This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation, the Auckland anniversary floods, arts patron Sir James Wallace’s prison sentence, the election of Christopher’s Luxon government and the All Blacks’ narrow defeat in the Rugby World Cup final.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2023. Today we take a look at some of the year’s best sleep advice.
The woman who couldn’t sleep for a decade - and how she fixed it
As a young girl growing up in the town of Ede in the Netherlands, writer Bregje Hofstede slept well. Insomnia that would end up crippling her didn’t arrive overnight. It started gradually. In her teens, she became what she describes as a fidgety sleeper and then, towards the end of her degree course, sleep deserted her altogether. She graduated in 2012, just as the Netherlands was going through a financial crisis — not a great time to begin a career in journalism. “There were no jobs,” she says. “I had no money. I had real trouble paying the rent every month.” The worry kept her up at night.
From there Hofstede found herself in a vicious circle familiar to insomniacs. The lack of sleep led to stress about the lack of sleep, which led to more lack of sleep. “You focus on sleep as something you cannot fail at, and that is the way to fail at sleep,” she says. “I’d panic when the clock hit three or four and I was still not sleeping. I would just think, if I continue like this, I will go mad. I was really afraid of going mad, of having some kind of psychotic breakdown.”
As the insomnia became more embedded, her thoughts grew darker and sometimes, in the depths of yet another sleepless night, suicidal. “Most insomniacs will recognise this — it’s something you could call night madness,” she says. “Between the hours of two and five everything seems utterly dark and you think, I can’t go on like this.”
It would be years before Hofstede would find a radical and radically simple solution to her sleep problems. Read the full story here.
The hidden dangers of your weekend lie-in
Could your lazy Sunday morning be harming your heart on Monday morning? For those of us who enjoy a relaxing weekend lie-in, this might sound counter-intuitive, but emerging evidence suggests that sleeping in late could put you at greater risk of a heart attack – especially as you get older.
According to new data presented at the British Cardiovascular Society conference in Manchester, rates of deadly heart attacks are more than 13 per cent higher on the first day of the week. Scientists suspect this is because the body’s natural circadian rhythms are disrupted over the weekend as we stay up late and switch off our alarms. When this comes to an abrupt end on Monday morning, it triggers surges in inflammation and stress hormones such as cortisol, which put greater stress on the heart.
This follows recent research which came to a similar conclusion. In May, scientists at Monash University in Australia studied the sleeping habits of almost 90,000 people aged between 40 and 69. They found that having a regular sleeping pattern is just as important as getting a sufficient number of hours of sleep.
People with irregular sleep patterns - such as shift workers, or those who varied their bedtimes - were 53 per cent more likely to die from any cause over the following seven years, compared to those who kept to a regular pattern.
Need more reasons to drag yourself out of bed at a reasonable hour on a Saturday or Sunday? Read on.
The art of being a morning person (even if you’re actually not one)
My older child has always been an early riser. He rarely snoozes past 6am; 6:30 is a miracle. He bounces out of bed as my husband and I clench our coffees, greeting his enthusiasm for the day with a lot of halfhearted grunting.
As a night owl, I often marvel at how I created this morning lark, especially because sleep experts say our respective sleep patterns are at least partly hard-wired - though not immutable.
“Everybody’s ‘clock’ is set a little differently,” said Leisha Cuddihy, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester’s Comprehensive Sleep Centre. “You may never wake up totally ready to go and wanting to do stuff,” she added, noting that she herself is not much of a morning person.
Still, if people like us want to feel more alive upon waking — a reasonable goal, given work and school start times — it’s not hopeless, Dr Cuddihy said. I asked her and other experts in sleep medicine and habit change to share strategies that can help mornings feel more tolerable, and even productive. Here’s what they said.
How to salvage your day after a bad night’s sleep
Most of us know that good sleep is a pillar of good health, on par with exercise and nutrition. And yet most of us have had a night (or many nights) when it all went sideways. Maybe you stayed out late and only got six hours, instead of the recommended seven to nine. Maybe your racing brain wouldn’t stop, and you woke up every hour, on the hour. Or maybe you missed a whole night’s rest cramming on a deadline.
Whatever the scenario, research shows that when people are deprived of sleep, they have slower response times, impaired decision-making, difficulty paying attention and worse memory. People are also more likely to feel anxious, depressed and anti-social.
Scientists typically see these effects in studies where they force people to stay awake for 24 hours, but Eti Ben Simon, a research scientist at the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, said that if you “just take away an hour or two for a couple of nights, you end up seeing the same profile emerging”.
To mitigate these effects, the No. 1 thing experts recommend is taking a nap. Not only can it help you feel less sleepy, but it can actually improve your performance on many of the cognitive processes that are impaired by lack of sleep. Here’s what else the experts advise.
‘I tried the world’s most expensive mattress and it ruined my life’
This is a story about a US$70,000 mattress. It seems important to state that at the top. It’s the kind of number that could trip you up later, if you’re not expecting it.
The most expensive mattresses in the world are made by Hästens, in Sweden. Their handcrafted beds (though they call them “sleep instruments”) range in price from US$25,000 to US$660,000 for a king size with a base, mattress and topper. I use US$70,000 because that is the cost of the most popular model sold in Hästens’ more than 250 partner stores.
The rise of super high-end mattresses is part exploding appetite for luxury, part growing obsession with sleep in the wellness industrial complex. Still, US$70,000 is a lot of money for a mattress.
“Who could possibly be buying these beds?” I ask the ceiling of the Hästens shop in Stockholm, sprawled across a blue-chequered pillowtop.
Trying the beds is like a guided meditation, and takes around an hour. In the cavernous, dark, lavender-scented showroom, I take off my shoes and put on a pair of US$235 booties made of down duvet before climbing into bed. I am instructed to wiggle, to say hello to the bed. “Every Hästens remembers the last person that entered,” he says. “When you move, you make the instrument aware that someone new is coming aboard.”
