I haven’t had a good night’s sleep for 10 years – this is how I cope with insomnia

If you don’t know the comedian Huge Davies from his keyboard-supplemented stand-up sets, or his appearances on various comedy panel shows, he’s concerned you might recognise him from his “crash out” last year. He appeared on 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown and couldn’t speak. “It was really bad. I get very nervous when I do panel shows,” he tells me in a drowsy, monotone drawl. “But often, I’ll try and fix the nerves by being really awake, so I’ll take three coffees and eat loads of sugar. “I also had Wagamamas. And it was so hot [on set]… I think I was fully out of it. Jimmy Carr asked me things, and I just didn’t know what was going on. They had to stop the show and check if I was alright.” Shorts He’s not been invited back on, he says, adding: “It happened on Jonathan Ross [the Comedy Club show] as well, they had to bring out the script to remind me what to say.” Huge, 35, has supported Phil Wang and Joe Lycett, co-hosted the podcast Slime Country and appeared on plenty of TV comedy shows. He’s become renowned for his dark jokes and absurdist observations contrasting amusingly with the peppy tunes he bashes out on his neck-slung Yamaha. The only problem? He’s not slept properly in over a decade. “I never feel refreshed; I feel like I’m crashing every morning”. Huge was in his second year of university when, “at some point, I realised I hadn’t been asleep for a few weeks”. “It’s partly the environment; everyone’s staying up all night to do essays or go out partying. I was a partier so I wasn’t really feeling the effects of [not sleeping]. But when it turned into five months I felt like, ‘Oh, I’m almost going to die.’” It got so bad that, for a few months, he sublet his bedroom. “A friend was in town for something happening in the city so I just let them stay – it wasn’t like I was using my room.” These days, he will take himself to bed, but not to sleep. “My body needs to be still and I need to close my eyes for a certain amount of time”, he says. “I listen to the same audiobook – The Hobbit – every night, which puts my mind to rest. It helps me phase out; I go into a bit of a trance.” The next morning, his alarm goes off at 8.30am and while his girlfriend “has been to sleep, I’ve been to Mordor and Smaug”. While many a sleep-deprived adult will turn to big doses of caffeine, Huge will – at least when he’s not nervous about crashing out on national TV – make do with “one can of iced coffee. I get quite shaky, I can’t deal with the caffeine. If I’m doing a TV record, I’ll take a lot of coffee but then I never learn.” Without this routine, he says, “I feel awful… if I do an all-nighter working, the next day I’m ruined and can’t do anything from 2pm.” Sometimes Huge can get five hours’ sleep, but the last time this happened was “three-four years ago”. The impacts of his near-constant grogginess have been massive. “My symptoms sound like ADHD but it’s just that I’m tired,” he says. “When someone’s talking I will space out, concentration is hard. “I always wonder what it would be like if I wasn’t tired, like if I started the day on a good day, how much could I get done? I see loads of people in comedy working and sometimes I just can’t do it.” ‘My friends know I’m always tired and will take that into account when I’m with them. If I’m stroppy or a bit out of it, they won’t ask me things that I need to think about’ (Photo: Dylan Woodley) He still has ideas, of course, and has a notes app bursting with them. “But sometimes I’ll think of a funny idea and I will forget it within a second. It’s not like my attention’s been driven somewhere else; I can physically feel my brain fogging. That’s when I get really annoyed; it’s like I’m not allowed to have my own thoughts, like I’m being punished for having a good thought!” Making new friends becomes hard, too, because strangers don’t get why he’s so distracted. “My friends know I’m always tired and will take that into account when I’m with them. If I’m stroppy or a bit out of it, they won’t ask me things that I need to think about”. They also won’t eagerly offer up solutions, like people coming to his new Edinburgh show, Sleep Paralysis Princess, do, suggesting “melatonin or exercise, as if I’ve not been in the Googles”. He’s also tried magnesium, but found it didn’t work and that “it felt weird to eat a metal”. As for stronger sleeping pills? “I took one – not even a hardcore one – the night before a podcast recording. I did sleep, but I felt so groggy the next day that I don’t actually recall the podcast recording.” He also tried therapy, at about £90 a week: “She would use props and was very interested in the sleep stuff. But years later, the sleeplessness wasn’t going away, nothing had changed, so I stopped paying for it.” Next, he tried acupuncture, at £80 a session, every week, but he only lasted a year: “That was a waste of time. There’s this whole thing in movies about how no one notices the needles sticking in, but it really hurts, your body goes so hot. “Everyone kept saying ‘stick with it, it’ll be fine’, but it’s absolutely painful.” All in all, Huge says he has “spent tens of thousands of pounds trying to solve it”. Huge’s fear of doctors means going to the GP isn’t an option: “When I was in my teens there was a fear I had something that I was going to die of. It turns out I was going to be OK and I wasn’t going to die, but I am full of dread from that.” Death plays in his mind often. “If you spend enough time alone you probably end up thinking about death. “I find death quite scary, but I think what’s good about comedy, that there’s always going to be a version of you that lasts forever, if the internet lasts forever. That helps me with the death stuff, because I don’t want to disappear.” There is some sliver of hope; he’s discovered that, if the setting is wrong, he can actually take a nap. “I did sometimes use to sleep for a few hours on the motorway on the way back from gigs.” The problem is, “As soon as I’ve been given a bed and need to go to bed, I can’t sleep, but I can just pass out when I’m not meant to sleep. I’m pretty sure I slept during Countdown”. ‘Sleep Paralysis Princess’ is on at Monkey Barrel Comedy until 30 August