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The app enables friends and family to receive alerts on their smartphone whenever Urgent Response is contacted.
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The Guardian
4 hours ago
- The Guardian
Can I tame my 4am terrors? Arifa Akbar on a lifetime of insomnia – and a possible cure
I can't remember when I first stopped sleeping soundly. Maybe as a child, in the bedroom I initially shared with my brother, Tariq. I would wait for his breathing to quieten, then strain to listen beyond our room in the hope of being the last one awake, and feel myself expanding into the liberating space and solitude. By my early 20s, that childhood game of holding on to wakefulness while others slept began playing out against my will. Sound seemed to be the trigger. It was as if the silence I had tuned into as a child was now a requirement for sleep. Any sound was noise: the burr of the TV from next door, the ticking of a clock in another room. When one layer of sound reduced its volume, another rose from beneath it, each intrusive and underscored by my own unending thoughts. Noise blaring from without and within, until I felt too tired to sleep. The artist Louise Bourgeois suffered a bad bout of insomnia in the 1990s, during which she created a series of drawings. Among them is an image that features musical notes in red ink, zigzagging across a sheet of paper. They look like the jagged score of an ECG graph that has recorded an alarmingly arrhythmic heartbeat. It sums up the torment of my insomnia: there is a raised heartbeat in every sound. I have been told that to overcome an inability to sleep you must find its root cause, but this quest for an original impetus is guesswork. Was it self-inflicted in childhood, or does it track further back than that, to infancy, to the womb, to genetics? One starting point is Professor Derk-Jan Dijk's view of a 'sleep personality', and the idea that childhood sleep habits can be the same later in life. I was born in London, but my family moved to Lahore when I was three years old, before returning to the UK a couple of years later. In Pakistan, there was vigorous, carefree slumber, on the roof of the house on the hottest nights, with the extended family in close proximity. It was sleep as communal ritual. Then the standstill after lunch when everyone lay down again in siesta. I remember my sister, Fauzia, sleeping beside me on these afternoons. There was no hint of insomnia until the move back to Britain when we found ourselves homeless, living in a disused building in north London for a while, crammed into a single room, before moving into a council flat. In light of Dijk's words, I see how my insomnia might be a reaction against this early chaos, along with my exacting need for order and silence in adulthood, but that is my own armchair analysis. There are so many gaps in sleep science that I wonder if sleep is by its nature too mysterious to systematise. If science can't explain the grey areas around sleep, maybe art can shed a light. It is surprising, given the painting's sense of joyous night-time, that Van Gogh painted his post-impressionist masterpiece The Starry Night in the midst of depression, after being admitted to an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the summer of 1889. A year before, in a letter dated 16 September 1888, Vincent tells his brother, Theo, that he is doing six to 12 hours of non-stop work, often at night, followed by 12 hours of sleep. By the following year he was in the grip of a 'FEARSOME' insomnia. On 9 January 1889, weeks after slicing part of his ear off in a high state of anxiety, he writes to Theo about his torment. He is fighting sleeplessness with a 'very, very strong dose of camphor' on his pillow and mattress, he says, and he hopes it will bring an end to the insomnia. 'I dare to believe that it won't recur.' I read Van Gogh's hope as optimistic desperation. In my case, it has always returned. Yet, even in his 'insensible' state, Vincent tells Theo that he is reflecting on the work of Degas, Gauguin and his own art practice; he continues to think, paint, write letters, with the insomnia existing alongside his productivity. The glittering night sky Van Gogh imagines beyond the confines of his asylum is an embodiment of the way we so often think of the gifted artist at night: synapses fizzing, imagination touched by divinity, a compulsively unsleeping genius channelling a heightened state of buoyant creativity. Countless artists and writers have elected to work after dark, from Toulouse-Lautrec, documenting night revelries at the Moulin Rouge, to Franz Kafka, Philip Guston and Patricia Highsmith. Musicians, too: the Rolling Stones' all-night jam in the lead-up to their appearance at Knebworth in 1976, for instance; or Prince, whose recording sessions could last across a continuous 24 hours. Certainly, if Van Gogh still suffered from insomnia when he was painting The Starry Night, it makes sleeplessness seem beatific – a curse turned gift. There is none of this buoyancy in Louise Bourgeois's night scribblings. She suffered from sleeplessness throughout her life but faced a particularly debilitating bout of night-time anxiety between 1994 and 1995, during which time she made her Insomnia Drawings series. 'It is conquerable,' she said, and for her it was conquered, by filling page after page of a drawing diary with deliriously repeated doodles and circles within circles, a mess of scribbles that look like screams on paper. They are so different from the enormous stainless steel, bronze and marble spiders and other caged sculptures for which Bourgeois is better known, but I feel a peculiar kind of excitement upon seeing these images, with their agitating boredom and alertness, side by side. The artist Lee Krasner also painted her way through chronic insomnia, around the time her mother and then her husband, the painter Jackson Pollock, died – the latter in a drink-driving car crash in 1956, with his lover Ruth Kligman, who survived, in the seat beside him. Krasner's Night Journeys series has some similarities to Bourgeois's drawings, featuring repeating, abstract patterns, but washed in an earthy sepia brown. The patterns are insect-like, as if ants are crawling across the retina. I am inspired by the images. Rather than seeking escape or avoidance of their sleepless state, Bourgeois and Krasner stare it in the face, and it stares back at them, an abyss of maddening monotony. There has only been one instance in my adult life when sleep became easy. Or rather, it became compulsive – as much as the insomnia was, and perhaps even more disturbing. It happened when Fauzia died in 2016, at the age of 45, of undiagnosed tuberculosis. She had been admitted to hospital with an unknown illness, and lay wired to a ventilator in intensive care. When the hospital called to say she had had a fatal brain haemorrhage one morning, the shock of it was too much to take in. So I began to sleep. No amount was enough and I felt increasingly worried by the long, blank nights, which did not bring relief but became as strangely burdensome as the insomnia had once felt. Haruki Murakami's novel After Dark features two sisters, the younger, Mari, mourning the older sibling, Eri, who is in a coma-like state. The book takes place over a single night in Tokyo as Mari roams through the city, meeting its nocturnal characters: a trombonist, a Chinese sex worker, the manager of a love hotel. All the while Eri lies in a trapped and mysterious kind of sleep. It might be an undiagnosed illness, a psychological condition or even a radical protest at the world and her place in it – we are never sure. Mari refuses to see her sister as 'dead', even though there seems no prospect of Eri's waking up. She looks at her sister's face and thinks that 'consciousness just happens to be missing from it at the moment: it may have gone into hiding, but it must certainly be flowing somewhere out of sight, far below the surface, like a vein of water'. This is how I saw Fauzia as she lay in hospital, after her haemorrhage. Even though we were told she'd remain on a ventilator for 24 hours as a formality before being pronounced dead, I kept watching for her to twitch awake, sure that it would happen. It seemed as if she was in a deep sleep, albeit so submerged by it that she had become unreachable. In her lifetime, Fauzia went through long bouts of oversleeping brought on by depression. There seemed to be a rebellion in it, too. From the age of 19, when she first became seriously depressed, she began holing herself up in her room, sleeping for the night and most of the following day. In the medieval era, the act of daytime sleeping, for men and for women, was seen to harm one's reputation. Many still regard it as slovenly and it can be subversive for exactly this reason. For a woman, especially, to refuse to get up and assume her role in the world – which may be one of monotonous domesticity, of caring for others, or of participating in the tedious, lower-rung machinery of capitalist productivity – might be a defiant act of saying 'no'. What might look like inertia, or passivity, can be an active summoning of inner strength, as suggested by Bruno Bettelheim in his psychoanalytic interpretations of fairytales in The Uses of Enchantment. He speaks of Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) not as an example of meek femininity but as an adolescent 'gathering strength in solitude'. Her sleep is a temporary turning inward in order to foment, mobilise and psychically prepare for the battles of adulthood to come. A glassy-eyed, self-medicating woman in Ottessa Moshfegh's novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation also 'hibernates' in her New York apartment. She is a Manhattan princess, narcissistic and hard to like, who does not want to experience any of life's sharp edges. Yet there is something I recognise in her overwhelming desire to disconnect from the terrible reality of the world. She plans to sleep for a year and wake up cured of her sadness, and she is. My sleep wasn't a cure, but the oversleeping did eventually lift and leave me feeling less numbed to my own sadness. Now I was glad to be returned to myself, and to my insomnia – an old friend, missed. There is evidence to suggest that women sleep differently from men and feel the effects of insomnia in discrete ways. Professor Dijk cites the familiar list of causes, from lifestyle to social class, wealth and genetics, but he has also found sex-based biological factors, with differences in the brainwaves of women and men when they sleep. Women intrinsically have different circadian rhythms, which are on average six minutes shorter than men's cycles; they experience more deep (or 'slow wave') sleep and may need to sleep for longer; while a mix of social factors, from breastfeeding to lower-paid shift work, means they face higher levels of insomnia. Sleep science makes a significant connection between hormones and sleep for women in the throes of menopause. About 50% of women who suffer with insomnia as they approach menopause are thought to sleep for less than six hours a night. The cumulative effects of this sleeplessness can be so intense that some have questioned whether they might be linked to UK female suicide rates, which are at their highest between the ages of 50 and 54. This brings another kind of insomnia for me, as I turn 50. It creeps duplicitously into my night, so I don't recognise it; I fall asleep quickly but am awake again at 4am with alarm-clock precision. This is not the organic and woozy 'biphasic' interruption believed by some to have been common in the centuries before electric light, in which communities were said to have a first and then a second sleep through the night, getting up to work or chat in between in a brief window referred to as 'the watch'. My brain is pin-sharp, as if the sleep before has been entirely restorative and I am ready to start the day, except there is a move towards a certain line of thought, a search for the faultlines of the previous day, the urgent address of an old argument or decision far in the future. And it is, in its scratchy insistence, so much like Bourgeois's scribbled red balls and Krasner's insects, that I wonder if they were experiencing menopausal sleep disruption while creating their works. Whereas younger insomniacs struggle to fall asleep, those in midlife might doze off quickly but wake up in the middle of the night as a result of hormonal changes, and it is in these 4am 'reckonings' that they encounter the night-time brain, says Dr Zoe Schaedel, who sits on the British Menopause Society's medical advisory council. 'Our frontal lobe [which regulates logical thought] doesn't activate as well overnight, and our amygdala [the brain's command centre for emotions, including fear, rage and anxiety] takes over.' So the very nature of thinking is different at 4am. In the daytime it is primarily logical, but at night we become more rash, anxious, catastrophic. That sets off its own physiological reaction in the nervous system, with a surge of adrenaline and cortisol, as well as rising heart and breathing rates. Between the waking, there is a welter of dreams, so many it seems like someone is changing between the channels on a TV set. Dr Schaedel says this apparent assault of dreams is an illusion. When oestrogen drops, women start sleeping more lightly and waking up in the latter part of the night, in the shallower REM, or dream, phase, which gives the impression of dreaming more because you are waking up more often in the midst of them. Still, I am wrongfooted by this second life in my head, this middle-aged night, as busy, as complicated and as exhausting as the day. When insomnia is at its most agitating, engaging the brain visually may be a way to lull ourselves back to sleep, says Dr Schaedel. This idea makes better sense of Bourgeois's scribbling. Maybe I would find my own recurring patterns on paper if I did the same thing, I think, and so I put a notebook beside my bed. I know I have had a maelstrom of dreams but, when I try to discover them on paper, it is like a stuck sneeze. I write a few words down, but I am left straining for more. A few snatched images come back, but far more float out of view, so much unreachable. The next night I can recall even fewer details, although I know I have dreamed heavily. So my odyssey of dreams evades any attempt at codification. They are determined to remain mysterious, on the other side of daytime. This is an edited extract from Wolf Moon: A Woman's Journey into the Night, published by Sceptre on 3 July at (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
The Independent
7 hours ago
- The Independent
Five stretches you should be doing every day according to a flexibility expert
If you want to add some mood-boosting movement into your day but, for whatever reason, you don't always manage to get a workout in, you don't necessarily need to commit to a long run or sweaty HIIT session. Stretching can be a welcome alternative, helping soothe sore muscles and providing a welcome break from the stresses of a busy schedule. Everyone can benefit from stretching, and the good news is that it's easy to do. If you're wondering where to start, try this seven-minute routine from flexibility expert Tom Merrick – better known to his one million YouTube subscribers as the Bodyweight Warrior. 'For most people, the biggest benefit they're going to get from [stretching to develop] flexibility is that feeling of losing restriction and gaining freedom to be able to move, even if that's just bending over to pick up something or play with the kids,' he says. Below, Merrick has shared five stretches he does every day and recommends for everyone to ease tight hips, improve shoulder health and improve flexibility in knees, hips and ankles. The five stretches you should be doing every day 1. The 90/90 'The 90/90 is one of my favourite general stretches for the hips,' Merrick says. 'It hits every single angle you're going to require, covering both internal and external rotation of the joint, with the focus of bringing more movement and more awareness into the hips.' He says that most people he sees are 'very locked up around the hips'. As a result, 'their back then ends up doing a lot of the movement for them'. 'Also, if you're sitting a lot in the day, you're going to get some compression and tightness of the glutes, and they then have an impact on other lower body positions like the squat,' Merrick adds. 'If we get more movement into the hips, I've found that's one of the best ways to help people feel more free and move better.' How to do it Sit upright with your right thigh perpendicular to your torso and your left thigh directly out in front of you. Your knees should both form a right angle, and your hands can be placed on the ground behind you for support. From here, lift both knees so they point at the ceiling, then allow them to fall in the opposite direction so your left thigh is perpendicular to your torso and your right thigh is extended in front of you. Continue to transition between these two positions, holding each side for a few deep breaths, for 90 seconds to two minutes. In this video, Merrick demonstrates some methods you can use to elevate this stretch or target specific muscles and movements. 2. The couch stretch This is another stretch that targets the hip flexors – the muscles around the pelvis, responsible for bringing your knees towards your chest – as well as the quadriceps on the front of the thigh. 'If you're doing sports like running and cycling, or you're doing a lot of sitting, it can cause this tightening up of the quad and hip flexors,' Merrick says. 'The nature of these activities means you're encouraging that flexed forward, tightened position [of the hips]. The couch stretch provides more of an extended position – the opposite experience to the stuff you would normally do day to day. 'It's also a really nice one because a lot of hip stretches won't include knee flexion [bending], which is going to stretch our rectus femoris – part of the quad muscle.' How to do it Place your left knee on the floor against a wall so your shin extends vertically upwards. Step your right foot forward so you're in a lunge position, with your left thigh and torso forming a straight line. Think about tucking your hips by squeezing your glutes (buttock muscles), and trying to pull your rear knee forward to contract the hip flexors. Place your hands on the floor inside your right foot, beneath your shoulders, for support. Hold this position for 60 to 90 seconds on each side. You can deepen this stretch by moving your torso more upright. Merrick says the couch stretch can be scaled to suit most fitness levels too. If you're new to flexibility training, you can start by keeping your hands on the floor for support and leaning forward over your front leg. As your flexibility increases, you can sit more upright to increase extension at the hip and flexion of the knee. 3. The squat This one might sound more like a strength-building exercise than a stretch, but Merrick says being able to hold a solid squat position 'demonstrates a reasonable flexibility at several joints including the ankle, knee and hips'. 'This is a fundamental human position, and it's a useful one to be able to get into,' he adds. 'If you're going to do any form of resistance training, you're probably going to come across a squat, and if you have kids or want to pick something up from the ground, you're going to want to be able to access this low position.' How to do it Stand with your feet roughly hip-width apart and your toes pointed slightly outwards. Keeping your chest up and your spine long, sink your hips down into a deep squat position. If you find yourself falling backwards, or you're unable to keep your chest up and your spine long in the bottom of the squat, hold onto a sturdy anchor point in front of you for extra support. Hold this position for 60 to 120 seconds, or watch Merricks' video for some variations to try. Most people will find they fall backwards when they try to get into a deep squat position, Merrick says. This is due to a lack of flexibility at either the ankles or hips, which forces the spine to round and more weight to be placed towards the back of the squat. To remedy this, he recommends practising sitting in a deep squat position while holding a sturdy anchor point in front of you, focusing on keeping your chest up and maintaining good positions. 'This comes down to the SAID [specific adaptation to imposed demand] principle,' says Merrick. 'If you want to get better at X, do X more, so find a way you can sit in a squat comfortably, then you can spend some time wiggling about, moving, and trying to get a good stretch.' 4. The hang Like the squat before it, Merrick says the hang covers a lot of bases. It can aid overhead flexibility for improved shoulder health, stretch a range of muscles around the shoulder joint including the latissimus dorsi in the back and pectorals in the chest, and it provides decompression of the spine too. 'During the day we might get a lot of compression in the spine just from being on our feet, moving around, sitting down,' he explains. 'Hanging allows gravity to pull that spine down and lengthen it.' How to do it Grab a pull-up bar with an overhand grip and your hands roughly shoulder-width apart. Take your feet off the ground to support your weight through your grip. Think about pulling your chest in to create a straighter body position. Hold this position for 30 to 60 seconds. If you are unable to support your bodyweight, use a lower pull-up bar and keep your feet on the ground to support some of your weight. Slowly reduce the weight taken by your feet over time to progress this move. Hanging can also develop your grip strength, which has been identified as an 'indispensable biomarker' for older adults in a review published in the Clinical Interventions in Aging journal. This is because it indicates good generalised strength, bone density and other important health markers. 'We know that grip strength is a really important factor, one for sports but also for longevity,' Merrick says. 'From hanging, we're going to naturally build some strength in the grip – being able to hang for between 30 and 60 seconds would be a good target for most people.' 5. The elephant walk into pike hold The hamstrings are the large muscles that run down the back of the thigh. In his time working with people to improve their flexibility, Merrick says tightness in this area is one of the main things that hampers clients' freedom of movement. 'If you want to work on more advanced flexibility, the hamstrings are almost like a key. If you unlock them, it lets the hips tilt and move more freely, which then is going to make you feel more flexible in general for things like squatting. So stretching the hamstrings in one form or another is great.' He says the elephant walk, where you reach towards the ground and straighten one leg at a time to stretch your hamstrings and shift your hips, is his favourite position for achieving this. How to do it Stand upright with a slight bend in your knees, then reach your hands towards the ground in front of you. With your hands on the ground for support, straighten your left leg while keeping your right knee slightly bent. Hold this position for a second, then switch sides. Continue to do this for 60 seconds, then straighten both legs and try to place your hands on the back of your lower legs, using them to pull you deeper into the stretch. Hold this position for 30 to 60 seconds. Should you try stretching? Stretching shouldn't be your only form of exercise – strength training and raising your heart rate with some form of cardio are key ingredients when cooking up a fit, functional body. But stretching can be a great way to enjoy a more relaxed form of movement while enjoying the many benefits listed above. 'It's universal, everyone can benefit from stretching,' Merrick says. 'The benefits really come down to the application. If you lift weights or do most other sports, the ability to put your arms overhead and squat down are two pretty crucial elements.' 'And we're all going to have to pick something off the floor at some point, so you would want to be able to touch the floor at the bare minimum – ideally, you would be able to get your palms down with straight legs. If you can do those three then you're going to have more than adequate flexibility to take anything that life throws at you.'
Daily Mail
11 hours ago
- Daily Mail
The cult-classic scalp scrub that's flying off shelves for its deep-clean MAGIC - users 'can't get enough' and it's 25% off right now
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