How To Sleep Like A Caveman by Merijn van de Laar: Want to beat insomnia? Be more caveman
How To Sleep Like A Caveman by Merijn van de Laar (William Collins £20, 304pp)
How To Sleep Like a Caveman is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Do you sometimes wake up with a jolt from a dream in which you’re falling? According to sleep therapist Merijn van de Laar, in his highly readable new book about how to deal with insomnia, that falling dream might be evolutionary. Before they discovered fire, our earliest human ancestors slept in trees to avoid predators.
That tree-falling fear may still be buried deep inside our subconscious, a catalyst for insomnia.
And if you’re of a certain age, do you frequently find yourself lying awake for two hours in the middle of the night? If so, you should feel proud. You would have been a superhero among cave dwellers.
This is the ‘poorly sleeping grandparents hypothesis’: that our elderly prehistoric ancestors dropped off to sleep earlier in the evening and then woke up in the middle of the night to keep watch, thus helping the tribe to survive.
The Stone Age is very much back in fashion.
Last year Clare Foges’s book The Paleo Life advised us to adjust our lifestyles to be more like cavemen, for a happier, healthier life: low lighting in the evening, lots of protein, sharing childcare with the wider social group, weekly rituals, and a session of daily squatting. Now, in an era when insomnia is on the rise, Van de Laar’s book encourages us to sleep like a caveman – or, at least, if we do lie awake, to lie awake like a caveman.
It’s impossible to know exactly how well or badly our prehistoric ancestors slept. No records remain – apart from the ashes of their beds, which they had to burn in order to kill off the biting insects.
The only way to get close to finding out about their sleeping patterns is to ask today’s last-remaining remote tribes of hunter-gatherers how they sleep (or don’t sleep).
So, pity the Hadza tribe of northern Tanzania, who were just trying to live their peaceful hunter-gatherer lives when a load of scientists descended on them, requesting precise data about their sleeping habits, and measuring their step-count. (The average Hadza tribesman does 19,000 steps a day.)
What all this revealed about their sleep is fascinating – as well as instructive and consoling for insomniacs.
The average Hadza adult is in bed for nine hours each night, but asleep for only six hours and ten minutes, which amounts to almost three hours of wakefulness in the middle of the night. But, crucially, ‘they did not see being awake as a problem’. In the afternoon they might nap for 55 minutes – again, with no guilt.
Other tribes were asked for their sleep data, such as one in Madagascar. There’s no overall rule. In some tribes, they sleep through the night and wake early; in others, they’re in bed for longer, with extended patches of wakefulness.
It’s simply not true (as some historians have claimed) that all of humanity used to have ‘two separate sleeps’ every night until the Industrial Revolution. But the general rule is: hunter-gatherer tribesmen don’t fret about their lack of sleep. The concept of ‘insomnia’ is not in their vocabulary.
We’ve had it drilled into us that ‘eight hours’ is the correct amount of sleep.
Van de Laar makes it clear that 60 per cent of adults sleep for seven hours or less, and 30 per cent for six hours or less – and they’re fine on it. That’s all they need.
‘Creating absurd standards of sleep duration only worsens the problem, because people who sleep badly get frustrated and anxious if they don’t achieve the idealised eight hours,’ he writes. On top of that, we’re bombarded with panic-inducing headlines such as ‘Short sleep leads to earlier death’, bringing on even worse anxiety.
And anxiety is a terrible obstacle to sleep. The tossing and turning so many of us do nowadays, as we lie awake for hours worrying ourselves sick about everything in the world, including our own sleeplessness, is described by Van de Laar as ‘restless wake’.
What we need to practise instead, he writes, and what those tribesmen are good at, is ‘restful wake’.
He asks us to imagine that we are sitting by a camp fire in a clearing in a forest. There are animals all around us, some of them good, some of them bad and dangerous, but the fire will keep them at bay.
We need to look into each of those animals’ eyes in turn, thus seeing off the danger. We need to imagine ourselves in a place of deep safety, focusing on every detail of that safe place.
One tribe of bushmen in northern Namibia sit round the fire telling stories every evening. ‘They let the issues of the day fade with the embers,’ as one witness described it. This, Van de Laar says, is a good start to a restful night.
Not that our cavemen ancestors lived totally healthy lives. Far from it.
Nodding Off: Cartoon caveman Fred Flintstone enjoys a nap
They smoked, drank alcohol, got high on drugs and died young. (The one thing they didn’t do, it seems, was drink caffeinated drinks, even though coffee bushes grew wild in Africa.)
So, there’s no need to romanticise their lives.
But it’s likely their high-protein diets did make for better sleep: surveys show that today’s poor sleepers tend to get their energy more from carbs and fats than protein.
When it comes to his own methods of curing insomnia in his patients, Van de Laar’s strongest recommendation is that we should limit our time in bed. Don’t spend ten hours in bed, hoping to sleep for eight of them, but in fact sleeping only for six. Go to bed two hours later, and get up as soon as the alarm goes off (don’t hit the snooze button).
If you can’t sleep in the middle of the night, get out of bed for 20 minutes and do something useful.
Don’t have a clock anywhere near your bed, and keep your phone out of reach, in another room.
Oh dear – I can see myself going against every single one of those pieces of advice.
But I will heed Van de Laar’s main advice: to stop worrying about not getting enough sleep – and just to chill, like a caveman.