“I’ll be right after a good night’s sleep… if I ever get one”

By Maria Millers  

You often hear someone saying ‘I’ll be right after a good night’s sleep.’ And of course they are usually right. Whatever caused their difficulty in sleeping passes and life returns to normal. But sometimes the inability to fall asleep persists and morphs into chronic insomnia.

Sleep plays a critical role in nearly every aspect of our health and well-being – physical, mental, and emotional. It’s not just ‘resting time’ it’s an active, restorative process that supports our body and brain in ways that waking hours can’t.

In short, sleep is just as essential for good health as nutrition and exercise. It’s the foundation that allows your body and mind to function, heal, and thrive.

And yet many, particularly young people are not getting the required number of hours of sleep.

Sleep deprivation weakens your immune system making you more prone to illness. On the other hand sleeping deep and well helps lower your blood pressure and heart rate, improves memory and learning, helps you stabilize mood and manage stress.

There are many, varied reasons why people have insomnia. These include biological changes as we age or because of our hormones, physical or mental health issues, the medicines we take, as well as how and where we live and work, but increasingly our life styles and the daily intrusions of confronting news.

Many now choose to wilfully resist watching the human tragedies across the world to avoid being upset.

The importance of sleep has long been creatively explored. Shakespeare had a deep appreciation of the power of sleep, and he wrote about it often in his plays – sometimes beautifully, sometimes tragically. In Macbeth sleep is seen as a healer repairing the stress and damage of the day just like mending the torn sleeve of a shirt.

Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.”
– Macbeth (Act 2, Scene 2)

Or as a natural comforter as in the following scene where Henry 1V who wonders why sleep escapes him tormented by care and guilt, he envies his subjects who rest peacefully.

How many thousand of my poorest subjects
Are at this hour asleep! O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

Of course all of us experience sleep deprivation at some times in our lives: grieving for a loved one, caring for a sick child, cramming for exams, shift work, jet lag or worrying about unpaid bills. Or it could be pain from injury or disease.

And when sleeplessness becomes chronic you are entering dangerous territory: Accident prone and dangerous behind the wheel of a car or in charge of machinery, muddle headed and certainly not nice to be about.

But you still hope that your bus or uber driver has had a good night’s sleep or the surgeon performing that intricate procedure hasn’t spent the night bingeing on Netflix because he or she was unable to fall asleep.

Modern living often makes getting a good night’s sleep difficult as pervasive lights, work stress, food, and rest put us out of sync with the body’s biological clock. Screens mimic daylight; social media scrolling overstimulate the brain delaying sleep, and electronic devices can all seriously interfere with your sleep. Melatonin, the hormone that signals your body it’s time to sleep.is turned off.

This has been described as Digital Insomnia and many young people are increasingly prone to it

It’s no wonder then that in much 21st-century poetry, sleeplessness reflects the impossibility of switching off in a world that’s always lit and online 24/7.

Poet Hera Lindsay Bird, writes about doom-scrolling, the blue glow and the ache of wanting connection while wide-awake and alone.

“I sleep with my phone glowing beside me
like a second sun.”

But you can also look at insomnia as a result of economic inequality: Those in the precarious gig economy or shift-based jobs often suffer most, making sleep deprivation a social issue. Rest becomes a privilege and sleep deprivation mirrors social imbalance

Kae Tempest’s poem, Let Them Eat Chaos takes place at 4:18 a.m., when seven Londoners lie awake.

Tempest turns collective insomnia into social commentary:

“None of us are sleeping soundly, none of us are dreaming deeply.”

Sleeplessness becomes a chorus of unrest – proof that capitalism and crisis never sleep.

And with less deep sleep, we dream less – potentially losing one of the mind’s ways of processing emotion and creativity. Sleep deprived people stop dreaming, so lose out on the role of the subconscious in imagination and renewal.

Poets treat this loss as emblematic of a civilisation that prizes productivity over reflection Some writers and thinkers – notably Tricia Hersey’s The Nap Ministry imagines a new reality where we embrace rest as a healing spiritual practice and as medicine for a sick and exhausted world.

Rest is not laziness; it’s dreamwork.

Add the constant forecasts of extreme climate events and the lived experience for many of heatwaves, bushfires, floods, and other ecological disasters. Climate stress becomes a factor in sleeplessness. Just a few days ago the weather forecast was for cyclonic winds across large swathes of Victoria. It put a lot of people into a state of anxiety The winds did come but seemingly far less ferocious than predicted.

For Australian poet and self-proclaimed vegan-anarchist-activist John Kinsella insomnia is ecological, his poetry often linking sleeplessness to environmental guilt, the poet kept awake by damage to land and species.

Sleep deprivation becomes an ethical insomnia, a refusal to look away from crisis. His poem The Bulldozer is a protest against the destruction of our natural world specifically in defence of the Beeliar Wetlands threatened by the building of a highway, which is a conversation against the way we destroy and consume our environment. He decries a world where the highest achievements of the human imagination: art, music philosophy and empathy are sublimated to the needs of a consumer society.

The Bulldozer Poem excerpt

Bulldozers rend flesh. Bulldozers make devils
of good people. Bulldozers are compelled to do
as they are told. Bulldozers grimace when they

tear the earth’s skin – from earth they came.
Bulldozers are made by people who also want new
mobile phones to play games on, and to feed families.

Bulldozers are observant of phenomena – decisions
are taken out of their hands. They are full of perceptions.
They will hear our pleas and struggle against their masters.

Some people view sleep as a metaphorical form of death, seeing it as a temporary escape from the burdens of daily life or a brief retreat into unconsciousness, similar to the finality of death. In Philip Larkin’s Aubade the poem captures is own unease with death.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what’s really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

Similarly in Hemingway’s short story Now I Lay Me, his soldier narrator and alter ego says:

I myself did not want to sleep because I had been living for a long time with the knowledge that if I ever shut my eyes in the dark and let myself go, my soul would go out of my body.

Our problems with insomnia show no signs of going away. Our lifestyles do not easily allow us to relax with nature whether long rambly walks, bird watching, gardening, leisurely preparing nutritious meals or reading for pleasure and listening to music. Maybe just simply day dreaming.

As with everything insomnia is becoming big business and getting bigger It is projected to reach US6.3billion, largely driven by increased diagnoses as well as the use of sleep aids such as sleep apps.

And just to make you smile if you’ve had a bad night, here’s a joke:

Q: What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an agnostic, and a dyslexic?
A: Someone who stays up all night wondering if there is a Dog.

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