Sleep Disturbance Quotes

“For insomniacs, social media is a lifeline, a connection to the rest of the world during those solitary hours of non-sleep. Switching off? Hell, no.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Alcohol, the drug of choice in professional life, puts us to sleep, but then we wake and can't get back to sleep. 'Do you take a nip of whisky or not? Or do you put up with it? There are penalty clauses to all of these sleep-inducers,' [Former Australian Greens Leader Bob Brown] says. I knew this from medical school. It turns on you in the middle of the night.'”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“My mum, her sister and my late grandmother were all nurses. Until fairly recently, nursing was one of the few occupations available to bright Australian women of modest means. Conditioned by years of night duty, sleep - and lack of sleep - was a constant topic of family conversation.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Our smart devices can know more about the quality of our sleep than the people who share our beds.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Unable to sleep and in despair, [former Australian Greens Leader Bob Brown] reflected on previous generations who had lain awake at the witching hour - the soldiers in trenches, the women in the pains of childbirth. He chastises himself for lying awake worrying about being tired the next day, for being anxious about his ability to perform in a maiden speech.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Over the years, putting his [former Australian Greens leader, Bob Brown] anxieties down on paper, and later on iPad, has helped put his sleep worries into context: the absurdity of worrying about the impact of one night without sleep on his performance in the day. On this particular night, 'It made me think about it, about people in the world with much worse situations for whatever reason, who can't sleep', he says. 'And in a way, how absurd, how silly it is that we find ourselves unable to sleep over some immediate discomfort ... [over] anxiety to perform, but that's how it is'.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“As a GP and former parliamentarian, [Former Australian Greens Leader Bob Brown]'s seen the costs of trying to artificially bring on that most basic of human functions. Brown was famously on duty at London's St Mary Abbot's Hospital on 18 September 1970 when Jimi Hendrix, aged twenty-seven, was brought in having died in his sleep after a cocktail of red wine and sleeping pills.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“Some, like [Former Australian Greens Leader] Bob Brown, favour a greater overhaul of the political system, restricting sitting days to normal business hours, and compressing sitting weeks iinto longer blocks of time, allowing parliamentarians and their staff longer uninterrupted periods back in the electorate and at home with family. 'I think it would be better to have four or five full days a week and hav ethe evenings off - all of them,' Brown says. 'If peopel want to, they can have their party-room meetings and inevitable discussions after, but earlier, and have more sleep time at night.'”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep

“A really fun thing to do at 3 a.m. is to google 'the future of sleep' for a glimpse into the dystopian future awaiting us. Sheer horror will keep you awake, but at least you'll be prepared for the revolution when we are all transformed into mindless cyborgs who never sleep.”
― Fleur Anderson, On Sleep