Insomnia: The self-medication phase

This is the hardest part of my story to tell. In the previous chapters, I was a victim—you can't change someone else's actions, and you can't change your nature. But from this point onward, I was in control. I didn't know it at the time, but it was my thoughts and choices during the early days of insomnia that led me to my most desperate state. If you've never had insomnia, read this part carefully...and then don't do what I did! You might be able to save yourself from a dismal fate.

When my breakup with my boyfriend was still a fresh, gaping wound on my psyche, I spent a lot of time crying. I cried all day, in between work meetings and necessary interactions with my housemate. I went to bed as early as I could and usually cried myself to sleep, only to wake up after a few hours, obsessively thinking about the disaster that had befallen me. Most nights, I couldn't fall back asleep until 4 or 5. Some nights, I didn't fall back asleep at all.

By this time, I was regularly consuming all sorts of chemicals to help me sleep. Because of the window blinds situation, I had already been taking melatonin or Benadryl most nights in a (unsuccessful) bid to stay asleep through the night. When my sleep patterns deteriorated further because of the breakup, I started taking them more regularly...not that it helped at all! My new roommate recommended magnesium, which I tried, to no avail. CBD was supposed to help with sleep, so I tried that, even though it had never helped me sleep previously. Once, I even tried a THC/CBD gummy,* which made me so relaxed I couldn't get out of bed, and simultaneously so anxious that I just lay there having a panic attack for an hour! In the end, I usually resorted to alcohol after everything else had failed, leaving me the next day both sleep-deprived and mildly hungover.

I don't really recall too much about those early weeks of insomnia (after all, sleep cements memories and I wasn't getting much sleep), and all these nights of rampant substance abuse kind of blend together. Since I still didn't know this experience was going to turn into a saga I'd be writing about months later, I can only reconstruct the progression of my condition by examining my browser history. It was around 2 weeks after the breakup that my searches began to change from things like "stages of grief" to "benadryl vs unisom."

I was getting over the breakup. I certainly wasn't crying continuously and bringing obsessive thoughts of it into bed with me any more, so I couldn't understand why I wasn't sleeping, They say that stressful events can cause sleep disruptions, but sleep usually returns after the stressful situation has resolved. The only explanation I could think up (and indeed, I was thinking about it a lot) was that the stress of the breakup had been replaced by stress from not sleeping.

It was four weeks after the breakup that I began Googling my symptoms (Oh no! Retrospective red alert!), and right around the same time, I officially labeled my condition as insomnia. This I know because that was also when I started keeping a sleep diary, a recommended part of the treatment plan for most insomnia sufferers.

In the sleep diary, I religiously recorded when I slept, when I didn't sleep, what I'd ingested in a bid to sleep, any activities I'd done that might have contributed to or detracted from sleep, and how I was feeling. I was feeling pretty awful. I'd begun noticing strange symptoms that are often linked with anxiety. I felt twitchy and on-edge, constantly getting butterflies in my stomach for no apparent reason, startling at the quietest of sounds. I wasn't really thinking anxious thoughts, but it seemed (I guessed?) anxiety had become a part of my physiology.

The sleep diary wasn't doing anything to help me improve my sleep, but it does provide a useful record of how my sleep continued to decline. At the beginning of April when I began the log, I was still falling asleep without much difficulty on most nights, and waking up in the middle of the night or too early in the morning. I was also sleeping 5 – 7 hours almost every night. By insomniac standards, I was sleeping great! But that all took a turn for the worse around mid-April. The change occurred rather suddenly, after I got my second Covid vaccine on April 15 (Moderna, thanks for asking). The second night after the shot, exhausted by my intense immune response, I slept a whopping 8 hours! And then the night after that, and every night following, I slept hardly at all! I'd gone from losing a few hours of sleep from mid-night awakenings, to lying awake most of the night. Over the next week, my nightly sleep time plummeted down to 3.5 – 5 hours a night.

After that one glorious night of 8 hours asleep, the wakeful nights were even harder to bear. I desperately purchased chamomile tea and started yet another dietary supplement (this time an expensive herbal blend) and again saw no results. My insomnia was clearly getting worse, nothing I could do was fixing it, and I was freaking out! So, six weeks after my first night of troubled sleep, I saw a physician, who referred me to a psychiatrist. Seven weeks into suffering insomnia, and I visited a shrink for the first time in my recollection! Did I finally get the help I needed? You'll soon find out, in the next chapter of this story!

*For the purposes of chronology, it must be explained that I took the THC gummy the same night following my psych appointment. He had prescribed me something, and I guess I wanted to try one last natural sleep remedy before leaping into the arms of Big Pharma.