Your eyelids have reached critical mass

I had another night of broken sleep last night.  This one was particularly unwelcome as it abutted one of the same on Monday night.  Two days and approximately one hundred minutes' sleep make for an incendiary combination.  It certainly doesn't aid office-based bonhomie.  Anyone who looks twice at me today can expect a head lock for his (or her) trouble.

Shit sleep tends with me to come in intense bursts like this.  I think the whole thing was triggered by a piece I happened across on Chris Evans' Radio2 programme on Monday afternoon.  He had a self-proclaimed sleep expert on.  

Sleep experts suffer from the same delusion as economists: if they really did know how to fix things (the economy, insomnia etc.), the problems they address would very quickly cease to exist.  Now despite their claims, I still see plenty in the papers that suggests to me that economists can't control or predict the economic cycle with any more accuracy than a macaque with a tombola.  Ditto sleep experts.  If your treatments worked, insomnia would disappear from the surface of the planet overnight (pun intended).  People aren't thick.  They aren't sticking with insomnia because they fear change, or because they wrongly think it makes them attractive to the opposite sex.

One of the reasons cures for insomnia don't work (in the long term at any rate) is because they draw attention to the act of sleeping.  This is what triggered my current bout.  As soon as I heard this chap on the radio holding forth about the importance of down pillows and flame-proof jimjams and so on, I knew I would struggle to sleep that night.  

When one becomes self-conscious about dropping off, the game's up.  It's like if someone asked to think carefully about all the actions you make whilst driving to Sainsburys of a Saturday morning.  Your car would end up on its roof in a lay by before you got 200 yards.  Sleep systems, therefore, are doomed to failure.  Musicians know all about this; they refer to it as keeping out of your own way.  I suppose it's akin to "the zone" that athletes rattle on about.  Basically, you have to stop thinking about what you're doing.

The only upside to insomnia is that it makes you realise how well you can function with scant shut-eye.  This is quite empowering.  I'm convinced that could I sleep as well as my wife (she could get eight solid hours of dreamless inside a tumble dryer if she had to), I would be running the free world.  Imagine for a moment what a pleasure for everyone that would be.