Hands up who’s been making an effort to have a good sleep at the moment, only to wake up every morning and still feel exhausted? With all the stress of 2022 life, it’s hardly surprising. Cast your mind back to the height of the pandemic when we were dealing with lockdowns and lucid dreams: a 2020 study by King’s College London found that 52% of women had disrupted sleep during that time. Sleeping more didn’t result in feeling well rested.

Two years on, fear of Covid is still a thing but we’ve got a host of other serious worries to contend with. War in Ukraine, the cost of living crisis, a climate emergency… it’s a lot. And at a time when we could do with a good dose of energy to contend with stressful news, we’re in a perpetual state of tiredness, sleep or no sleep. And that raises the question: are we sleeping properly?

Studies suggest that sleep disruption or deprivation can lead to “increased stress responsivity, somatic pain, reduced quality of life, emotional distress, mood disorders, and cognitive, memory, and performance deficits” in healthy adults. Other studies suggest that a lack of good sleep can lead to an increased risk of certain diseases, from diabetes to heart disease, and can even weaken your immune system. Sleeping well is crucial to our health, wellbeing and stress management; if we don’t feel like we’re getting enough of it, that’s a problem.

Fortunately, there are things we can do to improve the quality of our sleep so that we genuinely do wake up feeling refreshed. To find a solution, however, we first have to investigate the root of the issue.

Feel like you never get enough sleep? Here’s why 8 hours doesn’t feel like it’s enough right now