My insomnia hell: sleeplessness is a curse – but I think I finally have the answer

Pills, meditation, yoga, sleep restriction … I have tried absolutely everything to get some proper rest. Is the solution actually surprisingly simple?

I am standing in my bedroom in my boxers and a T-shirt, while a man I have just met fiddles with my legs. His name is Parthasarathi, and he’s here with his boss Julius, who has come to set me up for a polysomnogram – AKA a sleep study. Once they have glued electrodes all over my legs, chest and head, and stuck a cannula into my nostrils, and clipped a monitor to one of my fingers, and strapped more electronics to my chest and waist, and trained an infra-red camera on my bed, and given the Guardian’s photographer a good laugh, they’ll be leaving me for the night. Then all this kit will track how long and deeply I am sleeping, how much I am snoring, how twitchy my legs are, how often I get out of bed, whether I talk, walk or … I don’t know, juggle in my sleep, what’s happening to my blood oxygen levels, what my heart’s doing and, crucially, how well I’m breathing.

The answer to that last one turns out to be: not very well. I later learn that I stopped breathing for at least 10 seconds that night – not once, not twice, but 60 times. That’s an average of almost 10 times an hour. What the hell? I think.