The Sleep Doctor Who Can't Sleep: An Interview with Dr Amara Kell
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For twenty years she has helped nurses, pilots and students sleep better. By her own admission, Dr Amara Kell is a terrible sleeper herself.
Dr Amara Kell has spent twenty years running a sleep clinic in the northern city of Brannock, where she has treated everyone from night-shift nurses to retired pilots. She is, by her own admission, a terrible sleeper. We spoke at seven in the morning, which she insisted was her best hour.
Q: Is it true you have insomnia?
A: Mild, but yes. I wish I could say it makes me more sympathetic. Mostly it makes me irritable at conferences.
Q: What do patients misunderstand most about sleep?
A: They treat it like a light switch. I wish people would stop thinking of it as something you can force. Sleep is shy: the harder you chase it, the further it runs.
Q: You said sleep is shy. What does that mean in practice?
A: It means you stop trying. You get up, read something boring in dim light, and go back to bed only when you're yawning. Patients hate this advice. They wish I'd given them a pill instead.
Q: Do phones really ruin sleep, as everyone says?
A: Less than people think, and more than they'd like. It isn't the light so much as the conversation that never ends. I wish my patients would leave their phones in the kitchen, just once, and see what happens.
Q: Is there anything you regret, professionally?
A: I wish I had spent less of my first ten years telling people to buy gadgets, and more of it asking them what they were worried about. If only someone had told me back then that most insomnia is really an unfinished conversation.
Q: And your own sleep?
A: Last night? Four hours. I lay awake thinking about this interview. If only I followed my own advice.