How To Sleep Like A Caveman by Merijn van de Laar: Want to beat insomnia? Be more caveman By YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM Published: 00:01, 2 February 2025 | Updated: 00:01, 2 February 2025 e-mail View comments How To Sleep Like A Caveman by Merijn van de Laar (William Collins £20, 304pp) How To Sleep Like a Caveman is available now from the Mail Bookshop Do you sometimes wake up with a jolt from a dream in which you’re falling? According to sleep therapist Merijn van de Laar, in his highly readable new book about how to deal with insomnia, that falling dream might be evolutionary. Before they discovered fire, our earliest human ancestors slept in trees to avoid predators. That tree-falling fear may still be buried deep inside our subconscious, a catalyst for insomnia.
And if you’re of a certain age, do you frequently find yourself lying awake for two hours in the middle of the night? If so, you should feel proud. You would have been a superhero among cave dwellers. This is the ‘poorly sleeping grandparents hypothesis’: that our elderly prehistoric ancestors dropped off to sleep earlier in the evening and then woke up in the middle of the night to keep watch, thus helping the tribe to survive.
The Stone Age is very much back in fashion. Last year Clare Foges’s book The Paleo Life advised us to adjust our lifestyles to be more like cavemen, for a happier, healthier life: low lighting in the evening, lots of protein, sharing childcare with the wider social group, weekly rit.
