The woman who couldn’t sleep for a decade - and how she fixed it

Not getting enough sleep can cause stress about not getting enough sleep - which in turn leads to more lack of sleep. Photo / Getty Images

Driven to desperation by insomnia, the writer Bregje Hofstede began a quest to try everything that might give her a good night’s rest. It took a while …

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.”

During the day her eyes would dry out from exhaustion. At night, when sleep didn’t come, she would traipse to and from the bathroom several times before going into the kitchen to stare out into the night, hoping it would make her drowsy. When it didn’t, she would end up working blurry-eyed on the sofa or crying to her boyfriend in despair.

It would be years before Hofstede would find a radical and radically simple solution to her sleep problems. Throughout her 20s, she tried everything the internet, her doctors and the self-help industry had to offer. She recounts it all in her new book, In Search of Sleep. She started with the obvious interventions: no coffee or tea, no dark chocolate, more exercise and less sugar, earplugs, eye masks, blackout curtains, reading for an hour before bed, lavender oil, an app where a man called Andy tells you your legs are getting heavy.

She tried staying out late to see if that knocked her out. It didn’t. She counted down from a thousand, she counted in threes, she tried cognitive behavioural therapy and meditation and blue light glasses to reduce the sleep-disrupting glare of her smartphone. She tried a weighted blanket, which is said to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol. When that didn’t work, she got her boyfriend to lie on her. No joy.

She went through the consumable cures: warm milk for the amino acid tryptophan, which your body uses to make the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin; Greek yoghurt with extra protein and peanut butter on rice crackers to protect against night-time hunger pangs (protein is slow to digest); camomile for its flavonoids, which are thought to have a sedative effect; extract of hops and valerian, a root, to calm the nervous system by enhancing levels of Gaba (gamma-aminobutyric acid) in the brain. Upping the ante, she tried melatonin supplements, antihistamines, smoking cannabis and drops of THC oil (the psychoactive compound in cannabis), which left her feeling “like I had turned into a slug”.

Some remedies helped for a few days, others for weeks or months. Antihistamines, in particular, showed potential, despite leaving her feeling permanently “sluggish”. But nothing actually solved the problem. Not even sleeping pills, used by one in 10 adults in the Netherlands and the UK. Hofstede opted for a benzodiazepine (a type of sedative medication) called temazepam. Even after she increased the dosage, it still didn’t send her to sleep.

“My mind was compressed like the trash in a garbage truck, but there was always a crack of light, a sliver of consciousness that refused to go,” she writes in her memoir of her struggles. “And in the mornings the chemical hangovers got worse and worse.”

After several years of trying every conventional and unconventional treatment without much success, Hofstede, now 34, reached a point where she was “desperate enough to try anything”, she says. What she tried, with the help of a psychologist specialising in insomnia to whom she was finally referred, was a complete reframing of the issue.

“Let go,” the psychologist told her. “It’s better to stop all your endeavours to get your sleep back on track. Or, if you want to reduce your sleep problems, don’t do anything about them.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Bregje Hofstede (@bregjehofstede)

All the sleep hacks were simply consolidating the idea that she had a “disorder” that needed fixing. She had to abandon this idea altogether. She had to stop trying to get to sleep.

Perhaps the best-known book on insomnia of the past decade is Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep. The founder and director of the Centre for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, Walker has legions of fans and his 2017 book was a Sunday Times bestseller. But Hofstede found it “extremely disheartening” because he “focuses exclusively on the brain and seemingly forgets that this brain is in a living body, working and living in the world,” she explains. “So I found his book interesting, well worth the read, but as an insomniac specifically I found it frustrating and I felt both told off by it and condemned to eternal sleeplessness.”

In her own book, she looks at the bigger picture and how context impacts sleep: namely, our relationship with money, time, place and other factors. Or, as someone she knows — a man of few words — summarised her findings: “You need to be happy in order to sleep.”

A simple solution, then. But also hardly straightforward. For Hofstede, it involved a radical new direction. She moved to rural France.

In late 2019 she and her boyfriend, Toine (a fellow struggling sleeper, though not as badly afflicted), left Amsterdam and relocated to the Morvan Regional Natural Park in the middle of Burgundy in search of happiness and, hopefully, sleep. “What if I take my life as an experiment. I change it. I see what happens,” she explains. “So that’s when I decided to move.”

Her choice of France was less a romantic one and more financial. Country houses are expensive in the Netherlands, she says, pointing to the nation’s high population density. Burgundy, on the other hand, “is a region where very few people live; lots of houses are empty you can buy a house for as little as €30,000 ($53,000).”

And the move worked. From the second night in Morvan, Hofstede started sleeping well and now she usually gets the golden seven or eight hours. She still goes to bed between 10 and 11 o’clock, just as she used to, but her recipe for sleep is to slow down and connect with her surroundings and with others. She no longer leads a busy urban life filled with social engagements, “biking around at top speed and trying to make deadlines”. She works less and walks more, finding time for gardening and cooking.

Even the birth of her daughter, Ronja, two years ago wasn’t the trigger for the sleepless nights that she assumed it would be. “I thought I’d feel intensely frustrated over all the sleep loss,” she says. “But actually, since my sleep had recovered before I had my baby, it didn’t turn out that way.” The difference, she says, is waking up for a reason — to soothe her child — rather than lying awake aimlessly. “I rarely have trouble getting back to sleep after my daughter wakes me.”

The elephant in the room is, of course, that not every insomniac can up sticks and move to Burgundy. As a writer, Hofstede is able to work less, work anywhere and live more frugally if she wants to. She knows this is not possible for everyone. “I have a great deal of good luck to have some wriggle room,” she says. But, she believes, everyone is able to make small adjustments.

She resists the idea of giving a concise list of sleep tips (“I am sorry to be a spoilsport”) but promotes “changing the way you relate to the world around you. Not just the natural world but also the social world, the way you use time and the way you look at money.” Humans are the only species known to experience insomnia, she says. “The exception being the animals we keep in captivity.”

Recently her circumstances changed, so she now has less wriggle room than she used to. Toine’s mother has had a stroke and they want to be closer to home to help. This summer she is moving with Toine, Ronja and their dog, Kepler, back to the Netherlands to a flat in Arnhem. Will leaving their rural life cause her insomnia to return? At first, she was scared it might, but even amid all the logistics and paperwork required to move, she is still sleeping. “So I have good hope that even though we will have relinquished this life, we’ll import the lessons learned.”

On the odd occasion that she has a sleepless night now, she accepts it rather than getting wound up about it. She no longer feels a sense of doom, that she’ll be “lying awake till I die”. One anxious habit does remain, however: a bowl of protein-rich nuts on her nightstand. “A talisman against hunger pangs, a souvenir of darker times, I don’t know,” she says. “They just sit there uneaten.”

Written by: Blanca Scofield

© The Times of London