BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

Hello, I'm Matthew Price.

This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4.

Every day we ask one big question about one big story.

Today why can't we sleep?

Everything hurts, you know,

everything hurts, you know, headaches have I've had some of the most blinding headaches of my life in the last couple of years and your eyes get very sore, vision goes blurry, your hands and feet go numb for some reason. You know, everything just

starts to, feels like everything is just kind of going into some survival mode. You get memory loss and all your senses are sort of heightened. Every noise is very loud and grating and slices you in half.

We've all had it, that agony when you're awake in the middle of the night, but I really hope you haven't had it as bad as Samantha.

You just feel as if you're going mad, you know, there's a sort of feeling of insanity that comes with it.

We think we know what's going on. We're becoming more distracted, we're told, by work, by screens,

and we're sleeping less a lot less. Insomnia now affects about a third of us in the UK.

The NHS says that adults should sleep for between seven and nine hours a night, but most of us don't achieve that.

And Samantha Harvey knows how sleep can unravel in the blink of an eye.

My insomnia came quite quickly.

She's a novelist who until recently slept soundly.

In a matter of weeks, my sleep is sort of disintegrated almost entirely. So yeah, I went from being a very, very strong

robust sleeper to almost a non-sleeper. After several nights of disrupted sleep, Samantha suddenly had one night where she didn't sleep at all.

It was as if that one night of no sleep kind of opened a door, as if my brain discovered that it could do something or my body discovered it could do something.

It sort of spiraled from there.

What's the longest time you've gone without sleeping? Do you know?

I heard a week on the Monday I took myself off some

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