A Literary Prescription for

Insomnia

For the long hours of the night, and the mind that will not switch off.

Insomnia is a particular kind of loneliness. The house is quiet, the day is over, and still the mind keeps working: replaying, rehearsing, worrying at the same few thoughts. The harder you try to sleep, the further it moves away. It is exhausting, and it can feel endless. But the small hours have always been written about, by people who lay awake exactly as you are lying awake now, and there is a strange comfort in that company.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

These come at sleeplessness from different angles: the science of why we sleep, the practical work of teaching a tired body to rest again, and the quieter comfort of writers who know the night from the inside. Some are clear-eyed non-fiction, some are novels to get lost in. None will fix everything by morning, but between them they take some of the fear out of the dark.

Why We Sleep

Matthew Walker · 2017

Walker is a sleep scientist, and this is the book that made a generation take sleep seriously again. He explains, clearly and without alarm, what sleep actually does for the body and mind, and why losing it matters. For the insomniac the value is not guilt but understanding. Once you see sleep as something your body is built to do, the nightly struggle feels less like a personal failing and more like a rhythm that can be coaxed back.

“The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep.”

Say Good Night to Insomnia

Gregg D. Jacobs · 2009

This is the practical one. Jacobs, out of Harvard, sets out the cognitive behavioural programme for insomnia that most sleep clinics now recommend ahead of medication. It is a six-week plan rather than a quick fix, and it asks you to change some habits. But for people who have tried everything else, it offers the thing that helps most: a clear, evidence-based route back to sleeping without pills.

Insomnia

Marina Benjamin · 2018

A short, lyrical book-length essay written from inside the condition, in the drifting, fragmentary way the mind actually moves at night. Benjamin does not offer a cure. She keeps you company instead, turning the sleepless hours into something to think about rather than only to endure. For anyone whose insomnia has a restless, wide-awake, almost creative quality, it reads like recognition.

Wintering

Katherine May · 2020

Not a sleep book as such, but a book about the fallow, difficult seasons of a life, the times when the ordinary machinery stops and you have to learn to rest rather than push through. May writes beautifully about slowing down and giving the body what it needs. For anyone whose sleeplessness sits inside a wider tiredness, it is deeply consoling.

“Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening.”

Sleepless Nights

Elizabeth Hardwick · 1979

A strange, luminous novel that is really a book of memory and wakefulness, written in the associative way thoughts arrive in the dark. There is no plot to keep up with, which is exactly the point. Read a few pages in the small hours and let it carry you sideways, out of your own circling thoughts and into someone else’s.

The Night Watch

Sarah Waters · 2006

A novel told backwards, moving through wartime London in the hours when most people are asleep and a few are wide awake: fire wardens, lovers, insomniacs, the night shift of a city. It is absorbing enough to hold a restless mind, and its whole atmosphere belongs to the small hours. A good companion for anyone who has come to know the night better than they would like.

Poems about insomnia

For the small hours

“To Sleep”

John Keats, 1816

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine.

Keats knew sleeplessness well, and here he does not command sleep so much as court it, speaking to it tenderly, as though gentleness might succeed where effort fails. That is often the truest instruction for the insomniac: stop fighting, and simply make the dark a kinder place to lie in.

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“Come, Sleep! O Sleep”

Sir Philip Sidney, 1591

Come, Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,
Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low.

Four hundred years before the sleep clinic, Sidney lay awake pleading with sleep as though with a reluctant friend. His list of what sleep gives us, peace, release, an even hand between rich and poor, is also a quiet map of everything wakefulness takes away. If nothing else, it proves the small hours are very old company.

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“To Sleep”

William Wordsworth, 1807

A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by,
One after one; the sound of rain, and bees
Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,
Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky.

Wordsworth spends the whole poem trying every trick to fall asleep, the counted sheep, the remembered rain, and confesses none of it has worked for three nights running. There is real comfort in that honesty. Even the great poet of calm lay awake sometimes, cross and tired, waiting for morning like the rest of us.

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“Acquainted with the Night”

Robert Frost, 1928

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.

Frost gives the modern, restless version of sleeplessness: not the poet in bed but the insomniac out walking the dark streets, past the last lit window, keeping company with the night because sleep will not keep company with him. There is loneliness in it, but also a kind of steady acceptance. The night is not the enemy. It is simply something he has come to know.

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Quotes & Prose

Quotes about insomnia to keep

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Sleep is the best meditation.

The Dalai Lama

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O bed! O bed! delicious bed! That heaven upon earth to the weary head.

Thomas Hood

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There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.

Homer, The Odyssey

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The feeling of sleepiness when you are not in bed, and cannot get there, is the meanest feeling in the world.

Edgar Watson Howe

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From Georgia

When the night feels long

A little help for the hours when sleep will not come, and for the daytime practice that slowly makes the nights easier.

Calming Bedtime Meditation for Peaceful Sleep

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A slow, quiet practice to help you let go of the day and settle the body toward sleep. Made for exactly these hours.

Listen Now For Free

The Benefits of Meditation for Healing

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On what a steady meditation practice actually does for the nervous system, and why the calm you build in the day is the calm you can draw on at night.

Read the Essay →

The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations to help you build a calm, steady daily practice, one day at a time.

Start the 21-Day Course →

Questions people ask

Reading for Insomnia

Where should I start?

If you only read one thing, start with Say Good Night to Insomnia by Gregg D. Jacobs. It is built around the cognitive behavioural approach most sleep clinics now use, and it is practical rather than preachy. And if a whole book feels like too much at 3am, scroll to the poems below. Keats’s “To Sleep” can be read in a minute and asks nothing of you.

What can I read when I am too tired and wired to concentrate?

Keep it short and undemanding. Wintering by Katherine May is gentle, seasonal and easy to dip into a few pages at a time. Or begin with the poems and the lines to keep further down the page. You do not have to read in order, or finish anything.

Which quotes about sleep are worth keeping?

Quotes about sleep worth keeping include “Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson), “Sleep is the best meditation.” (the Dalai Lama) and Thomas Hood’s “O bed! O bed! delicious bed!”. You will find these and more in the quotes section above.

Can reading really help with insomnia?

It genuinely can, in two ways. The right book at bedtime gives a racing mind somewhere quiet to rest instead of running the day again. And understanding what sleep actually is, and why it slips away, takes some of the fear out of the small hours, which is often half the problem.

Insomnia

Prescribed reading

For the small hours

Quotes about insomnia to keep

When the night feels long

Reading for Insomnia

Where should I start?

What can I read when I am too tired and wired to concentrate?

Which quotes about sleep are worth keeping?

Can reading really help with insomnia?

More prescriptions await.