19/09/2025
Picture this: You're a new Army officer cadet, always rushing somewhere you were meant to be 5 minutes ago, in the wrong uniform.
Your nights? They're spent frantically preparing kit for the next day – if you're lucky enough to sleep at all!
When you join the British Army as an Officer, your first stop is the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS). I went there in September 2000 as a newly qualified physio, and quickly learned that RMAS is a deeply stressful place where you're always on the back foot.
(My first night, we were all dragged from our beds at 2am due to a supposed 'bomb threat' and sent around the grounds hunting for an imaginary bomb).
As a result, everyone wandered around in a highly sleep-deprived state. It wasn't unusual for officer cadets to fall asleep the moment they sat down. My notebooks demonstrate this perfectly - I'd begin diligently writing notes on some military subject, and the line of biro would tail off completely as I passed out mid-sentence.
In one signals lecture this did come back to bite me. While learning about voice procedure (the specific way you talk on military radio to avoid misunderstandings), I drifted off so deeply that the Corporal teaching the lesson managed to draw an entire flower on my cheek with whiteboard marker!
During one three-night exercise in the training area, with mandatory sentry duty limiting us to about three hours of sleep per night, I became so sleep deprived that I hallucinated. In my wild stress dream, my entire platoon had silently packed up and were standing to attention outside my tent. I stuck my head out and, completely mistaking the trees for my fellow officer cadets, rushed to wake my very unimpressed tentmate. He had his work cut out telling me I was talking absolute nonsense.
Let's just say there's a good reason sleep deprivation is internationally denounced as 'a form of torture or cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment'!
In those days, I had no idea how vital sleep was for healing, repair, and keeping our nervous systems functioning properly - but my experiences at Sandhurst certainly taught me what happens when we don't get enough of it!
