I had extreme insomnia and barely slept for nine months after my career fell apart. It left me in agony but I finally cured it

It's 4am. But rather than being snuggled under my duvet, gently drifting through ­soothing dreams, I'm sitting bolt upright in bed. I've wandered to and from my sofa ­countless times. I've aimlessly opened and closed the fridge, then peered through my French doors to be eyed suspiciously by a fox. I don't blame its annoyance at sharing this ­solitary hour with me. I'm thoroughly annoyed myself.

Yet when I return to my dark, shuttered bedroom, collapsing exhausted on to my bed, the one thing I crave refuses to appear. Sleep. My body aches, longs and screams for it. But it has been weeks since I slept – and that is no exaggeration.

For roughly nine months, in 2022, I barely slept at all. This was no brief period of insomnia, like that ­suffered by one in three of the UK population. It wasn't 'troubled sleep' or the occasional rough night. No, this was full-on, wide-eyed sleeplessness, the kind that could drive a person mad and their life out of control.

I've never craved a 'conventional' life. When everyone at school was choosing universities, I decided I wanted to be an actress. When most of my girlfriends were getting ­married and having kids in their 20s, I wanted adventures and other life experiences.

Not all of these 'plans' worked out – I didn't become an actress, but went to Oxford instead. I eventually worked as a broadcast journalist and news producer for the BBC and ITN before, aged 37, I quit my full-time job to go freelance. Back then, I seemed to have the golden touch. I was earning more money, had a better work-life balance and had fallen into the glamorous world of travel journalism.

Before I knew it, I was jetting around the world presenting films for Sky TV and writing for national newspapers. From having lunch on a submarine in the Caribbean one week to meeting foreign royalty the next, I couldn't believe how well my life had turned out.

OK, I had not landed the handsome husband, big house and 2.5 kids, but a life of freedom and endless luxurious adventures – to me – seemed like a ­bigger win.

Then Covid threw a massive spanner in the works.

Planes were grounded, trips were cancelled and the four walls of my one-bedroom flat in West London suddenly became mind-numbingly familiar. However, it did give me a surprise bonus: routine.

I would wake at 7am, do yoga, work for eight hours, play my long-neglected piano, have a hot bath then sleep soundly until the following morning, when I'd start the routine all over again. I've always been fond of rituals and my 'new normal' brought with it a sense of contentment and control. Plus it helped me do the one thing I'd always struggled to do: sleep.

Not that it lasted long. Within weeks of the world opening up again, I was being asked to hop on a plane and jump in front of a camera on little to no jet-lagged sleep. Back in the UK, the invitations to drinks and parties floooded in.

As I embraced my old life, I quickly lost touch with my new-found sleep skill. I just couldn't do it any more. With every new offer of an exciting work project or a fun social event, the pressure to get a good night's rest beforehand would build.

And then I'd find myself lying awake all night, regularly without so much as a minute's sleep. It was as if my subconscious wanted me so ready for the next day it put me on high alert, keeping me in a constant state of flight or flight. The type of insomnia that no amount of breathing exercises or getting up to read for an hour would cut through.

It also didn't help that the building work in the flat above mine was so excruciating that neighbours at the other end of the street were complaining. So there was no chance of getting back into my yoga routine or 'catching up' on sleep during the day. My lockdown ­sanctuary had been shattered and I was spiralling into crisis. Fast.

It didn't take long for my lack of sleep to affect me mentally. My ­torment felt visceral, terrifying, like something was coming after me. I even named it 'The Thing'.

Every day I'd try something to make the insomnia stop: hot baths, valerian and melatonin capsules, magnesium lotions and even mouth tape, to encourage deeper nasal breath to help relax me to oblivion. But everything I did just seemed to make things worse. As a psychiatrist later explained: 'Trying to sleep is like trying to push a football into water. The harder you push, the more it fights back.'

Since insomnia had previously rarely plagued me for longer than a fortnight, I began to mark milestones in my diary for when I ought to have cracked it. That relaxing weekend in Barcelona with some friends ought to do it, I thought.

Yet when I turned up to the airport, it was after a run of five sleepless nights and I was quite deranged with it. Far from chilling out, I spent the weekend in a state of desperate, fanatical anxiety about my sleep problem and came home worse than ever.

I even sought ­refuge at my ­parents' house, in the Staffordshire countryside, to try to 'fix' myself – but the result was just two nights' sleep in an entire fortnight. I felt (and had started to behave) like I was going mad.

By this point, I believed my body had stopped making the sleep ­hormone melatonin and forgotten how to sleep altogether. I spoke to numerous doctors and, at the end of my tether, even called 111. But always the general advice was to speak to a therapist and 'get to the root of the problem'.

Sleeping tablets would make the situation worse, I was told, even though my most profound desire was someone or something to ­simply knock me out. I was trapped in a cruel vicious circle.

The mental and physical agony that accompanied a sleepless night made me too agitated to sleep the following one, so long strings of sleepless nights racked up. By this stage, I wasn't eating properly which, compounded with my ­anxiety, was making me look ­painfully thin.

My beautifully crafted freelance career was in freefall. I was a far cry from the outgoing travel ­journalist I used to be. Insomnia and anxiety were distorting my reality. I was so convinced that I had lost the ability to sleep that I couldn't plan anything and was becoming housebound. There was rarely a moment of the day when I wasn't in tears.

Now, I realise that what I was feeling was grief. I was grieving for my life, along with my old sense of normality. Even the ­simplest things, such as opening my wardrobe and looking at clothes I assumed I'd never wear again, would reduce me to a sobbing mess. I was also constantly trying to cover my tracks.

I became paranoid about my stalled career, and was filled with anxiety at the thought of lunch with friends or old colleagues who'd naturally ask 'What are you up to at the moment?'. I didn't want people to know I'd dropped the ball and was struggling. I was anxious about feeling anxious because it would cost me yet another night of sleep.

Indeed, by then – 20 weeks into this wretched spell of extreme insomnia – my brain wasn't working properly at all. It felt like it was breaking down. Decaying even. There were times when I would jabber incoherently and other times when I was unable to speak at all.

Then came the night when I physically couldn't leave my flat to meet friends and ended up pacing the living room instead, backwards and forwards, utterly broken, forcing my parents to come to rescue me and drive me to the hospital.

I visited A&E five times over the next two weeks. Each time, I insisted to baffled medics that not sleeping for such long periods had damaged my brain, convinced that I had ­premature dementia. I even had a CT scan, an MRI and a lumbar puncture, which doctors hoped would ­reassure me was not the case.

My glamorous London life was a thing of the past and I was a shadow of my former self. I was 45 and living with my parents.

Given my age, many suggested perimenopause could be behind my problems, though numerous blood tests ruled that out. Eventually, it was only with strong medication that I was able to start climbing my way out of my nightmare. In autumn 2022, ­hospital doctors prescribed ­mirtazapine, an antidepressant which, taken just before bedtime, made me drowsy and it worked from night one. My brain finally felt like it was healing.

However, the thought of living in my London home, the scene of too many sleepless nights and its accompanying distress, left me traumatised. I found myself paralysed with fear in my childhood bedroom, unable to see a way of returning to my adult life.

In fact, anything that reminded me of the period when I couldn't sleep was an anxiety trigger. For instance, my laptop, which I relied on for work but ­remembered staring at like a zombie after zero sleep. The upshot was, where once I was upbeat and laid back, now I was a mental health shambles.

My exciting jet-set life had shrunk to something small and painfully ironic. Everything I had loved about life felt compromised, sabotaged even, by this spell of extreme insomnia. I was in the depths of despair.

Somehow, just before Christmas last year, an idea came to me, and through my darkness I started to write a book (mostly typing it into my phone as my laptop was off limits).

The words poured out of me in the space of six weeks. It's a novel set in Oxford, my old alma mater, which I was feeling guilty about letting down.

I found the process extremely therapeutic, transporting myself to a different world. I even started dreaming of finding a pretty cottage near to where I'd grown up, and living a new life as a writer far removed from my old stomping ground in London.

But then something surprising shifted in me. I'd had to return to to London to have my place ­valued and realised that the ­traumatic memories of my sleepless nightmare there were finally starting to fade.

The weather was good so I started to fix up my garden. And, before I knew it, I'd created a new sanctuary with a summerhouse as an office to write in, a little oasis outside the confines of my flat. I reconnected with friends and I slipped into a new routine, helped by early morning swims and seeing a therapist once a week. Slowly, slowly, life started to feel worth living again.

It has been two years since I suddenly stopped sleeping. I now fall asleep and stay sleeping ­easily, usually getting a comfortable eight hours per night. And I'm slowly weaning myself off the medication. It hasn't been easy. The domino effect it had on my life was catastrophic, leaving me financially comprised and adrift at an age when I imagined I'd have everything worked out.

But it forced me to slow down, think more about what's ­important in life and realise how lucky I am to have family and friends who will stick by me through the darkest times.

I've even finally completed my book and am now in talks with a publisher. It's not exactly the way I'd envisioned things working out, but then a conventional life was never my dream. And now, yes, I do at last dream. That moment when I wake and remember a glimpse of one, before it fades into the darkness, is something I will never take for granted again.