A former insomniac, Tommy Graves, shared details of his unintentional sleep experiment when he could not sleep for eight days straight. The 27-year-old ended up in a psychiatric ward due to a lack of sleep.
He explained that he was raising money in March 2021 for a local charity and became so engrossed that he did not sleep for eight days. This turned him into a delusional person, and he felt like he was on The Truman Show. The movie follows a man whose life is constantly filmed without his knowledge.
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During the charity fundraiser, Graves became obsessed with different ideas and worked tirelessly on the project. He claims that so many ideas stressed him, and he found it harder to sleep. He added, “My brain wouldn’t switch off. As the days went on, the ideas got more and more extreme, elaborate, some people would say delusional.”
According to a report, the lack of shut-eye made Graves made him feel as if he were performing for the camera. He claimed he was “extremely unwell” and needed to stay in a psychiatric ward for four weeks. He explained a part of his psychosis, “I was trying to engage and entertain the audience. There was singing, dancing, cartwheels, and running up walls. I leaped over a nurse.”
Graves felt like he had left the planet, and entertaining people in the psych ward could earn him an Oscar. At one point, he felt as if he had met the queen. He got his sense of reality back after weeks when he started to feel a bit normal. He concluded that a healthy bedtime routine and sleep are important. So he started his mission to “make it cool to have a bedtime”.
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Now, Graves is a certified sleep coach and gives tips on his social media accounts to people who wish to have a better sleep cycle. He shared his experience so that everyone learns about the importance of good sleep. His main goal as a sleep coach is to resolve common sleep-related problems such as scrolling on their phones, ruminating, and even taking magnesium to sleep better.
He understands what lack of sleep can do to a person. He connected mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, and bipolar disorder to lack of sleep. When he did not sleep for days, he was in a manic episode of psychosis due to sleep deprivation. He said he was coherent but needed family intervention to get out of it.
Going to the psych ward was a wake-up call for Graves to learn how to sleep. He got certified as a sleep coach last April and advocates healthy habits.
