Can’t sleep? How to use insomnia to your advantage

When the author Annabel Abbs’s father died three years ago she was braced for night after sleepless night. Abbs, 59, had endured insomnia — which one in three people in the UK will suffer in their lifetime — “since for ever”. Yet now, tormented with grief, she found that the long hours lying awake were strangely welcome.

“Generally when you can’t sleep you feel desperate because you’re worried you won’t be able to perform the next day,” says Abbs, from Fulham, southwest London. “But weirdly I wanted to be in the dark, to have that time of silence and stillness. My days were filled with admin and caring for others, so nights became my refuge, where I was released from daytime thinking, when I began