Why Can't We Sleep?

Darian Leader sets the contemporary sleep industry against a longer history, arguing that human rest has never been regular or standardised and that the pursuit of a perfect night's sleep rests on a myth. Sleeplessness, he holds, is not simply a physiological malfunction to be medicated away; it is bound up with anxiety, guilt, mourning and the unfinished business the waking mind keeps at bay. Drawing on Freudian dream theory, clinical material and the economic history of the working day, he treats insomnia as a psychical position rather than a symptom with one cause.

For the consulting room, the book supplies a vocabulary for hearing what a patient's wakefulness carries: what they cannot let go of, what they keep watch for, what sleep would ask them to surrender. Leader reads pharmaceutical promises against the wishes they conceal, and returns rest to the social arrangements that shape it. Hamish Hamilton published it in 2019.