Why Can’t We Sleep? by Darian Leader review – understanding our sleepless minds
Are you so worried about not sleeping it’s keeping you awake? Why ‘sleep science’ has made insomnia worse
The complaint has become all too familiar: the phones by our bed are Trojan horses, brimming with enemy soldiers (demands, anxieties, distractions) laying siege to our sleep. The risk of a culture with no off switch is that sleep becomes an inconvenience, an obstacle to the ideal of 24/7 productivity. This is the context for the widely proclaimed insomnia epidemic that, according to sleep scientists such as Matthew Walker, threatens a public health emergency of catastrophic proportions, with dire consequences for our health, safety and productivity.
Few would argue with the basic premise that the digital age is menacing our sleep. But as psychoanalyst Darian Leader’s bracing and important intervention in the debate makes clear, this is a narrow point of agreement amid many points of contention. The most basic concerns the nature of insomnia itself: is it a psychosocial malaise, or a neurobiological one?