To sleep, perchance to dream

Picture: Royal Philips

If there was one commodity, one seemingly luxury item, I could guarantee myself every single day of the week it would be a good night's sleep. But, as I progress through the novice slopes of my 50s, a night where I'm out at 11 and awake again next morning, unbroken, appears as elusive as a sane resolution to Brexit.

I can, so my girlfriend attests, go to sleep quite quickly after head hits pillow, but it is rarely the last movement before waking again at the preferred hour. Not wishing to take things too far into unpleasantness, there is usually at least one trip to the smallest room in the house, before returning to, apparently, slumber. Travel isn’t helping. By the end of this month I will have travelled to Barcelona, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Rome, Zurich, Milan and Lausanne (having dodged brief visits - and long flights - to Tel Aviv and Dubai), with individual overnight hotel stays in each city. Sounds luxurious (and in the case of Barcelona, possibly the best hotel bed I’ve ever had the pleasure to snuggle up in), but, alas, not a solid night's sleep in any. No matter how Egyptian the cotton, or how high the thread count, I just can’t relax. Travel weariness might catch up with me, conking me out for an hour or two at a time, but I’m too easily awake, briefly, searching for the optimum sleeping position (a choice of: 1. on my right flank; 2. my back; or 3. my left flank). It's not insomnia per se, just a lack of proper, deep, uninterrupted, out-for-the-count, lost-in-the-depths-of-Bedfordshire, giving it the full Z, sleep. Over-the-counter sleep aids bought easily in American supermarkets don’t seem to help, either, even contributing to the frustration of sleeplessness by being ineffective. You just lie there thinking about the pills you’ve taken, rather than being blissfully asleep.

So, in this month of almost perpetual takeoffs and landings, check-ins and check-outs, and a generally disturbed pattern to my nocturnal doings, it’s somewhat ironic that today should be World Sleep Day. Yep, there's one of them, too (though I have to confess that I’m a little more excited about Record Store Day next month). To mark this day-of-days, my former employer, Philips - which is less about consumer electronics, these days, than healthcare - has published the findings of a global study into sleeping habits, and not of the usual "he hogs the duvet/she takes up too much of the bed” kind.

Surveying adults in 12 countries to see how they feel about sleep, the results come worryingly close to my own sleep issues, showing that people are increasingly concerned about the impact on their health caused by poor sleep, but also their frustrations at the pursuit of a quality night's kip. Though not giving an immediate explanation for the finding, Philips reports that 44% of adults say their sleep has worsened in the last five years. The obvious culprit may well be the use of smartphones and tablets close to lights-out, a point of blame recently cited as the reason for sleep issues amongst teenagers, due to the blue light such devices emit which strongly inhibits the production of the sleep hormone melatonin. Addiction to such devices isn't, however, limited to teenagers.

Getting off to sleep is one thing, but the quality - and therefore, restorative effects of good sleep is another thing. Eight out of ten adults would like to improve their sleep, according to the Philips study, with 77% recognising that sleep has an enormous impact on general health, including a growing awareness of chronic sleep problems and sleep deprivation and a high correlation to medical conditions such as depression, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, neurocognitive disease and even cancer. More than three-quarters of those surveyed said that at least one recognisable condition impacted their sleep, be it insomnia (37%) or snoring (29%).

So, as my month of almost perpetual motion continues, I'll try and apply these top tips from New York-based sleep therapist Dr. Ross Levin: 

• Limit alcohol consumption.
• Give yourself at least an hour to wind down before going to bed.
• Disconnect from electronics and keep them out of the bedroom.
• Keep regular sleep/rise times within an hour day to day.
• Never cancel social/work obligations in anticipation of staying up late.
• Keep a sleep diary.
• Get morning sunlight.
• What you think about during the day affects how you sleep at night.
• Try not to obsess about your sleep – people who don’t sleep well think about sleep all day long. People without sleep problems just go to sleep.
• Talk to your doctor if you’re concerned about a sleep disorder.

Night-night.

Smartphone zombies - the modern urban nightmare

Because, probably, it interferes with its nation's world-renown public transport punctuality, the German city of Augsburg has come up with a clever way to stop people getting inconveniently hit by trams when crossing roads while glued to their smartphones. The city, which lies some 50 miles north-west of Munich, is trialling the use of red LEDs embedded into the ground on pedestrian crossings which flash when a tram is approaching. "It creates a whole new level of attention," an Augsburg city spokesman told the German news organisation N-TV.

According to the DEKRA Accident Research institute, 17 per cent of people on European streets use their smartphones in road traffic. One of DEKRA's researchers, Clemens Klinke, said one incident in Stockholm made a particular impression. "A young girl stood in the middle of the road, got her phone out and started texting," he told the Daily Telegraph. "It wasn’t until a bus driver sounded his horn that she realised where she was standing." Sadly, a 15-year-old in Munich wasn't so lucky last month, killed by a tram while crossing a road wearing headphones and looking at her phone.

Tragic as that was, it is sadly a symptom of the mindless attachment we have to our smartphones, and the equally mindless distraction it causes. Germans even now have a word for it - "smombies". How often do you have to step out of the way because someone is walking towards you more interested in their call or texting than looking where they're going? That might merely be an annoyance, but when people get killed by ignoring basic road safety, then being glued to a smartphone on the street is not so smart.

The smartphone has become the indispensible tool of our age. We can't go anywhere without it, we can't sit down to dinner without having one at hand, and have even started to lose our basic navigation skills because of our reliance on phone-based navigation apps. I've posted before on how anti-social phones have become, but the fact that a German city needs to install flashing lights in addition to the skill we're all taught as children of looking both ways before we cross a road, over-reliance on phones is becoming a public safety nuisance too.

The part that worries me the most, however, is how smartphones cut people off from the world, oblivious to it, others and things (trams included). For as long as I've been commuting to work, the "personal stereo" has been a blessing and a curse - a comfort to shut out the frequent horrors of overcrowded public transport, a nightmare when it involves hissy music leaking from headphones. Last week I briefly returned to commuting in London after a 17-year break, and noted how, with standing room-only on the 0711 to Waterloo, everyone to a man and woman was hunched over a smartphone, idly thumbing through e-mails or tweets or Candy Crush or whatever it was that they were doing. At least, though, they weren't getting in anyone's way.

But walk down a busy street, however, and it's impossible not to get stuck behind a zombie texter, or have your progress climbing stairs after getting off an underground train impeded by some idiot desperate to refresh their inbox as soon as a whisp of reception can be attained. Here is where the Chinese had a capital idea two years ago: the city of Chongqing became the first place in the world to create a dedicated walking lane for pedestrians hooked to their phones, with 100ft of pavement was marked with special paint and the sign "cellphone" for those wishing to dawdle along with their devices, and another "no cellphones" pathway for those wishing to go about their business freely.

In tech-mad Tokyo the problem is even more acute. The notorious melee of people traversing the pedestrian crossing at Shibuya Station has become even more hazardous due to the hundreds of people paying more attention to their phones than those around them. According to a report by the AFP news agency, incidents in Tokyo involving pedestrians or cyclists account for 41% of all phone-related accidents. Some 122 people were taken to hospital between 2009 and 2013 as a result of accidents caused by pedestrians using mobile phones.

That a teenager in Munich should have been killed by not seeing a tram coming is, sadly, no surprise. The Japanese mobile operator NTT Docomo conducted research into safe use of smartphones and found that the average field of vision while staring down at one is just 5% of the normal view. Using computer simulation, NTT found that, based on an average of 1500 people on the Shibuya crosswalk at any given time, if they were all looking at their phones there would be 446 collisions, 103 falling to the floor and 21 phones being dropped.

As someone who spends most of his travelling life plugged into his iPhone listening to music and podcasts, I'm as guilty as anyone in any of these cities for shutting out the world. But I do at least reserve a little - some might say smugly so - awareness of when I'm inconveniencing others. Because nothing you read, hear or watch on your smartphone should be worth putting your life at risk. Should it?