Before he sought out an adult sleep coach, Thorsten had spent countless hours trawling online advice about sleep.
“I devoured advice and implemented it all,” he said. “From the moment I got out of bed, virtually everything I did was tailored towards getting a good night’s sleep the following night.”
Thorsten is not an insomniac and his disordered sleep patterns came out of nowhere.
“Every few weeks, I’d have inexplicable periods when I would wake up at 4.30am and couldn’t get back to sleep,” he said. “After a couple of days, I would be making mistakes at work, be bad tempered at home and would start seriously worrying about the impact of sleeplessness on my long-term health.”
Increasingly, adults are seeking out one-to-one sleep consultants. Photograph: Mavocado/Getty Images
It was his colleague who suggested he employ a sleep coach. “It was the first I’d heard of sleep coaches for adults but when I asked around, it turned out a load of my colleagues had used one over the past two to three years,” he said. “It was like this hidden world I’d never known existed.”
It seems paradoxical, but at a time when advice is just a click away and “sleep hygiene” is taken as received wisdom, increasing numbers of adults are seeking out one-to-one sleep consultants.
Stuart Thompson, founder of the Still Method, started his sleep consultancy for adults two years ago in response to demand.
“I was getting so many adults asking me for sleep training that I realised there was a new and real need that was not being catered for,” he said.
“I’d never seen people like this before: a cohort who had never struggled with sleep previously but were unable to help themselves, despite spending considerable time researching all tricks of the trade, as regards achieving consistent, quality sleep,” he said.
Thompson had his lightbulb moment when he began talking to his new clients about their efforts to go it alone. “I realised they were drowning in too much information,” he said.
Tailored help wasn’t optional for these people, said Thompson; it was a necessity.
Katie Fischer, a sleep consultant in London, has also seen business boom in the last two to three years.
Katie Fischer has seen business boom in the last two to three years. Photograph: Supplied image
“People come to me saying: ‘I’ve got perfect sleep hygiene; I do everything right but I’m still not sleeping.’ That’s where a sleep coach comes in,” she said. “We help them cut through the online ocean of advice – much of which is not professionally underpinned – and understand their unique patterns and needs.”
Sleep coaches might have started as a luxury reserved for newborns. But Fischer said things had changed: “Now we’re seeing everyone from shift workers to executives, all struggling to sleep,” she said.
Kerry Davies, known as the Sleep Fixer, said that while sleep coaches for adults might seem to be an indulgence, many people needed an intense focus to break the cycle.
“Sleep coaches look at client’s whole 24 hours – habits, mindsets, daily stressors,” she said.
Davies encourages clients to step away not just from online advice but also to strip off the wearables. “Sleep trackers often increase anxiety, which only makes things worse,” she said.
UK data shows the scale of the problem: the average adult reports just three days a week of good-quality sleep, with 14% saying they don’t get enough to function on any day – and 38% experiencing mental health impacts at least weekly.
Amy Cheseldine of the Good Sleep Method said that personal coaches succeed because they hold clients to account. “People often understand what to do but fail to apply it consistently – or they do loads of thing but miss the one small thing that will really help,” she said.
“Coaches also adapt plans to real life – shift work, caregiving, stress. Online advice can’t do that,” she added.
Advice online generally focuses on generic sleep hygiene but, said Fischer, misinformation could often be the real culprit.
Sleep coaches see their clients for an average of four sessions. Photograph: Posed by model; Andrii Lysenko/Getty Images
She lists common examples of advice that does more harm than good: the insistence that everyone needs eight hours’ sleep, for example. Or that if you’re struggling to sleep, an early bedtime will help. She also says that people unnecessarily cut things out of their lives that they enjoy: caffeine, she said, is not universally harmful to sleep; blue light doesn’t prevent sleep if what you’re reading or watching is calming.
Sleep coaches see their clients for an average of four sessions. But Thorsten only needed one: “It took just one session with a coach to realise I was simply going to bed too early,” he said.
“I now understand that I only need seven hours of sleep a night, so if I go to bed at 10pm, I’m going to have a disturbed night or I’m going to wake up in the early hours,” he said. “I needed a later bedtime. It really was that simple.”
