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Journalism of Courage
“Error 404: Sleep not found.” That was the insta message card that changed the life of 31-year-old Karthik Bhaskar, who would scroll his way to dawn, sleep at 5 am and wake up three hours later to be in time for his corporate job. “Being a movie buff, I devoured world cinema in my after-hours. My alertness levels went up, my brain could not wind down, my stress hormone cortisol was dangerously high and my body crashed after my 30th birthday. It turned me into a zombie. I felt disembodied and scared,” he says.
After intense self-help therapies, he now sleeps by 11 pm, goes for a morning run and then heads to office. “All my waking moments are so full and active these days that I fall asleep easily,” says the IIM Bangalore alumni, who has started an online wellness newsletter, ‘Tiny Wins, A Letter from Your Future Self on 0.1 per cent Growth Daily’.
“When it comes to sleep, motivation won’t take you places, discipline will. Discipline cultivates a habit and puts your life on autopilot,” says Bhaskar, who now helps young people restructure their lives, not just their sleep. There are many like him in the ‘vampire’ tribe who are battling sleeplessness, purely because of a habit of their own making, seldom because of an underlying health condition. Like Srigandh Nagaraj, 33, a Bengaluru-based environmental engineer working remotely for a Singapore firm, who had gotten so comfortable with the idea of not sleeping and living life in the moment that he literally woke up after blanking out while driving. “Watching reels is the new smoking,” he says.
Delhi’s Rishabh Chauhan, 27, would feel a workplace high even after two hours of sleep, till he felt cut off in his nocturnal island. Meanwhile in Chennai, Srijata Narayanan, 33, got so addicted to doomscrolling that she developed hyperanxiety.
Indians across age groups are sleeping less. Much of it is driven by habit rather than medical reasons. “Call it a brain pop, when the control centre of the human body is overstimulated and on a high. This has a cascading effect on the heart, gut, hormones and other organs. Then it becomes a vicious cycle of sleep-deficit causing disease and disease causing sleep deficit. Just going by the complaints of my patients, I would say that Indians today are sleeping no more than four hours,” says Dr Vivek Nangia, head of Pulmonology and Sleep Medicine at Delhi’s Max Hospital.
A social media platform, LocalCircles, has found that 61 per cent of Indians reported fewer than six hours of uninterrupted night sleep over the past year. The sleep solutions company, Wakefit, has found that in 2024, about 88 per cent respondents are on their mobile phones before going to bed, and as many as 54 per cent stay up beyond bed time to consume social media and OTT content.
“A lack of mindfulness and respect for oneself,” says Dr Nangia, bluntly. Of all our bodily functions, sleep seems to be the most negotiable, an indulgence rather than a necessity. Worst, in performance-driven lives, it seems like a frivolity. As Nagaraj says, “I, too, felt the pressure of building social accountability. A social media index is like a goalpost, not only for your peers but your friends, too. So you make time for it. Besides, late night is the only time most people can devote to personal freedoms without a stopwatch dangling over their heads. It’s easy to control the last few hours of your day. Two-and-a-half hours on Bengaluru roads, 12- to 14-hour work days, chores and regular activities had pushed sleep lower down my to-do list. I had given up sports, even talked to my five-month baby while driving so that he became familiar with my voice.”
This is what’s called the “revenge bedtime procrastination,” a pop psychology term since 2014, meaning a let-yourself-go moment with electronic device use. This ‘self-command’ mode is actually ‘self-defeatist’ because we do not understand the function of sleep. Dr Viny Kantroo, respiratory and sleep medicine expert at Delhi’s Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, says that one out of every 10 patients she sees has a sleep disorder. “We not only underestimate the value of sleep but its quality. Deeper planes of sleep are required for cell restoration. That’s the time when the body gets rid of toxins, which are inflammatory molecules in the body. Be it diabetes, obesity, heart disease, everything happens from inflammation. It is also the time when metabolic waste is flushed out from the brain, preventing dementia. The nutrient assimilation from the food we eat is incomplete when we sleep poorly,” she explains.
Research has shown that most lifestyle-induced diseases are controlled easily by eating, sleeping and waking up according to the diurnal cycle to which our bodies are programmed. Although compensatory sleep during day time is inevitable for shift workers, it is the night sleep that matters. “Cortisol, your wake-up hormone, is a day hormone.
Melatonin, the sleep-inducing hormone, kicks in during the evening, peaks at 10 pm and starts dipping post 2 am. So when you stay up late, the body and hormones get confused. The cortisol has to reactivate itself while the melatonin doesn’t know if it has to wind down. With continuous suppression, its levels get depleted and you remain sleepless. This also raises levels of ghrelin, your hunger hormone, and makes you raid the refrigerator in the middle of the night, piling up more calories than your body can burn at that hour,” says Dr Kantroo.
Young people have a high metabolism, so they have the energy reserve to sustain wear-and-tear caused by this mad tussle in the body. “My patients are usually in the 15-25 age group, who suppress sleep because of peer pressures and study load for competitive exams. Or in the 30-45 working professional age group. The background noise has happened but is not showing up. That’s why we see young heart attacks, early onset diabetes, hypertension and obesity,” says Dr Kantroo.
Sleep has many stages. The first stage is when you are still aware of your surroundings. The second and third stages are the deeper and restorative sleep, when you are not receptive to the environment. This should ideally last four hours or make up 60 per cent of your sleep, according to Dr Kantroo. The last stage is the rapid eye movement (REM) sleep where dreams happen and memories are consolidated, and should last one-and-a-half hours. If this pattern is broken frequently or crunched into two hours, like Chauhan did at one time, a sudden sleep attack during daytime could happen and can paralyse you. “I would crash without warning and sleep for 16 hours at a stretch after three days of barely sleeping for two hours,” he admits.
Nagaraj got worried when he started snoring, wondering if he had a medical condition like sleep apnea, when airways collapse and shallow breathing disrupts oxygen flow. Though his sleep therapist ruled that out and suggested melatonin supplements for sleep hygiene, he didn’t want to be dependent. He took a tough step, deactivating his social media accounts and signing out of chat applications at a certain hour. “I had to be healthy for my baby. I realised social media was not really knowledge-worthy, there’s always the Internet to refer to. I saved over two hours, slept earlier, woke up earlier and found time for Suryanamaskara. I limited partying, avoided drinking on Fridays. Now on weekends, we go on drives, visit my parents and engage in some real-world socialising. In short, I moderated every indulgence,” says Nagaraj, who claims to have understood his body’s needs like balancing an equation.
Bhaskar, who had pushed his bedtime to 2 am and then to 5 am, had a rude awakening one day when he felt utterly exhausted after climbing a flight of stairs. “I realised I had become a creature of habit. I stopped watching films at 11 pm which would keep me awake till 1 am. I chose reading self-help books like Atomic Habits (2018), which helped me make small changes everyday. I rolled back my sleep time by 15 minutes at first, then half-an-hour. After 60 days, I could sleep by 12.30 am instead of 4 am,” he says. He now dozes off by 11 pm after a light dinner at 8 pm. He deleted video-streaming apps on his phone and reset the time settings to lock apps. “Just make bad habits difficult to access and half the battle is won,” says Bhaskar.
He now has daily conversations with his mother, something he missed earlier as he would wake up late and make a mad dash to work. “I have started the 100-day running challenge with my friends, beginning with 500 metres and hoping to do 10 km a day. Since it is a group project, I know I will commit to it,” says Bhaskar. He even has a checklist, realistically pushing work that’s not a priority to another day and evening out the work pressure over days. His newsletter is a hit and he uses his morning walks to gather feedback.
Chauhan is currently on talk therapy to deal with his deep-seated childhood trauma of his mother’s death, one that kept him awake and made him listless. “I now eat clean and do Vipassana, which helps you bring your mind to the present moment of body awareness. So if your body is tired, the mind will focus on it instead of wandering off, telling you to rest,” he adds. Research by the Department of Science and Technology has shown that Vipassana meditation practitioners transition from light to deep sleep faster and have a longer duration of deep sleep. It can even increase REM sleep states.
Both he and Narayanan are trying out sleep aids like mattresses and pillows made out of memory foam that support the body and help you fall asleep comfortably. Narayanan has taken her sleep hours so seriously that she’s become obsessed with the sleep tracker data on her smartphone. “The first thing I do in the morning is check my sleep quality,” she says.
This addiction is called orthosomnia, something that Dr Suhas HS, sleep medicine expert at Manipal Hospitals, Bengaluru, sees routinely in the IT hub. The problem is sleep trackers only measure your dormant state, not your quality. “Only a clinical study can tell you about heart rate, brainwaves, breath patterns, snoring index and diagnose if your sleep disorder is habitual or medical. Besides, why build up another stress? Just seeing the sun first thing in the day can recharge you,” he says. At least India’s youngsters are trying to find their sweet spot, with or without the sun.
