Thea de Gallier
Published
Breakfast radio DJ Daisy Maskell on her struggle with insomnia.
"The worst symptoms of insomnia for me are isolation and loneliness."
Kiss FM breakfast DJ Daisy Maskell has struggled with her silent, night-time world since childhood. The hours where everyone else was asleep but her chronic insomnia was keeping her awake.
In a new BBC Three documentaryDaisy Maskell: Insomnia and Me, Daisy looks deeper into the sleep disorder that's plagued her since she was nine, and makes a surprising discovery.
'I said insomnia was a benefit to my job'
Insomnia was searched on Google more in 2020 than it ever had been before, according to one study, while another suggested that the number of insomniacs in the UK rose from one in six to one in four, external over the pandemic. As Daisy says: "This film is really timely."
The increase in people talking about insomnia is a reason Daisy herself began to think about her own issue more, and came to making the film.
"I've suffered for such a long time – it's definitely changed over the course of my teenage years," she says.
"It used to be trouble with staying asleep, so I'd wake up really early, and when I got into my teenage years it was more a problem with getting to sleep. When I was at school, I couldn't sleep during the week, but I was able to crash on the weekend.
"As you become an adult and take on more responsibilities, you don't have the space to do that any more. I was running on nothing and not being able to catch up on sleep either because I had other commitments."
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Sometimes, the exhaustion of not sleeping would lead to Daisy cancelling plans, which added to feelings of isolation.
"You can experience very physical effects of insomnia, but for me I've always struggled with more of the mental effects and the knock-on effect it had on my mental health," she says. "That leads to me not wanting to see anyone and cancelling plans."
Being a breakfast show presenter seems a bizarre, or perfect, choice for an insomniac, depending on how you look at it, and Daisy says her job led to her making light of the condition in the past.
"I took over the breakfast show at the start of 2019. When we did press and interviews surrounding me taking over, I look back and cringe now at the fact I used my insomnia and the fact I didn't sleep as a benefit to me taking over that show," she remembers.
"I didn't put enough importance on it, I didn't recognise the ways I was suffering. I definitely used it for my benefit. The field of work I stepped into meant surviving on minimal sleep."
'You can't call in sick because you've had a bad night's sleep'
Another reason she played down the seriousness of her insomnia, she says, was the general narrative around insomnia, and the stereotypes that come with it.
"One of the biggest things I hope for this film is that we raise awareness of the stigma surrounding sleep-related disorders," Daisy says. "Insomnia is usually put down to a lifestyle factor, so either you're up late partying, you're using too much social media, you're up gaming – that's definitely something I've experienced, people blaming me and my lifestyle. Not only does that not validate me and my issues, but it prevents me trying to get help. I've not wanted to go to GPs or therapists in case I'm faced with the same conclusions.
"Every time you Google trouble with sleep you get the top tips for getting to sleep and it can be anything like lighting a candle, using a pillow spray, and that's fine, it can create a relaxing environment but those things weren't helping me and when they were prescribed it was more frustrating than anything."
While Daisy says her employer was "brilliant" on the one occasion she overslept and didn't make it into the studio on time, other people's jobs are less likely to be understanding. "You can't call your boss and say, 'I can't come in today because I had a bad night's sleep,'" she says. "The factors associated with that are laziness, like teenagers sleeping in. It's horrible, it feels like you can't reach out even if you're suffering."
In the documentary, Daisy meets other insomniacs who've faced exactly the kind of misunderstandings she's afraid of. Ruan, a student who approached his tutor when his insomnia started affecting his uni work, describes – somewhat incredulously – his tutor's suggestion: to go and drink some whiskey.
'Childhood trauma carries through to adulthood'
While making the documentary, Daisy realised that her insomnia had its roots elsewhere in her psyche.
"I always felt like my insomnia was a by-product of something else, or a trauma that presents itself as an inability for me to get to sleep, but I pushed it to the back of my mind," says Daisy.
The trauma she talks about is her parents' divorce, which happened around the time her insomnia developed. In the programme, she sees a psychiatrist, and finally has this suspicion confirmed.
While not all people who have insomnia will have suffered serious mental health issues, Daisy - who is a chronic sufferer - says: "It was validating and a breath of fresh air to have a medical professional think of it the same way as I had. The diagnosis of PTSD, as well, was shocking to me – you don't realise you carry the same brain with you for your whole life, and things that affect you in childhood can carry through to adulthood if they're left untreated."
There are other factors at play, too. Daisy reveals she also struggles with an eating disorder, and a brain scan shows her brain while resting is 30% more active than the average person's, meaning it's harder for her to wind down and relax.
For the first time, she was able to look at her insomnia in the context of her overall physical and mental health – and it was this, as well as finding solidarity with other insomniacs, that has helped her sleeping since making the film.
"We were looking at it as a chicken-and-egg scenario tied in with mental health," she says. "Everyone has a different trigger that could affect their sleep."
Organisations offering information and support for some of the issues raised in Daisy Maskell: Insomnia and Me are available here.
