Men and insomnia: have I finally found the cure?

I have come to the sunny, lazy Dalmatian archipelago to get some rest. Not just a 20-minute snooze on a sunbed after some poolside scrolling, followed by an exhausting three glasses of rosé lunch before being rudely awakened by a splashing kid in the shallow end, the searing afternoon heat and the beginnings of a daytime hangover.
No, I am at the Pharomatiq Wellness resort of Maslina, on the island of Hvar, to enjoy days in the sunshine and successful nights (and afternoons) of deep and delightfully meaningless REM sleep. My goal is not just to have a holiday but to break the habit of an adult lifetime by achieving an eight-hour-straight stretch of unbroken shut-eye — and bringing home techniques that will still work in the somewhat less idyllic environs of west London.
This is long overdue. I can clearly remember the last good night’s sleep I got. It was in 1996, on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, after an endless flight from London, via San Francisco, mostly in coach, across several time zones, to one of the remotest places on earth. When I arrived at my swanky hotel, 2am Polynesian time, I was jet-lagged to trippy disorientation as well as hound-tired from new fatherhood and both-ends candle-burning. I pulled down the blackout blind, drew the curtains, took the phone off the hook, hit the mattress and slept like a hibernating bear, non-stop, for 13 hours straight.
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Since then, almost three decades on, sleep has been fitful and inconsistent. To counteract my chronic circadian arrhythmia, I self-medicate with melatonin, Nurse Malbec and Dr Barbara Sturm’s Good Night capsules (passionflower + valerian root + griffonia seed etc).
At home, my bedroom blind is almost 100 per cent eclipsing, my pillows are duck-feather-and-down delights from Hästens and my mattress cost as much as a car. For special occasions I deploy a Virgin Upper Class eye shade and weld my mouth shut with special black tape called “Hostage” to stop my snoring, which is of a machine-gunning, tractor-like intensity that can wake not just me but everyone else who happens to be in the house. It is at its worst (and loudest) when I sleep on my back. If I sleep on my side I am quieter but I wake up feeling as if I’ve just gone three rounds with Tyson Fury.
I love and crave heavy sleep but I am actually a total lightweight. I wake at the slightest noise — rutting foxes, neighbourly music, rain, people upstairs shagging etc — and at the merest hint of a needy bladder. I am roused, every day, at 4am, mildly traumatised by torrid, lurid dreams and anxious about work, money and life. I pee (sitting down), flail in the duvet, irrigate, then try to drift off again with the aid of earbuds and podcasts — usually something soothing like the Rest Is History boys talking about Hitler or Stalin. I wake again at 7.30am, feeling half-baked.
I am always, alwaystired. Although women are more likely to suffer from insomnia than men — with peak sleep disruption occurring during the menopause — 71 per cent of men struggle to sleep during the night, according to research by the men’s healthcare company Numan. Meanwhile, a YouGov survey of 2,512 men and women in 2022 found that 59 per cent of men regularly wake up feeling tired and almost as many regularly wake during the night. Perhaps this is because men are three times more likely to be diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnoea, according to recent research conducted by the University of Southampton.
The deep irony here is that I am really a very talented get-to-sleeper; an Olympic standard zedder. I can fall asleep anywhere, any time, pretty much to order: trains, planes, cars, fields, beaches, cinemas, churches, buses, auditoriums. When I am WFH, I’ll go down for 20 minutes of post-lunch, sofa siesta bliss, come round and get going again. If I lived in California and didn’t feel quite so sluggish and drowsy afterwards, I’d call these “power naps”.
So, a challenge for the kind Croatians: can the lavender-fragrant staff at the delightful White Lotus-style Maslina spa get me to go down for an uninterrupted eight or nine-hour stretch?
We begin, my fellow sleep-seekers and I, not long after breakfast with a session of yoga nidra. We are under a vast canvas canopy, in a quiet sandy bay. There’s a mat on the floor and somewhere to rest my head. I can smell lavender. Yes, I know it is only two and a half hours since I left my bed but already I am feeling ready for a well-earned lie-down. This is going to be my sort of workout.
I’d never heard of yoga nidra before but apparently it’s quite the thing. With new research reporting that lower sleep quality is associated with anxiety and depressive disorders, yoga nidra’s movements are designed to “reset” the nervous system, its guided meditations inducing a state of consciousness that is somewhere between waking and sleeping.
From a supine, eyes-shut position (my favourite yoga pose, obvs), my Croatian yogi effects a calming tone and counts out a breath-work overture; deep inhalations and even deeper exhales. Then every part and detail of the body is explored and “noticed”.
We deploy what the professional comatose calls the 4-7-8 method. That is, breathe in quietly through your nose for four seconds, hold your breath for seven seconds, exhale audibly and forcibly through your mouth for eight seconds; repeat for a total of four cycles.
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According to the British Heart Foundation, this is a helpful bedtime practice for those who struggle to fall asleep, switching the body out of its sympathetic nervous system (responsible for the “fight or flight” responses felt during anxiety) and activating the parasympathetic nervous system (its “rest and digest” state), which lowers the heart rate and increases feelings of calm. Research confirms this, with those who practise 4-7-8 breathing experiencing an immediate reduction in heart rate and blood pressure, according to a study published in Physiological Reports in 2022.
Tongue position is important here: place the tip on the ridge behind your upper front teeth and keep it there the whole time. Don’t be shy about exhaling through your mouth with a loud(ish) “whoosh, whoosh”. Heading for the z-zone, the jaw and tongue should relax, followed by fingers and thumbs, toes and elbows, ear muscles and eyes. Limbs are made weighty … and I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything else about yoga nidra because, after 15 minutes of the 90-minute session, I drifted off into the light and dreamy sleep of a toddler on a half tab of melatonin. Told you I would be good at this.
Next, a walk to the spa, foraging for lavender from the organic garden to be made into herbal pouches and applied during an Adriatic rejuvenation treatment. Why lavender? First, it is everywhere on Hvar, with huge fields of its bluey-purple flowers waving in the arable distance during the summer. The Romans, who were on the island during the 3rd century, co-opted its antiseptic, soporific qualities and introduced it to us Brits. One of lavender’s main components is linalool, which produces a sedative effect by activating the brain’s GABA receptors and calming the central nervous system.
Naturally, I fall asleep during my hour-long lavender massage and have to be woken up, gowned and guided like an anaesthetised geriatric, into my aromatic lavender bath (one of the two or three I have every day during my stay).
After lunch is a sound bath: we lie on the floor while a healer musician gently bongs a series of gongs. The low-frequency sounds are supposed to engage the parasympathetic nervous system, responsible for slowing down the heart rate, reducing blood pressure and promoting relaxation. Guess what, I fall asleep almost immediately. Solid gong, man.
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This is getting embarrassing. Since waking up this morning I have now had almost three hours of daytime sleep. How the heck am I going to get off when it comes to proper shutdown?
After dinner I head to my room at 10pm. It is still light outside, but with the blackout curtains closed, the picture window shut and the duvet turned temptingly down, I am already feeling sleepy. On advice from the spa, I run myself (yet another) lavender infused bath, and after drying and gowning, dab a few spots of lavender oil on my arm.
I shut down the TV, turn off my phone — putting it in a cupboard out of arm’s reach — and, instead of my usual coffin/cadaver/luge mattress configuration, assume a side-lying position, my slightly elevated head on a lavender pillow. I execute some 4-7-8 deep breaths and begin to “notice” my earlobes and elbows. In five minutes I am fast asleep. Delirious and delicious, deep and sweet-dreamed sleep. Eleven hours later, I wake up, all my sleeping problems finally put to rest.
Five weeks on, having returned to a home bereft of gong baths and lavender rubs, the morning yoga nidra has lapsed (my patio is no match for a calming Adriatric-facing beach) but the breathing exercises, the tongue positioning and the earlobe relaxing have been a revelation. I often find myself sleeping for nine hours at a time, especially at weekends, and I haven’t yet resorted to the help of melatonin or late-night malbec. Even the rude, 4am awakenings are less regular now and more manageable. At that time of the day, instead of night terrors, worry and headaches, I just lie back, take a deep breath and think of Croatia.
Simon Mills was a guest of Maslina Resort, Croatia, maslinaresort.com
Take a few deep breaths, releasing any tension that you might be holding in your jaw and rest your tongue gently against the roof of your mouth.
• Breathe in through your nose for a count of four.• Hold your breath in for a count of seven.• Breathe out through your mouth for a count of eight.• Repeat the process three times — this counts as one round.
The British Heart Foundation recommends up to four rounds for beginners before returning to your normal rhythm of breathing. Take a minute in between each round.