The clocks go back this Sunday, giving Britain an extra hour in bed. The nation’s sleepmaxxers are treating it as a personal best. They are also, already, worried about it.
Gareth Pilling, 38, a project coordinator from Swindon, has spent the week preparing. He has taped his mouth shut every night since March. He has blacked out his bedroom windows with a material he calls ‘aerospace grade’ and his wife calls ‘foil’. He wears a ring that measures his sleep and, each morning, gives him a score and a one-word verdict.
The verdict is ‘Fine’.
‘Not Good. Not Optimal. Fine,’ said Pilling, having peeled the tape off for the interview. ‘I’ve done the temperature, the breathing, the no screens after eight. And it says Fine. Like a waiter.’
Seven tabs, one of them called Fridays
Pilling takes three types of magnesium at staggered intervals. These are logged on a spreadsheet with seven tabs. One tab is labelled ‘Variance’. Another is labelled ‘Fridays’. He declined to explain Fridays.
His plan for the extra hour is precise. He will go to bed at 9.45pm as usual, wake at his usual time, and bank a full sixty minutes of additional rest. He has already drafted his response should the ring score him below 80. It runs to four paragraphs.
‘An extra hour should be a gift. Patients are treating it like an audit.’
Dr Fiona Hargreaves, a consultant in sleep medicine at a hospital in the Midlands, said the pattern was well documented. ‘There is a term for it, orthosomnia. It means becoming so preoccupied with perfect sleep data that you stop sleeping well. I have patients who wake at 4am, see a number, and then cannot get back to sleep because of the number.’
She added that the clock change could make matters worse. ‘The ring will record nine hours and twelve minutes. A calm person would call that a lie-in. A sleepmaxxer will call it an anomaly.’
The other person in the bed
Claire Pilling, 37, a teaching assistant, has not been consulted on the optimisation plan. She is, however, present for all of it.
‘I just want to sleep,’ she said. ‘Last Tuesday he sat up at 3am and asked if I’d felt him go into deep sleep. I said no, Gareth, because I was asleep. He wrote that down.’
She confirmed she will be using the extra hour to lie very still and say nothing.
A poll of 1,100 self-described sleepmaxxers, commissioned by a company that sells mouth tape, found that 62 per cent plan to use the extra hour to ‘optimise’. A further 31 per cent said they would lie awake wondering whether it ‘counts’. The remaining 7 per cent were asleep and could not be reached.
Pilling remains hopeful. He has moved his magnesium window forward by fifty-five minutes to compensate and has set a reminder to review the data at 6.30am, before he has fully woken up.
‘If it says Fine again, I’ll be fine with it,’ he said. His left eye twitched. ‘Probably.’
An NHS spokesperson said the best use of the extra hour was ‘going to bed’.
