a little rest. You breathe in, count to five, then exhale, counting to five as you do so, and then repeat. Sleep will come within two minutes. Well, that’s unless, like me, you start thinking about the CIA and all they’ve been involved in, back in South America, and also Asia, and then the current situation in the Middle East, and whether I should join a protest march or – maybe more practical – fill up the car with petrol.

Which leaves me at 12.46am, and with a fresh thought: I could avoid tomorrow’s petrol queues by jumping out of bed, hopping into the car and filling up right now.

Perhaps I should do it naked, following the advice of Lord Monboddo. I’d do anything for a little shut-eye.

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