Experts say dangerous sleep apnoea affects an estimated 8 million in the UK alone, and everything from evolution to obesity or even the climate crisis could be to blame

When Matt Hillier was in his 20s, he went camping with a friend who was a nurse. In the morning she told him she had been shocked by the snoring coming from his tent. “She basically said, ‘For a 25-year-old non-smoker who’s quite skinny, you snore pretty loudly,’” says Hiller, now 32.

Perhaps because of the pervasive image of a “typical” sleep apnoea patient – older, and overweight – Hillier didn’t seek help. It wasn’t until he was 30 that he finally went to a doctor after waking up from a particularly big night of snoring with a racing heartbeat. Despite being young, active and a healthy weight, further investigation – including a night recording his snoring – revealed that he had moderate sleep apnoea. His was classed as supine, the most common form of the condition, meaning it happens when he sleeps on his back, and is likely caused by his throat muscles.

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© Illustration: Igor Bastidas/The Guardian

© Illustration: Igor Bastidas/The Guardian

© Illustration: Igor Bastidas/The Guardian

A poor night's sleep might leave you feeling like your eyelids have filled with lead—and keeping them open is the ultimate dead lift. But for some, bad sleep brings on eyelids so droopy and floppy that they can do curl ups on their own.

That was the unfortunate case for a 39-year-old woman who sought care at an ophthalmology clinic in Brooklyn, New York. She told the doctors that for six weeks she felt like she had something in her eyes, and they were watery. By the time of her appointment, her eyelids had rolled up, flipping inside-out on their own—and were staying that way. In the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, doctors report her eye-opening case—and its unexpected solution.

(You can see images of her eyelids—flipped and recovered—here. The images may seem graphic to some, but they are not much worse than that kid in elementary school who would flip their eyelids just to freak everyone out for laughs. You know the one.)

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© Getty | George Pachantouris

As the residents of Marlborough are woken at 5:30am by a peacock, people in Ynyslas by a mini-tornado, those of Litton are woken by an earthquake, and people in Cheam are kept awake by a bottom-pinching ghost, the optional question for this week is ... what wakes you? Or just chat about what's going on in your life (no politics, as there's a billion other threads on this site for that).