Man who didn’t sleep for EIGHT DAYS reveals his descent into madness,
Tommy Graves slapped on a giant smile and pulled off a perfect cartwheel – but although he believed his acrobatics were being broadcast to millions, in reality, his only audience were the nurses monitoring him in the psychiatric ward.
Now aged 32, Mr Graves, from Bermondsey, London, found himself being treated in a mental health unit after eight days without sleep plunged him deep into a psychosis where he believed he was living a life like Jim Carrey’s character in The Truman Show.
He said: ‘My family sent me [to a mental health hospital] in an ambulance because they knew something had gone wrong.
‘I was extremely coherent but I was not making sense.
‘I had a plan to end racism, end sexism, end wars, cure cancer, all of these amazing things.
‘By this point I didn’t even know where I was. I thought I was in a television studio, like The Truman Show.’
In the iconic 1998 movie, Carrey stars as a man who is unaware that his entire life is being captured on camera and broadcast to the world.
Mr Graves’ sleep deprivation began when he was working on project to raise money for a homeless charity.
‘There were going to be musicians, actors and performers,’ he said.
‘I just got really excited about it and worked tirelessly on it. The more I worked on it the more stressed I became, the more ideas came into my head and the harder I found it to sleep.
‘I couldn’t get to sleep at all as much as I tried because my brain wouldn’t switch off. As the days went on the ideas got more and more extreme, elaborate, some people would say delusional.
‘By day six of not sleeping the idea had gone from raising £100 to raising £66million.
‘I was then admitted to a mental health hospital.’
Mr Graves spent four weeks in the mental health hospital, but he was so poorly he was convinced it was a television studio like The Truman Show and that he had to entertain the audience through the facility’s cameras.
He sang, danced, and did cartwheels in front of the cameras, believing he was going to ‘earn an Oscar’ for his performance, until he was finally able to sleep with medication.
‘One of the nurses told me I would get an Oscar if I carried on like this. Most people would have seen that as sarcasm but I thought “I’d love to get an Oscar”,’ he said.
Doctors reportedly told Mr Graves that he had experienced a manic episode with psychosis and spent the next four weeks ‘coming back to reality.’
Mr Graves said: ‘I completely left planet earth, I had no sense of what reality was, I was hearing and thinking and seeing things that were not real.
‘I was performing to these cameras at the mental health hospital and I was trying to engage and entertain the audience.
‘There was singing, dancing, cartwheels, running up walls. I leapt over a nurse.
‘They managed to finally put me to sleep after giving me all sorts of medication. I spent the next four weeks in the mental health hospital coming back to the real world.
‘What I experienced was a manic episode with psychosis caused by stress and sleep deprivation.
‘I was in the highest level of care you can get. I never thought that could happen to me. That was enough to scare me into picking up a book and figuring out how to sleep well.’
When he was discharged a month later, Mr Graves’ life was in tatters and he was under no illusions that his sanity could again slip through his fingers if he wasn’t vigilant about sleeping.
He said: ‘When I was discharged, I felt so sad. My life had just been blown to bits. I was incredibly embarrassed.
‘My doctor said I needed to learn how to sleep or I could risk losing my sense of reality again.
‘As soon as I learned to sleep better my brain started working, my productivity got higher, I experienced what life feels like when you’re fully rested.’
Mr Graves spent the next two years learning how to sleep properly and in April 2025 he qualified as a sleep coach.
He now no longer goes out late at weekends and instead has a set ‘bed time’ and ‘wake up’ time he tries to stick to.
Now, he wants to make it ‘cool’ to have a specific bed time every day to improve sleep quality and runs workshops for businesses and communities to teach people the importance of sleep and how to do it.
‘The experience I had of being a lad living in the UK, it is the norm for weekends to be dedicated to late nights and for weekdays to be more early mornings.
‘You end up in this vicious cycle of exhaustion – you’re trying to get over the late nights from the weekend and you go into a week of early mornings, and then it’s back to the late nights again.
‘Around one in three people suffer from insomnia in the UK. Having a consistent bed time and wake time is pivotal, that is the most important thing you can do.
‘Most importantly on the weekends, you’re basically getting social jet lag every weekend, which is like flying two to three hours every week.
‘I’m on a mission to make it cool to have a bedtime. I’ll go out at midday and stay out until 9pm. Might as well make the most of the day.
‘It’s not about having less fun, it’s about doing it at a time that doesn’t make you exhausted’
‘I want to spread awareness that sleep is connected to every main mental health condition, either making symptoms worse or being a key driver in the problem existing in the first place.’
Poor sleep has been linked to a number of health problems, including cancer, stroke and infertility.
But experts have long advised that waking up during the night does not necessarily mean you have insomnia, which figures suggest affects up to 14million Britons.
Insomnia can be caused by stress, anxiety, alcohol, caffeine or nicotine, noise, shift work and jet lag.
If you regularly have problems sleeping, there are simple ways to improve your sleep hygiene.
This includes keeping regular sleeping hours, staying active in the day and by creating a restful quiet space to sleep.
