The Bottom Line

There’s a pattern that goes like this: it’s late, given when we’ve got to wake in the morning, but instead of going to bed, we stay up. The next day, of course, we feel sluggish and weary and we promise ourselves an early night. Then it happens again: it’s already midnigh...

At times during this erratic sleep cycle, we feel deeply frustrated: we call ourselves idiots and worse: obviously we need to get to bed early, yet we are too stupid, stubborn and self-sabotaging to do so. And to our profound exhaustion, we add the burden of self-disgust. But our anger at our own...

And even though such lovely associations may not be at the front of our minds, we continue to have a subterranean, but significant, sense that to go to bed early is to miss out on the joys of existence. Our late-night activities might be utterly prosaic but just by being awake into the early hour...

It’s one of the weirdest features of being human: a completely clear sense that how we’re behaving is bad and counter-productive doesn’t get us to stop. Harsh criticism is the utterly entrenched human tactic for getting people to change – just as self-condemnation is our instinctive strategy for ...

For many years, through childhood, night-time seemed immensely exciting. It was a secret, mysterious zone when from our darkroom we might hear the grown-ups laughing around the dinner-party table, talking of things we weren’t supposed to know about and catch, perhaps, the sweet scent of cigar smo...