Why TV Gets Sleep So Wrong

Is TV simply reflecting how poor we are at educating people about sleep at scale, or is there something about television itself that means it can never quite get sleep right?

“Watched it, felt patronised.”

That was the message from Ian, who works with me at Sleepunity, after watching Channel 5’s Britain’s Best Mattress documentary.

Others have since passed comment on both that and Channel 4’s How To Sleep Better with Denise Van Outen. The general feeling was similar, cheery in tone, prescriptive in approach, and at times uncomfortably close to making light of poor sleepers rather than helping them.

And they are not wrong.

Ian is always a useful sounding board on this sort of thing. He is not a sleep expert and he does not come with preconceived ideas about sleep. Like me, he is compassionately blunt, and that is useful, because he reflects what a lot of people think at a mass population level.

It seems to be that within a single series, sometimes even within a single episode, everything feels crammed in.

So it raises a bigger question.

Why does TV get sleep so wrong?

But before we delve into that, here are the stories that have caught my eye this week…..

🛌 Sleep This Week

🧠 Sleep “Brain Age” Linked to Dementia Risk

New research suggests sleep data can be used to estimate “brain age”, with gaps linked to increased dementia risk.

Sleep isn’t just recovery, it may be one of our earliest warning systems for long-term brain health.

💡Lighting Used as a Sleep and Mental Health Intervention

Researchers in Norway are using blue-depleted lighting in psychiatric wards to improve sleep and stabilise circadian rhythms.

A reminder that sometimes the most effective sleep intervention isn’t a product, it’s the environment.

🧠 Cognitive Shuffling: A Practical Tool for Switching Off

The BBC takes a deep dive into “cognitive shuffling”, a technique that uses random, low-stakes thoughts to help the brain drift into sleep.

It’s one I use a lot with poor sleepers, simple, practical, and often surprisingly effective.

⚽ Football Workload, Recovery and the Role of Sleep

A post from Ilkay Gündoğan highlights the relentless demands of elite football and fixture congestion.

You do wonder whether more sleep expertise could help teams balance performance and player health.

💊 Sleep Apnoea Pill or Just Keeping You Awake?

Discussion around AD109, a new sleep apnoea drug, raises questions about whether it treats the condition or simply masks symptoms.

As Vik Veer points out, are we solving apnoea, or just making people more alert while it happens?

Back to the longer read….

The Three P’s Problem

Very early on, you can see a familiar pattern.

A lot of TV sleep advice breaks what I would call the three P’s of poor sleep advice.

It becomes patronising, in tone as much as content. It becomes prescriptive, follow these rules, do this, avoid that, often presented as golden rules. And it becomes privileged.

Take a classic example, getting up in the middle of the night.

That might be helpful for some people. But for others, it is not realistic. They may not have another room to go to. They may have caring responsibilities. They may be disabled, and leaving the bedroom in the middle of the night is not simple.

It is not that simple, and we do not need to leave the room to drop our heart rate and relax. That advice is a tip, while what we need to give is an understanding of what we want our brain and body to do.

Is It TV, Or Something Bigger?

There is a temptation to say the problem is television itself. It needs pace, resolution, something to happen. Sleep is slow, internal, and largely invisible.

But TV loves sleep disorders because they are sleep issues with action, with movement, and often very loud noise.

So it is not necessarily television that is the problem. To me it feels like a broader sleep education issue.

We default to prescriptive advice because it is easy to communicate. But it does not help people understand what is actually going on.

Reducing Sleep To Disorders

You see it very quickly in how sleep gets reduced to disorders on TV.

We move straight to sleep apnoea, insomnia, narcolepsy, parasomnias such as sleep walking or sexsomnia, and things like restless legs or PLMD.

These conditions are complex, misunderstood, and need to be explained properly, in an engaging way.

But most people who struggle with sleep do not have a sleep disorder.

I would much rather see a format where episodes are built around different versions of poor sleep. One on school start times, one on shift work, one on menopause, one on sleep disorders. Do each of them properly.

Instead, we try to cover everything at once, and very little lands.

A Wider Sleep Education Problem

I see the same pattern outside of television.

Only this week I was with a corporate client who had brought in academic experts. The feedback from staff was that it was jargon heavy, difficult to engage with, and quickly moved into sleep apnoea and insomnia.

That is not a television problem. That is a sleep education problem.

It is driven by those who deal with specific issues or research, not those of us coaching and working with poor sleepers every day, who see a whole host of different issues playing out at once.

Good coaching helps people understand the triggers of their poor sleep. TV could be a far better sleep coach than it currently is.

What I Learned From TV

I should declare an interest here.

Nearly nine years ago I was one of four experts on Channel 4’s Secrets of Sleep. Three episodes, twelve contributors.

It was a programme with good intentions, developed by some passionate people, with experts at the top of their game.

But it showed me what was missing.

Story.

We focused too much on treatment and not enough on the person. Too many contributors, too little time. Twelve people across three episodes meant the viewer never really connected.

To be blunt, they did not care about the contributors.

And when you do not care, you do not watch. And when people do not watch, a second season is not commissioned.

I still speak to production companies at least twice a year about sleep related ideas. They are always interested, but very little ever makes it through.

Watching the Denise Van Outen programme felt very similar, even down to the format, but a lot more crammed. One episode, five contributors, three focus areas, chronic insomnia, sleep apnoea and nutrition, with a short section on teenagers.

Even there, no mention of how school start times work against teenage biology, but plenty of focus on behaviour.

Again, too much, too quickly.

Surface Level Advice

There is also a more practical issue with what is actually delivered.

In reality, the Denise Van Outen programme was general and no more useful than taking a few minutes reading an article online.

There was very little on how to access support through the NHS, particularly for something like sleep apnoea, where the pathway and the treatment options really matter.

That is a missed opportunity.

What Good Looks Like

Formats that do work take a coaching approach.

Supernanny is a good example. Jo Frost builds a relationship with the child and the parent in a way that experts often do not with poor sleepers on these programmes.

You are invested, you feel something, you are engaged, and you will be listening and learning.

Sleep has not found that format yet.

The Mattress Problem

The mattress programme is another example of where things stay at the surface.

It talked about mattresses being important, but did not really explain why. It mentioned that memory foam can sleep hotter, but did not explain that foam is an insulator and how that affects temperature regulation.

There was no Goldilocks test to check support. No clear demonstration of someone on the wrong mattress and what that does to their body.

No discussion about not sleeping on your front. No mention of how an adjustable bed could help with snoring or help when using CPAP.

And no real emphasis on the fact that your mattress, your pillow, and your duvet are the foundation of your sleep.

So again, it becomes general rather than useful.

The Insomnia Segment

The same applies to the insomnia segment on the Denise Van Outen programme.

CBT I was referenced. Steph, who delivered that part, is an excellent practitioner and very experienced in helping people with chronic insomnia. She was also on Secrets of Sleep.

But what we see is always a simplified version.

What we do not see is that the contributor will have had incredibly intensive support, one to one coaching, and a level of input that most people will never receive.

So it comes across as a case of just following the golden rules in a linear way, rather than the reality of sleep coaching, which is uneven, frustrating at times, and requires adjustment.

If it had been a more Supernanny style format, we would have been able to see that journey and understand what we actually needed to do.

The Bit We Never See

There is also the issue of tone.

There is often a slightly light, slightly amused feel to these programmes.

But there is nothing more lonely than being awake at night when everyone else is asleep.

We never see that side of poor sleep on these programmes.

So What Needs To Change?

Sleep cannot deliver what television wants unless the focus shifts to story and to the whole person. And that is not just a problem for TV, it is a problem for how we educate people about sleep more broadly.

Until we move away from cramming everything in, from prescriptive advice, and from trying to fix sleep in isolation, we will keep missing the point.

TV gets sleep wrong because it treats sleep as something to show, rather than something to understand.

Over To You

Where do you think TV gets sleep wrong?

And what is the best sleep programme you have seen, if there is one?