"Insomnia is my Mastermind subject”

WHY HADLEY FREEMAN NEEDS TO STARE AT THE WALLPAPER IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

A s a bad sleeper, I am often told that I need to make my bedroom more peaceful. ‘A calming nest’ is a phrase I often hear, with plain walls, no pattern, no distractions, no excitement. Just soothing blankness.

This is nonsense. I may not be able to speak on much with authority, but sleep difficulties are my Mastermind subject and, as such, I can tell you that the one thing a troubled sleeper does not need is a blank wall.

When you find yourself tossing and turning at 2am and sleep feels like a foreign language you were never taught at school, the problem is not that your walls are too patterned, it’s that your mind is dancing around like a chimpanzee on speed.

You need to distract your mind so that it stops generating its own insane thoughts, which then keep you awake. This is the whole thesis behind people reading before they go to sleep and, more commonly, listening to audiobooks or In Our Time on iPlayer (genuinely, in my opinion, the best cure for insomnia ever created.)

It’s also what underlies all those overpriced ‘help you to sleep’ apps, which just consist of someone talking at you through your headphones, so you stop listening to your brain screaming: ‘Remember that email you never replied to? Now everyone hates you! You can’t sleep and you’ll never sleep again and oh god you’ll be so tired in the morning!’ Instead, you listen to a monotoned