The Sleep We Stole From Ourselves

The Sleep We Stole From Ourselves

By Dr Jeremy Mellins

Last night, my ten-year-old woke at three in the morning. I slept through it, but my wife, her ears sharpened by years of attunement to the rhythms and disruptions of the house, heard the creak of a door and found our daughter hiding in the bathroom, watching a show on her tablet. She had had a bad dream, or something like a bad dream, and couldn’t get back to sleep. Having composed herself just enough to comfort the child, to be soft when softness was needed, my wife then couldn’t sleep herself. So by the time the alarm went off, a little after six, she was preconditioned to be irritated with the day before it had even begun.

Then the seven-year-old wouldn’t get up. She didn’t want to go to school. She was warm. She was tired. She was, at some level, her vocabulary couldn’t quite reach, simply refusing to participate in the fiction that this was a reasonable thing to ask of her body. But we got her up. We made her. And in the process, everyone in the house became angry with everyone else. Instead of waking with the breaking of the day, sharing a meal together, spending time in each other’s company, we were forced from warm beds we didn’t want to leave, some of us heading to places we didn’t want to go, all five of us fighting for the right to be left to some crumb of comfort, some last scrap of rest. We went into the day sadly and separately, snapping at one another because we could not accommodate our bodies’ need for the most basic resource there is.

And here is the thing that struck me, walking to work this morning, chewing on that particular flavour of domestic guilt. Sleep is not like food or water. We do not have to find it, or grow it, or pipe it in from somewhere. We carry the capacity for sleep on board. Our bodies do it automatically, will do it whether we want them to or not, if only we are given the freedom to let them. We have created a scarcity so deep, so perverse, that it extends beyond the resources we must seek in the external world. We have made scarce something we already have inside us, something we could have every last crumb of if we were simply left alone to take it. That is a special kind of madness. That is what happens when a civilisation has so thoroughly internalised the logic of scarcity that it can no longer distinguish between a resource that must be produced and a biological function that merely requires permission.

I had a patient last week, mid-forties, two kids, middle management, the usual. She sat down, and before I could ask what brought her in, she said: “I’m just so tired.” She said it with a kind of apologetic defiance, as if she knew tiredness wasn’t a proper reason to see a doctor but also knew, somewhere beneath the embarrassment, that something fundamental had gone wrong.

I hear this every day. Every single day. It is among the most common complaints in general practice, and the one we are least equipped to address, because the problem is not medical. The problem is civilisational.

There is a joke amongst GPs, or at least something that functions as a joke in the way that dark observations do when you have heard them enough times. Hardly anyone ever really loses their medication. We don’t ask the open question, ‘what have they lost’? We ask ‘is it painkillers or sleepers’? When a message comes through from the front desk saying a patient needs an early prescription because their medicines have gone missing, it is almost always an opiate or a benzodiazepine. They “left it at their mate’s house in Reading” and can’t afford the bus fare back. “Their bag was stolen”, though for some reason they don’t have a crime reference number. These patients, the ones begging for more of these medications, will broadly fit a certain desperate narrative type. The drug seeker. I do not use that term as a judgment; these people are as afflicted as anybody else, and the fact that they have overused their prescription or sold it is a symptom of their disease, not a moral failing. Nevertheless, they fit a recognisable pattern.

But there is another category of callers for lost or missing drugs, and it may be the biggest category of all. They are the ones asking for Z drugs. Zopiclone, zolpidem, and the like. Straight up, old-fashioned sleeping tablets. These are rarely initiated these days and never recommended for long-term use. Yet there are legions of patients who were prescribed these in the ‘good-old-days’ of the 1980s and 1990s and still will not give them up. And here is what fascinates me: these people are phenotypically different from every other drug seeker who calls the surgery. They are often middle-class, middle-aged, and professional. They get up at the crack of dawn to do a job of work. They have mortgages, private health insurance, and busy social calendars. They would never for a second think of themselves as being in the same bracket as the person begging for morphine. But they are. They are no different at all. Once you give somebody a regular monthly supply of sleep, boxed in blister packs of twenty-eight, you become a monster when you try to take it away.

In sleep, we have created a scarcity so pervasive that it captures absolutely everyone who lives our Victorian, Calvinist work-world nightmare. It reaches the addict on the estate and the solicitor in the detached house, and it takes them both to the same place: the phone call to the surgery, the slightly desperate voice, the story that does not quite add up, the unmistakable tone of someone who needs something their life is not giving them.

Here is the strange thing about sleep. For most of human history, we did not ration it. We did not have to. Our ancestors rose and fell with the sun, not because they were virtuous but because they had no choice; there was nothing to do in the dark except sleep, talk quietly, tend the fire, and keep one ear open for predators. The historian Roger Ekirch has documented how, for centuries before industrialisation, Europeans slept in two phases: a “first sleep” beginning shortly after dusk, a period of wakefulness around midnight for prayer, conversation, intimacy, or simply staring into the fire, and then a “second sleep” until dawn. References to this pattern appear everywhere from Homer’s Odyssey to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to sixteenth century French medical manuals. It was not a lifestyle choice. It was what human sleep looked like when humans were allowed to sleep like humans.

Then came gaslight. Then came the factory whistle. Then came the understanding, which has never really left us, that sleep is time stolen from production, and that the good worker, the serious person, the one who deserves respect, is the one who sleeps least.

We have been telling ourselves this story for about two hundred years now, and it has become so deeply embedded that most of us do not recognise it as a story at all. We experience it as reality. We experience tiredness as normal, and the desire for more sleep as weakness.

Think about how we talk about sleep. Think about the social grammar of exhaustion. “I was up at five.” “I didn’t get to bed until two.” “I’m running on four hours.” These are not complaints. They are claims. They are bids for status, little flags planted in the conversational landscape to signal that you are serious, committed, needed, in demand. Every middle-class, middle-aged conversation I witness, whether in the consulting room or at the school gates or at a dinner party, involves this peculiar competitive ritual. Everyone is tired. Everyone says so. And everyone says so with a strange mixture of suffering and pride, as if exhaustion were both a wound and a medal.

The research confirms what the consulting room suggests. A study published in Sleep Health by Elijah Wee and colleagues at the University of Washington found that disclosing a lack of sleep at work can confer social status. For men, it signals strength and resilience. For women, it signals self-sacrifice and dedication to others. Either way, the message is the same: I am giving more of myself than my body can sustain, and you should admire me for it. The researchers also found, and this is the part that should give us pause, that when leaders brag about their sleep deprivation, it undermines their subordinates' sleep and ultimately leads to increased unethical behaviour within the team. The exhaustion cascades. The badge of honour becomes a contagion.

Meanwhile, the science of what sleep deprivation actually does to us has become difficult to ignore. The CDC calls insufficient sleep a public health problem. Research consistently links chronic short sleep to increased risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, depression, and impaired immune function. A National Sleep Foundation survey presented at CES 2025 found that over half of Americans reported poor sleep negatively affecting their work productivity, their ability to avoid mistakes, and their capacity to interact appropriately with colleagues. Sleep-deprived individuals show impaired recognition of happiness and sadness in others' faces, meaning the person bragging about their four hours is quite literally less able to read the room. And the cognitive impairment from sustained wakefulness is comparable to alcohol intoxication; seventeen hours without sleep produces performance deficits equivalent to a blood alcohol level that would make it illegal to drive.

We know all of this. We have known most of it for years. And yet we keep doing it. Why?

Because the story is older and deeper than the data. The story says that suffering is the price of participation, that comfort is suspicious, that the person who rests is the person who does not care enough. It is, when you look at it squarely, a scarcity story. In a world where there is never enough, where resources are fought over and time is zero-sum, the willingness to sacrifice your own body becomes a signal of loyalty to the group. You are proving you are not a free rider. You are proving you deserve your place. Every time you tell someone you had four hours of sleep, and you say it with that little note of pride in your voice, you are performing an act of submission. You are saying: I am an obedient participant in a system that demands more than I can give, and I am giving it anyway.

This is what interests me. Not the sleep science, which is important but which others have covered thoroughly, but the social architecture of exhaustion. The way we have turned a biological necessity into a moral test. And the way we punish, with remarkable consistency, those whose sleep patterns do not conform.

Consider the teenager. This is a subject close to my heart, with children on the cusp of puberty. The research here is not ambiguous, and the cruelty of what we do is not subtle. At puberty, the adolescent brain undergoes a well-documented shift in circadian biology. The body’s production of melatonin, the hormone that signals sleepiness, is delayed by roughly two to two and a half hours. The adolescent brain does not begin producing melatonin until around 11 at night and continues to peak production until about 7 in the morning. This is not laziness. This is not poor discipline. This is neurobiology; it has been observed across cultures worldwide, which confirms it is not a product of social habit but of developmental biology. As one University of Washington researcher put it, asking a teenager to be alert at half past seven in the morning is the biological equivalent of asking an adult to be sharp and ready to go at five.

We know this. The American Academy of Paediatrics stated formally in 2014 that middle and high schools should start no earlier than half past eight. The evidence behind that recommendation is substantial. Schools that have delayed their start times have seen students gain between twenty-five and seventy-seven minutes of additional sleep per night. Studies have shown reduced daytime sleepiness, reduced depression, reduced caffeine use, fewer absences, fewer disciplinary incidents, and improved grades. When a Minnesota high school shifted its start time from quarter past seven to twenty to nine, scores among the top-performing students rose dramatically, dropout rates fell, students fought less, and school counsellors reported fewer cases of mental illness and stress. A University of Washington study found that when Seattle high schools pushed back start times, students simply slept longer; they did not stay up later. Their biology was not the problem. The schedule was the problem.

And yet most American schools still start before eight, and in many other countries, the picture is similar or worse. In the UK, where schools typically begin at around twenty to nine, the situation is less extreme, but the principle holds: even a start time that looks reasonable on paper requires a wake-up time that does not, once you factor in the commute, the uniform, the packed lunch, and the school run. The point is not that every school everywhere is dragging children out of bed at six; it is that almost no school anywhere has been designed around adolescent sleep biology. The schedule came first. The child was expected to fit.

And when children are irritable, inattentive, impulsive, and aggressive, we call it a behaviour problem. We discipline them. We label them. Research consistently links insufficient sleep in teenagers to increased aggression, impulsivity, emotional dysregulation, and risk-taking behaviour. A meta-analysis found that individuals with poor sleep quality were over 3.5 times more likely to exhibit aggressive behaviour. The CDC’s Youth Risk Behaviour Survey found a dose-dependent relationship: the less sleep teenagers got, the more likely they were to engage in unsafe driving, substance use, and violence. Sleep deprived adolescents, as one researcher noted, often lose conscious control over their emotional state, becoming angry and aggressive in stressful situations; and then, miserably, the conflict that arises between students and parents over late wake ups, and between teachers and students over tardiness and classroom sleepiness, further worsens the teenager’s emotional state, creating a spiral of fatigue, hostility, and resentment that we then attribute to adolescent character rather than to institutional design.

We do this with a smile. We do it cheerfully, briskly, with the breezy confidence of a system that has never questioned its own premises. Early to bed, early to rise. Good habits start young. Never mind that the habits in question were set not by biology but by the factory bell, and that we are asking children to conform to an industrial timetable designed for adult productivity in an era when the moral virtue of early rising was indistinguishable from the economic necessity of showing up before the foreman.

Now consider the other end of life. Sleep disturbances affect up to 70% of people with dementia; their internal clocks damaged, their days and nights blurred. The suprachiasmatic nucleus, the brain’s circadian pacemaker, can degenerate in dementia, and with it goes the capacity to maintain a coherent sleep/wake cycle. These patients rarely spend a full hour continuously awake during the day or asleep at night. And the institutional response is too often to medicate them into conformity with a schedule that serves the staff rota rather than the patient. Caregivers report disturbed sleep as one of the most distressing dementia symptoms, and it is a leading reason families move loved ones into care homes, where the rigid scheduling of institutional life compounds the very problem that brought them there.

So here we are. The young, whose brains are wired by puberty to sleep late, we force awake at dawn and punish for the consequences. The old, whose brains are unwired by neurodegeneration, we sedate at dusk and manage as a nuisance. And everyone in between we congratulate for their exhaustion. Three generations, each failed by the same refusal to accommodate human biology, each disciplined into the same industrial rhythm, each paying a different price for the same delusion: that the clock on the wall matters more than the clock in the brain.

We have, in other words, taken one of the most fundamental human experiences, the surrender to sleep, the daily act of letting go, and turned it into another site of scarcity. Another place where you must earn your right, even to rest. Another system in which the correct amount is always less than you need.

This is a FOME problem. Not because sleep is about to become abundant in some technological sense, though one can imagine a world in which work is reorganised so radically that the question of “when do I sleep?” becomes yours genuinely to answer. It is a FOME problem because it reveals how deeply the logic of scarcity has colonised even the most intimate spaces of our lives. We cannot sleep properly because we cannot stop performing the role of a person who does not need to sleep. We cannot rest because, in a scarcity economy, rest looks like giving up.

There is a version of the abundant world in which this changes. In which we design work around human biology rather than requiring human biology to submit to work. In which the teenager sleeps until nine and starts school at ten. In which the shift worker is not forced into circadian misalignment for the convenience of a production schedule. In which the parent of young children is not expected to function on four hours of broken sleep and then perform competence all day. In which the elderly person with a failing internal clock is met with patience and flexibility rather than sedation.

That version requires us to stop treating exhaustion as virtue. It requires us to look at the person who says “I only had four hours” and hear not a warrior but a casualty. It requires us to finally notice that the system which demands your sleep is the same system that will discard you when the lack of it makes you sick.

It is a system designed for production, and the fact that the production in question increasingly serves no one, that much of what we stay awake to do is pointless, performative, or actively harmful, only makes the whole arrangement more grotesque.

My patient, the tired one, did not need a blood test. She needed a world that does not require her to run on empty and then feel guilty for being human.

We could build that world. The question, as always, is whether we will.