Why Can't We Sleep?

One in four adults sleeps badly. Sleeping pill prescriptions have increased dramatically over the last three decades, and our bookshelves and browser histories are littered with experts promising to ‘fix’ our insomnia.

But is this so-called sleep crisis anything new? Our relationship to sleep has always been irregular and changeable, variously shaped by social conventions, commercial imperatives, and personal psychologies. Look beneath the headlines, and it seems there is no such thin…