In this week’s Sleep Diaries, a 31-year-old solicitor wonders what the long-term effects of heading to bed after midnight might be,

A little about me:

Age: 31
Occupation: Solicitor
Number of hours sleep I get each night: 7 (in lockdown, 6 hours pre-Covid)
Number of hours sleep I wish I got each night: 8
Any officially diagnosed sleep-related problems: I have not officially been diagnosed, but struggle to get to sleep almost every night and some nights get very little sleep due to nightmares and infrequent sleep paralysis. I’m supposed to sleep with a mouth guard as I seem to chew the inside of my cheeks in my sleep, too!
How much water I drink on average per day: 2-3 litres
How much exercise I do on average per week: 9 hours (20 mins Pilates weekday mornings, 1 hour walk weekday evenings, more walking at the weekend and the odd swim outside in the local lido while it’s still relatively warm). Pre lockdown was much more regularly swimming and far more walking during commuting!

Day 1

I am an alarm setter and I have 6 different alarms ranging from 7am – 8.30am. I know this is probably a terrible habit and it seems to have grown from my usual 4 pre lockdown. I’m not a morning person at all and I am always worried I’ll sleep in on a Monday. I get up at 8.30am and have a shower. I’m pretty tired because I still get the weird Sunday night can’t sleep feeling, even in lockdown, and I didn’t fall asleep until about 2am the night before.

I eat my breakfast while whizzing through the weekend’s emails before our weekly Monday morning team catch up on Zoom and try and get a structure for my week by dividing up the big tasks over the days of the week. It’s a busy week ahead because I just settled a case and I am tying up all the loose ends with the Court remotely over the internet.

“Is it really so bad to go to bed late?” – a sleep expert answers your questions