When you read this, I’ll be 30,000 feet up, winging my way over the Atlantic to launch the American edition of my book Much More to Come in New York City. There’s always a thrill in going to the Big Apple. I used to visit regularly for meetings with the supreme boss (very Succession…truly) or to interview big stars such as Clare Danes or cultural figures like Swoon (the world’ best female graffiti artist – I had such fun hanging out in her studio with her squad). Now I’ll be in NYC once again, promoting my book (another pinch-me moment).
I’m doing an event at the Hearst Tower on Monday night with an American author called Tamsden Fadal, a global menopause activist (who, in a weird coincidence, was born on the same day as me). And I’m being hosted by a new friend, Michael Clinton, President of Hearst Magazines, who wrote a bestselling book Roar: Into the second half of your life and who also runs a brilliant outfit called ROARforward, which bills itself as the “business intelligence platform for the new longevity era”. It’s a bit like NOON but a business-to-business NYC version.
Michael is inspirational in his take on what is possible as we age, and he’s a real fellow traveller in talking about opportunities for us all in the 50-75 space (the Q3 of our lives). I’ll also be catching up with old friends and colleagues and promise to report back next week on what’s happening for people like us Stateside!
Time to get a good night’s sleep?
In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about sleep. Partly because I’m anticipating the jetlag – but also because I’ve been reading How To Be Awake, a new book by Heather Darwall-Smith. We interviewed Heather as one of our NOON experts last week at a webinar that was free for Paid Members. You can see the full recording and highlights as a Paid Member benefit on our NOON homepage tomorrow or click here to watch it now (you’ll need to log in to your Paid Member profile to access the page).
I’ve been obsessed by sleep – like many of you – for a while. Partly because so much disrupts sleep at this time of life (menopause, hormonal changes, anxiety, big life changes) and because I read Matthew Walker’s book a few years ago. Walker’s book was tyrannical in its message that getting enough sleep is about the Most Important Thing we can do for our health. He explains how we need 8 or 9 hours for our brains to be able to clean, reset and rearrange themselves for healthy functioning. It made me feel a bit like sleep was anther thing I was getting wrong.
His messsage was news to many of us who grew up as Margaret Thatcher’s children (she famously slept only a paltry few hours a night). We 1980s kids were bred on the notion that sleep was for wimps – or as many people, including an old editor of mine, said: “You can sleep when you’re dead!” I worked in a newsroom where editors kept camp beds in their offices, where it was normal to work till 3am on a Friday and be back in the office at 8.30am for another 14-hour day. It was a burn-the-candle-at-both-ends culture.
‘Having it all’ meant everything, except sleep
For women in particular, not sleeping has often been a badge of honour.
Part of Having it All was cramming it all in: One way for working women to manage the double shift (home and office) was to not sleep as much as we needed to. Now, for me, this feels very personal.
My beloved stepmother Tessa Jowell died of a brain tumour in her early seventies. Like a good have-it-all feminist back then, she managed to make it to Tony Blair’s Cabinet and bring the Olympics to Britain and be a lovely mum, stepmum and wife by sleeping very little. It was typical for Tessie to be scruffling around in her pantry or reading the papers in her ministerial red box till 4 or 5 in the morning. Often she worked through the night so she could make it to, say, a school concert; she was determined not to shortchange anyone. But I can’t help wondering if, by driving herself so hard, she shortened own her life dramatically. Particularly given what we now know about sleep and brain health….
Sleeping less is not “more”
I know myself how tempting it is to just cram another thing in; I’m also enticed by social media on my phone at midnight, or have been known to start checking emails at four in the morning. Doing this can make us feel like we are getting a jump on the endless Queenager to-do list. But what I’ve learnt about sleep, and about how we keep ourselves on the road without burnout, is that it’s vitally important to give ourselves proper downtime. Not just by going on holiday every so often, but by practicing good sleep, exercise and rest hygiene every day.
In our NOON event with Heather, she told us: “Think of yourself as a bottle of Coca-Cola. During the day with all the hectic-ness and stress, the bottle gets shaken up.”
At this point she took a bottle of pop and shook it – you could see the fizziness straining to escape. “So all day you are shaking it up, making it fizzier. Then at night you stop and try and sleep – which is like taking the top off the bottle. And what happens – it doesn’t just settle, it explodes.”
She explains that all too often that’s what happens to us. We run around all day being manic – in my last job I used to get to the end of the day feeling like a ping-pong ball that had just bounced between meetings and encounters all day long. And before we can sleep, we have to be calm enough to drop off: All that fizziness has to be expelled and settled first.
Sleep type 1: Perfectionists
The first cohort “are the perfectionists, they are so over-vigilant, pushing themselves so hard to achieve that their brains are still racing at the end of the day, worrying about everything they haven’t managed to do. If you have a voice inside you saying nothing is ever enough, how can you possibly rest?” Indeed.
You may not necessarily consider yourself a perfectionist in every area of your life, but it can apply if you have certain ideas about work, sleep and what you expect from yourself.
Heather treats these people by changing the story around about sleep. “We need to tell ourselves that we DESERVE rest, pull away from the Puritanism in our culture which sees sleep and rest as lazy. If we are to sleep well at night, we have to give ourselves some gaps in the day to process. If we think about that Coca-Cola bottle, we have to make time for the gas to escape, for our systems to settle down during the day.”
She recommends 10 or 20 minutes just staring at a wall (yes, really!), or going for a walk, solo, in nature. Or taking an afternoon 20-minute power nap where we are in that relaxed, zoning stage even if we don’t go into a deep sleep. I like this idea of allowing ourselves some decompression time during the actual day – not requiring our poor brains to process EVERYTHING at night just before we drop off.
Sleep type 2: Neurodiverse people
The second big group of clients who come to her for sleep advice are those who are neurodiverse. “They tend to have higher rates of circadian rhythm disorder; to maybe naturally sleep at odd times, later at night, or be early risers and are trying to force themselves into unnatural patterns. All of us will have our own natural sleep pattern, its important to work with that not against it.”
Her book outlines key routines to achieve this. But she says the most important step is to recognise what your natural sleep pattern really is.
Sleep type 3: People with trauma
The last group are those who have suffered severe trauma who, understandably, are often in a state of hypervigilance and so find it particularly hard to switch off; for this cohort, she says, “sleeping pills can be a life saver”. These folks can also benefit from therapy with qualified experts since their sleep problems are linked to underlying issues that can need addressing as well.
Don’t put sleep on your “to-do” list
Heather’s deeply humane and practical advice stresses that sleep shouldn’t be another thing that we all start obsessing over; another area where we decide we’re “not good enough or failing”.
And here’s great news: When we have a sketchy night’s sleep, we don’t need to worry. She is adamant that for most of us, “a night tossing and turning will mean the next night we catch up and sleep well,” she says. “Too many of us live in a state of sleep anxiety.”
Do sleep trackers help?
Here’s a question that several of us on the webinar were wondering: Do devices like Apple Watches, Oura rings and Fitbits that monitor our nights and track sleep cycles really help?
Heather’s answer: Not really.
“I don’t think bands or watches that track our periods of sleep are a good idea,” she says. “They are not accurate enough to be meaningful and can make us more obsessive. We need to approach sleep with flexibility and gentleness – not be perfectionist about it. The most important thing is to have a consistent wake-up time and to be gentle with yourself about it. Remember that time spent resting even if you aren’t asleep is still useful.”
Are you actually asleep right now?
I was fascinated to learn that in some sleep cycles, we can feel awake but actually be processing in the way our brains need to to reboot. “Some patients report that they are not sleeping when actually they are,” she says reassuringly.
Of course Queenagers also get hit with menopause, which affects sleep. Those pesky hot flushes that can wake us from our deepest slumbers, and anxiety around midlife collisions can disrupt our nights as well. Again, her advice is not to panic but to cool ourselves down, wind down, gently remind ourselves to turn over and sleep again.
I love this idea of sleep as our companion in a dance; reflecting how we treat ourselves when we are awake. How we sleep is a great indicator of whether or not we are being kind to ourselves in the rest of our lives.
I talk a lot about how us Queenagers can be tyrants to ourselves, talking to ourselves and driving ourselves harder than anyone else in our lives. Heather’s message about sleep is very inline with our NOON advice to be kind to yourself, to speak and behave to yourself like you would a particularly beloved friend, child or even pet. No more nasty inner voice!
xx – Eleanor
