You have to pity Labour’s Lord Young. At approximately half past nine on Monday night, just a few minutes into a sparsely attended second chamber debate about genetic modification, the 79-year-old peer succumbed to the effects of tiredness. Slumping to the side, with his head back and his jaw open, he remained there, deep in a state of blissful slumber, until the doorkeeper discreetly nudged him awake.
However, this isn’t why Lord Young deserves our pity. No, he deserves our pity because he got caught. When the time came for him to contribute to the debate, he stood up — hair slightly matted, tie slightly askew — and got only a handful of words out before the government whip Lady Bloomfield butted in. “I am afraid the noble lord was fast asleep for the entirety of the minister’s opening speech,” she told the House, like a massive snitch. And then she promptly banned him from taking part in the rest of the debate.
Lord Young has done what anyone would in this situation and denied it, claiming he was merely resting his ear against a speaker.
Either way, you can relate, can’t you? Only a person with an inhuman level of self-control could manage to go their entire life without drifting off somewhere they shouldn’t. I know I certainly haven’t. Like Lord Young, I am an inveterate napper. Luckily I work from home, so it’s rare that I get caught. However, it has not always been this way. I might be one of the only people, for instance, who has fallen asleep in a classroom both as a pupil and as a teacher. The glares you get as the latter are far worse.
In my defence, it happened only once. I was teaching English in Seoul. It was an especially warm, airless summer’s day. I had slacked off a little by setting the children the task of drawing. And, crucially, I had a whopper of a hangover. So I decided to rest my head on my desk for just a second, only to be awoken some time later by an incredulous cry of, “Teacher?!” from one of my pupils, staring at me with a look of bafflement and horror on his face.
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“If you are sleepy, then sleep will take any opportunity to occur,” says Neil Stanley, author of How to Sleep Well. “It tends to happen when you are in a low-stress, low-stimulus environment,” he adds, accurately describing a quiet office, a classroom and (quite possibly) the House of Lords, with its soft seats, low-level burble and subsidised bar.
So what of Lord Young? What could possibly have caused him to drift off so ignominiously? The sleep scientist Sophie Bostock suggests it may be down to adenosine, a molecule that builds up throughout the day, causing drowsiness. This naturally sleep-inducing chemical is so effective that it is undergoing trials as an insomnia treatment.
Some of us, though, struggle to keep our natural reserves at bay. “Some people use caffeine to block the effects of adenosine,” says Bostock. “But when it wears off you can get hit by the wall of adenosine that’s built up in the background.”
Another theory of Bostock’s is that Lord Young’s inappropriate tiredness might stem from sleep apnoea. “This is when you temporarily pause in breathing during the night,” she explains. “It’s often associated with snoring. And it’s usually because the tissue in the palate or the tongue falls and blocks the airway. What happens is the brain recognises the oxygen levels are low and triggers a large breath. But this also triggers you out of deep sleep.”
People suffering from sleep apnoea can have 200 of these micro-arousals a night, she says, which keeps them in a permanently light sleep, meaning they are often tired throughout the next day. Is there a specific demographic that sleep apnoea likes to target? According to the experts, it is overwhelmingly males who suffer, which perhaps explains why we so rarely see female politicians asleep in the House.
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“Other risk factors include being over the age of 50, having a high BMI and having a large neck circumference,” Bostock adds. Which — not to unduly categorise anyone — does seem to describe Lord Young perfectly.
Luckily, if this is the case, help is at hand. “I contacted some researchers who have done some studies that showed that, by practising certain exercises to strengthen the muscles in your tongue and throat for eight weeks, if you have mild to moderate sleep apnoea, then it can actually cure you,” says Bostock. She points to the YouTube videos of the ear, nose and throat consultant Vik Veer as a way of finding out more about these exercises. Perhaps there’s hope for Lord Young.
