Emma Hughes: What it's like to suffer from severe, debilitating insomnia

By the time I graduated, I’d discovered sleeping pills. By registering sneakily with several GPs I was able to maintain a supply of zopiclone, a hypnotic rarely prescribed for any length of time because it’s so addictive. When they ran out, I swallowed anything I could get my hands on, from hay-fever tablets to Night Nurse. More than once, I googled ‘where to buy chloroform’.

‘But you don’t look tired,’ people used to say. And I didn’t. I wore three different blushers (Nars’ Orgasm is an insomniac’s best friend), two concealers and bright lipstick. But I had a permanent, low-level cold. My blood pressure was high. And my skin, underneath all the Bobbi Brown, was like a teenager’s. I even started having hallucinations — one night I watched in horror as my dressing gown waved to me from the back of my door.

Insomnia was eating away at my relationships, too. Boyfriends imagined they could put me to sleep with a kiss like a reverse Sleeping Beauty. I hated disappointing them, so I’d secretly take a sleeping pill after I’d brushed my teeth.

I would then reach for my heavy-duty earplugs, which blocked out virtually all sound — the first time one boyfriend told me he loved me, I missed it. Even with such armoury, I’d toss and turn. I had never lived with a partner and I worried that my insomnia would mean I’d never be able to.

I was also crotchety, paranoid and cried at the drop of a hat.

I’d resigned myself to my fate when, earlier this year, I got a new GP who refused to prescribe any more sleeping pills. As soon as I got home I started hunting for a dodgy online pharmacy that would ship me some zopiclone — and found Sleepio instead. A doctor-designed website and app, it promised to make significant inroads into insomnia in just six weeks.

It couldn’t possibly work for me, I thought, reading the testimonials. Could it?

The first part of the ‘cure’ is behaviour modification. You’re only allowed to use your bed for sleep and sex, and have to turn your phone off at a reasonable time. You also get access to a tailored sleep diary, relaxation MP3s and a ‘thought checker’ that addresses unhelpful thinking patterns.

That all sounded fine. But the second part — sleep restriction — was the stuff of nightmares. Insomniacs spend a lot of time lying awake and worrying.

To correct this, I was told, you need to shrink your in-bed time to a bare minimum; five hours, say. And if you’re not asleep after 20 minutes, you have to get up and read, then try again. For a few days, you might not sleep at all. But eventually, the theory goes, you’ll be so exhausted that you’ll have no choice — which starts to forge a new pathway in your brain. The thought of it made me want to go and lie in the road. But what did I have to lose?

I set my initial ‘sleep window’ from 1am to 6am. At 11pm on the first night I dimmed the lights in the living room, feeling like I was queueing for the guillotine. At 1am I hauled myself off to bed, braced for the worst — but staggeringly, within 15 minutes I was asleep. What’s more, I slept through. When my alarm woke me at 6am I actually punched the air. Rather than dreading going to bed the next night, I was excited to see if the trick would work again. And it did. Having spent nearly half my life chasing after sleep, I’d stopped — and it had come running after me.

‘Those kinds of results aren’t unusual at all,’ Sleepio’s Dr Sophie Bostock told me. ‘The foundation of what we’re doing — cognitive behavioural therapy for insomnia [a treatment that looks at how your thoughts affect your feelings and behaviour] — has been around for 30 years, and more than 70 per cent of patients who do a face-to-face course of it will be able to recover their sleep to healthy levels.

But what’s pretty remarkable is that we’ve shown you can use technology to deliver the same outcomes at a much greater scale.’ For now, Sleepio costs £200 for a year’s access, but there is hope that it could soon be rolled out much more widely, and cheaply, across the NHS.

Five months on, I’m averaging six solid hours. I’ve had the odd bad night, but who doesn’t occasionally? I’ve even managed to share a bed without knocking myself out. These are words I never thought I’d type, but honestly, it’s a dream come true.