“That’s the advantage of insomnia. People who go to bed early always complain that the night is too short, but for those of us who stay up all night, it can feel as long as a lifetime.” – Banana Yoshimoto
No kidding.
Insomnia is many things, not one of which is pleasant. It can make your bedroom feel like the most daunting place on Earth, it can cause your days, weeks, months to bleed together like some crazy, punctuation-free, run-on sentence. It’s the stuff Fight Clubs are made of.
As an anxious-type child and then an anxious-type young adult, I’ve spent countless nights waiting out the darkness for morning, simply so I would have a good excuse to get up and stop trying to fall asleep. I’ve heard all of the tricks, played all of the games. My body is slowly, from my toes, filling with sand, growing heavier. I am on the beach, waves crashing in the distance, sun warming my skin. I am in the mountains, in Savasana on my yoga mat, I am letting Arrested Development play quietly on TV, I am counting backwards from 1,000. I am doing it again. I am taking melatonin. Unisom. Anything with PM on the label. I am listening to waterfalls, I am burning eucalyptus. I am awake.
So, what helps? There’s creedence, yes, to the advice to not overthink it. A hot bath, a well-timed sleep aide. A really, really boring book. Earlier this year I discovered that a noise-maker can really take the edge off of the constant chatter of my obsessive thoughts. But guess what—just like anything else in motion—a mind tends to want to stay in motion, too. When thoughts want attention, they find a way to make themselves heard. I’ve not ruled out the possibility that I am truly my own worst enemy, or that my circadian rhythm is the opposite of how it should be, sporadic and on a phasic schedule all unto itself.
If there’s an article out there about other people who insom, or about how sleep deprivation can feel on par with being legally drunk, or how tons of really smart, high-achieving people are insomniacs, I’ve probably already read it. In the middle of the night, no less. I’ve read the infographics, I know that I’m preventing my body from rejuvenating, that I’m increasing my risk for stroke and diabetes. And I know that I should just relax. But, it turns out that it just doesn’t work like that. Because there’s 3:00 in the morning, staring back at me like dear, God, look away. The hamster wheel in my mind spins. It keeps going. Running, running, getting nowhere.
Sometimes, even, at the beginning of a bout of insomnia I will just surrender to it and make myself comfortable for its stay. Sometimes, with a calm patience, it works its way in and then back out of my life; other times it culminates in a completely unbearable exhaustion wherein a sheer desperation for sleep is all-consuming.
There is no magic pill, practice, or solution to insomnia and everyone will find different things do and don’t work for them: the conditions might be perfect but sleep can still find a way to evade us. Knowing as little as we do about sleep, it makes a person wonder if there’s just some other element to it. Is it like falling in love? Is it possible that even when the setup is Rom Com, meet cute, algorithm perfect one can just simply not be feeling that… special thing? Is it possible, that even with the last cup of coffee emptied over ten hours ago, and the air set at 75 degrees, the sheets fresh and the curtains blocking light, with a favorite wind-chimey, watery, meditative musical number floating above the sound of the traffic, that still something is amiss. You feel calm, you feel tired, you are comfortable, all the world seems right, and yet there you are, wide awake, waiting.
Photo by Andy Sutterfield