There has also been little chance to “sleep when the baby sleeps” (among the most irritating advice I’ve been offered) when you have another child at home – and a job.īut now that we are emerging from the fog, and she is sleeping better, it is time to address my own sleep health. These past 10 months, with a baby who wakes for three hours straight in the middle of the night, have been particularly brutal. Newer studies tell of the need for a consistent sleep routine to keep my immune system on top form – not only to fight off the regular cold and flu viruses, but also Covid-19. Studies that warn of the dangers to my long-term brain health, increased risk of Alzheimer’s, heart problems and life expectancy do nothing to relax me into a good night’s sleep. It’s not a brag – I know it is chronically short of what I need. I’ve had regular – and long – spells of insomnia, and this, coupled with having two babies, the youngest of whom is still only 10 months, means I don’t often top about four or five hours a night. I am obsessed with sleep: largely because a blissful night’s rest has remained tantalisingly out of my grasp for most of my life. “When we change our sleep schedules by an hour or longer from one day to the next, we are sending signals to the brain that we are attempting to transition to a new time zone, making the next night’s sleep challenging.” Just one hour’s change is enough to throw you off track, according to Dr Rebecca Robbins, a sleep expert for Savoir, the British bed and mattress makers, and co-author of Sleep for Success! “One hour can indeed be enough to throw our internal clock out of sync,” she tells me from her laboratory in Boston, where she is instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and an associate scientist at the Division of Sleep and Circadian Disorders at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. On top of this, we have the hour change next week, which always leaves me feeling discombobulated for the following week. Now, as schedules shift and more people are drifting back to the office, commutes mean that our schedules are shifting again. The stress of the pandemic has led some to experience sleep difficulties dubbed “coronasomnia”, adding to the third of us who already suffer from sleep problems, according to the Sleep Foundation. Our sleep has taken quite the battering over 18 months of restrictions.