Surfing a tsunami of tiredness 

“How are you doing?”

“Yeah, good thanks…just tired.”

I don’t know about you, but it feels like I’m having a version of this exchange at least once a day. It seems that everyone I know is genuinely and profoundly knackered.

My friends say it. My postman says it. My teenage son says it. Even my partner, who usually has the energy levels of a Duracell-powered soft toy, grudgingly admits his batteries are drained. 

When did we all become so zonked?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Mainly because I’ve been utterly wiped out for months now – not just sleepy-tired, but in a bone-deep “I could sleep for a thousand years and still need a nap” way.

What’s maddening is I’m getting plenty of shuteye (at least eight hours a night). I’m not burning the candle at both ends. I don’t have a newborn or a particularly demanding social life. And yet, the exhaustion persists.

Last weekend, my partner and I planned a romantic weekend, and I’m ashamed to admit that I slept through half of it. I woke up at 6 pm on Sunday, confused and mortified after sleeping all day. My pesky body had clearly staged an intervention without even consulting me. Rude.

My friendly GP’s response? Welcome to perimenopause, where energy levels freefall and nobody sends a parachute. To be fair, my GP looked pretty knackered herself; hardly surprising when one in three NHS doctors report being so tired that their ability to treat patients is impaired. If the people keeping us alive can barely stay awake, what hope for the rest of us?

Because the truth is everyone seems exhausted. And we can’t all blame it on perimenopause or overworked jobs. This sleep crisis feels collective.

The data backs this up. A recent survey found that us Welsh get the most sleep in the UK, at 6 hours and 38 minutes a night. But we’re still not getting anywhere near enough sleep. The NHS recommends 7 to 9 hours for healthy adults. We’re falling short by at least 20 minutes every single night, and that deficit adds up. Sleep deprivation, according to experts, is becoming normalised.

I reckon it’s partly because our brains simply weren’t designed for the way we live. We evolved to live in small groups and to care about the people in our immediate circle, our village, our tribe. But now? Now we’re expected to carry the emotional weight of everything, everywhere, all at once. War. Climate catastrophe. Political chaos. The cost-of-living crisis. The injustice. The rage. It never ends.

If we can’t switch off, it’s because the world won’t let us. Every notification is a tiny assault on our peace. Every news alert delivers a fresh horror. Every scroll through social media is a reminder of how much suffering exists and how little we can do about it. Our nervous systems weren’t designed for this level of constant, low-level overwhelm.

Is it any wonder we’re exhausted? The miracle is that any of us gets any sleep at all.

And yet, we’ve turned tiredness into something we should be ashamed of, another personal failing to optimise away. My bathroom cabinet groans under the weight of magnesium spray, valerian root, lavender pillow mist, CBD oil and some deeply suspicious-looking gummies that promised to “optimise my sleep architecture” (whatever that means).

Sleep, something humans have been doing successfully for millennia, has become a multi-million-pound industry. We’ve commodified a basic biological function and turned it into something we can fail at so we can be sold the solution. It’s capitalism’s perfect con trick: grind us into the ground, then profit from our exhaustion.

But what if the problem isn’t that we’re doing sleep all wrong? What if it’s everything else that’s wrong?

I recently came across some fascinating research on medieval sleeping patterns. It turns out that our ancestors didn’t sleep in one long stretch, the way we’re told we should. They practiced “biphasic sleep” – going to bed at dusk, waking for a few hours in the middle of the night (for prayer or simply sitting quietly), then returning to sleep until dawn. The period between sleeps was considered a natural, peaceful time for reflection and rest. Imagine!

Today if we wake at 2 am, we panic. We reach for our phones. We scroll. We flood our brains with more information than they can possibly process.

We’re all running on empty, trying to be good parents, good partners, good employees, and good citizens who recycle, vote, and care about the right things. We’re supposed to be productive, present, grateful and mindful while also maintaining boundaries and practicing self-care (which itself has become yet another job on the to-do list).

So what’s the answer? I don’t know. I’m too cream crackered to work it out.

But I do know this: maybe the most radical thing we can do is simply admit we’re tired. Properly, deeply tired. And stop pretending that another early night or different pillow will solve what is fundamentally a problem with how we’re expected to live.

This weekend, we’re off to London for another attempt at that romantic weekend. I’ve spent all week stockpiling sleep like a rest-obsessed squirrel preparing for winter; early nights, no phone after 10pm, the full routine.

When my very patient partner asked what I want to do there, “Stay awake” was my instinctive reply. And that’s romance in your forties, folks: where the bar is so low you could trip over it, but you’re too tired to notice.

Yawn.