Insomnia, Alain de Botton, School of Life Staff

Not being able to sleep is deeply frightening. We panic about our ability to cope with the demands of the next day; we panic that we are panicking; the possibility of sleep recedes ever further as the clock counts down to another exhausted, irritable dawn. Our societies have learnt to treat insomnia with the best applied discipline we know: medicine - in particular, with pills power