‘I was so stressed I didn’t sleep for eight days and had a mental breakdown’

A sleep coach wants to make it ‘cool’ to get an early night on a weekend – after EIGHT DAYS without sleep left him in a mental hospital thinking he was in the Truman Show.

Tommy Graves ended up working so hard on a fundraising live stream in March 2021 to raise money for a homeless charity that he did not go to bed for eight days straight.

So sleep deprived by the sixth day, the 27-year-old said he was ‘delusional’ and had ‘crazy’ ideas, thinking he could end racism and change the world.

Tommy said his behaviour concerned his family and he was taken to a mental health hospital in an ambulance, where he was admitted for four weeks.

Yet the events manager was so poorly he was convinced the mental hospital was a television studio like The Truman Show and that he had to entertain the audience through the facility’s cameras.

In the popular 1998 movie, Jim Carrey stars as a man who is unaware that his entire life is being captured on camera and broadcast to the world.

Tommy said 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.

Doctors reportedly told Tommy he had experienced a manic episode with psychosis and spent the next four weeks ‘coming back to reality.’

Tommy spent the next two years learning how to sleep properly and his experience taught him getting enough shut eye was so important that he qualified as a sleep coach in April 2025.

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.

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.

Tommy, from Bermondsey, London, said: “I was working on a project to raise some money for a local homeless charity. There were going to be 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.

“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. My family sent me up there 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.

“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 said he ‘completely left planet Earth’ and even thought he had a meeting with the Queen.

Tommy 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 leaped over a nurse.

“They managed to finally put me to sleep after giving me all sorts of medication. I spend 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.”

The experience left Tommy wanting to learn how to sleep properly to avoid losing sense of reality again.

The sleep coach said being a lad in the UK involves going out on the weekends and being ‘boring’ for not staying out late.

Now, Tommy 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.

Tommy 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.

“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.

“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

“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 bed time. 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.”