A Londoner has revealed what happened when he went eight days straight without sleep, describing how he ‘left planet earth’ and ‘had no sense of what reality was’.

Tommy Graves, from Bermondsey, was fundraising for a charity in 2021 when his stress spiralled into an extreme case of insomnia, leading to a manic episode with psychosis.

On day six with no sleep, the 27-year-old was admitted to a mental health hospital, where staff prescribed therapy and medication to help him get some much-needed rest.

But Tommy didn’t believe doctors and nurses were trying to help him. Instead, he was convinced they were all actors starring in a Truman Show-like reality programme, filming him for an audience at home.

‘I was hearing and thinking and seeing things that were not real,’ the former events manager and DJ recalls.

Tommy’s week without sleep started when he was working on a livestreaming project with a  local homeless charity, co-ordinating with musicians, actors and performers.

‘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,’ Tommy, now 32, says.

‘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.’

Tommy ended up in hospital after his family realised something was wrong and sought medical help. An ambulance was arranged to take him to the inpatient facility.

‘I was extremely coherent but I was not making sense,’ he remembers. ‘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.

‘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.’

Tommy sang, danced and did cartwheels in front of the ‘cameras’ in hospital, until he was finally able to sleep with medication.

It took four full weeks to physically recover – with the impact on Tommy’s life lasting far longer.

‘When I was discharged, I felt so sad. My life had just been blown to bits. I was incredibly embarrassed,’ he says. ‘My doctor said I needed to learn how to sleep or I could risk losing my sense of reality again.

‘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.’

Tommy spent the next few years learning all he could about sleep, before deciding to change careers and become a qualified sleep coach in April 2025.

Around one in three people suffer from insomnia in the UK and Tommy believes our culture is largely to blame.

‘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,’ he says.

‘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.’

Tommy has now broken free from that cycle and wants to help more young professionals to feel rested. 

He no longer goes out late at weekends and instead has a set ‘bed time’ and ‘wake up’ time he tries to stick to.

He also recommends not looking at any blue light from phones or devices at least 90 minutes before bed, nothing taxing on the brain for an hours before bed and avoid food for three hours before sleep.

‘I’m on a mission to make it cool to have a bed time. I’ll go out at midday and stay out until 9pm. Might as well make the most of the day,’ he says. ‘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.’