Insomnia Fails

You might not believe it, but the two posts about all the supplements and medications I consumed to treat my insomnia don't even begin to cover the myriad ways I tried to improve my sleep. Drugs are the quick and easy solution, and I, even in my addled and sleep-deprived state, knew that quick-and-easy usually also means too-good-to-be-true. So in addition to ingesting things, I also tried doing things!

I wasn't originally going to include this laundry list in my insomnia series, but 1) it's going to help illustrate a point I want to make in a future post, and 2) it's going to help illustrate a point that I want to make now, which is: if your sleep has deteriorated to the point that you're actually referring to yourself as an insomniac, minor lifestyle changes and sleep-focused activities aren't going to change a blasted thing. 

Here's a video on the subject, which does a good job of explaining why in a nutshell, but which I'm not going to cover right now. I still have a fragmented narrative about myself to get through, after all! But if you are an insomniac, I encourage you to watch the video above, and not do the things below, because they will only waste your time.

Ready, kids? Don't try these at home!

Lifestyle modifications

• Sleep hygiene —  Mention to any medical professional that you have insomnia, and they will magically whisk out a printout containing sage advice on how to improve your sleep (I got one from the doctor I saw for my chronic back pain!). These practices are known as sleep hygiene, and they do not help with insomnia. I have heard sleep hygiene compared to dental hygiene—it's great for everyone to practice regularly, but if you already have a cavity, tooth brushing is not going to fix it. Same with insomnia—adopting better sleeping habits is just not enough to break the cycle.
  
• Changing what you eat — For a while there, I suspected that my sleep problems were linked to my diet. Maybe I was eating too much sugar. Maybe I was eating too much protein near bedtime. Maybe I was eating too near bedtime, period. Maybe I wasn't eating enough near bedtime. I made a token effort to change some of those factors, but altering your diet is hard! Especially if it's only for an experiment and there's no guarantee that it will have any effect. Most of my dietary modifications lasted one day or less, and none of them had measurable impacts on my sleep.

Things you listen to

• Guided meditations — Back when we were just young'ns, my brother had this "Go to sleep quickly" self-hypnosis tape, and one of my grade-school camp counselors welcomed us on the first night with a guided meditation that I loved, so the idea of letting other people's voices coach me to sleep was probably my first experience with sleep interventions. Of course, we all laughed at the silly sleep hypnosis recording, and I never actually fell asleep during any guided meditation even when I didn't have insomnia, so I'm not sure why I had such faith in this strategy. I gave up on guided meditations completely when I started getting the twitchiness. Every pause in the speech meant I'd be startled when it started again, which did not promote relaxation by any means.
  
• Audiobooks — Back when I was doing an awful lot of air travel, I learned, quite by accident, that I actually can fall asleep while listening to an audiobook, even on an airplane! So when I stopped being able to sleep at home, my first thought was to at least fill the time with an audiobook so that my mind would have something to do, and maybe even fall asleep! Sometimes that happened, but I always woke back up again...because there was still a voice talking in my ear! Not an effective way to ensure restful sleep. And plus, I never knew what was happening in the story because I was always sleeping through parts of it!
  
• Affirmations — Go on YouTube and search for "sleep affirmations," and you'll find them. Long videos of inspiring phrases like "I love my bed." I tried listening to a few, but I couldn't get over the fact that someone else was saying them instead of me. (You love your bed? Great. Congratulations.) And I certainly didn't have the patience to do a follow-along or read from a script.
  
• White noise — While I acknowledge that white noise is great at drowning out the sound of your roommate getting up to use the bathroom every night at 3 am, I took my dedication to white noise to an excessive level. I have a white noise app on the iPad, and for a while, I was experimenting with different mixes every day, trying to figure out if there was a certain frequency or combination of sounds that would help me sleep better than others. There wasn't. But I did have my weirdest dream while sleeping to brown noise, so maybe try that if you're looking for a mental rush?
  
• Chillout music — One thing I heard/read over and over again when I first started having trouble with my sleep was that I should pamper myself with a pleasant environment in the hour or two before bedtime. Quiet, relaxing music was always one of the suggestions. While I'm sure this can't be harmful, I'm not the type to just have music on in the background, so I found that it was somewhat stressful to select a streaming channel every day, make sure it wasn't loud enough to disturb my roommates, and then actually listen to it, because I was in and out of so many different rooms, doing so many different things, that I was missing out on the music more often than I was actually hearing it. Not worth the effort!
  
• Binaural beats — Binaural beats are this weird, woo-woo concept that involves tones of specific frequency, auditory illusions, and their purported effect on your brain wave patterns. You can look up how they work if you want, but it's probably not worth your time. Essentially, using them is supposed to coax your brain waves into a certain frequency, e.g the frequency that they produce during deep sleep. Supposedly that helps you fall into sleep faster. I listened to binaural beats for a half-hour to hour before bed, religiously, for about 2 weeks. During that time, I did not experience any change in my sleep patterns, and I certainly didn't feel any different while or after listening.
  

Things you do before bed

• Hot baths — One suggestion that came up often for a relaxing evening ritual was to take a hot bath. There was a lot of compelling evidence in favor of this practice. Supposedly the heat helps your body cool down rapidly once you get out of it, which can cause sleepiness. I wanted to incorporate this in my life, but have you seen the interior of my bathtub? It's not the kind of place you want to be putting your bare skin if you're hoping to relax. Besides, I couldn't conscience using that much hot water every day just to maybe cool my body by a degree or two. Do you know how much water it takes to fill a bathtub? A lot more than a shower! I compromised once by taking a hot shower at night, but then my hair was wet when I went to bed, and, ugh! Some habits are just not worth getting into!
• Yoga — Yoga is one of my favorite forms of movement, so when I started reading about insomnia, I was pleased to find out that yoga was frequently recommended as a way to relax and help promote sleep. Maybe I shouldn't have been pleased, because I should have realized that if I was already doing so much yoga and it wasn't helping, then yoga can't be a panacea. But nonetheless, I tried, spending the last hour before many a bedtime doing various nighttime yoga routines in the hopes that they'd help me sleep. Surprise! They didn't.
• Qigong — One of the people in my insomnia forum just couldn't stop gushing about this evening qigong routine she'd found on Youtube and how it had changed her life and finally helped her get to sleep! So I tried it. I liked it the first time, because it was a little more active than most of the bedtime yoga, and therefore better able to help me channel any nervous energy I might be feeling. But ultimately, I got annoyed at how repetitive it was, and didn't really feel like it did anything for me.
• Acupressure — There are approximately one million acupressure points associated with sleep, anxiety, and insomnia. Press on any known acupressure point (or just pick a random spot on your body) for 5-30 seconds, and it will help you sleep at least as well as any other acupressure point! Trust me, I've tried them all. Yes, I'm being sarcastic, and no, acupressure did not seem to relieve either my anxiety or my insomnia. But it did give me a sore thumb!

Things you do while trying to sleep

• Breathing techniques — The internet is in love with breathing as a sleep aid: "I tried this one breathing technique and fell asleep in 2 minutes!" and I click on them, every time, like a sucker. There's box breathing, and 4-7-8 breathing, and 4-6 breathing, and the main difference between them is how long you inhale vs. how long you exhale, and the main similarity between them is that they don't help me fall asleep. In fact, when I was experiencing anxiety and insomnia together, I found that deep breathing often did the exact opposite of what it was intended to do: it made me panic!
• Progressive muscle relaxation — I learned about progressive muscle relaxation decades ago. It's a simple technique in which you tense up your muscle groups one at a time and then let them go, which causes them to be much more relaxed than before you started. A variation on this, which I recall was developed by the military to help soldiers sleep in adverse conditions, is to focus on each part of your body starting with your head, and consciously let it go limp. I have used both techniques successfully in the past, but they are not much good if the trouble sleeping is more in your mind than in your body. I've gotten myself as floppy as a wet noodle, but I was still so stressed out about still being awake, that there was absolutely no chance of sleeping!
  
• Directed thought —  One of my oldest problems with falling asleep is that my mind just tends to wander to ever more interesting topics, keeping me awake for longer than I should. So over the years I learned to keep my mind on track and fall asleep by playing the Alphabet Game, which I described in an earlier post. When that stopped working for me, I came up with other ways to distract my brain: sometimes I'd plan outfits for the next day; sometimes I'd try to list things I was grateful for; other times, I'd just try to retell the events of my day. Sometimes I'd fall asleep while thus occupied, but more often than not, my brain would go into that blank state where I could no longer think but I could not sleep either.
  
• Counting down — This is a specific form of directed thought that deserves special mention, because it is commonly suggested as a way to help you sleep—despite being basically identical to the generally-accepted-as-useless counting of sheep. It's pretty simple: count down from 100. I found myself hitting zero with this strategy more times than I could count (hehe), so I upped it to 1000. I think I only succeeded in falling asleep twice. Usually it was so boring, that my mind would slip away from me and get back to its regularly scheduled ruminating or utter emptiness.
  

Environmental modifications

• Lavender — Spray your pillow with lavender! they say. It'll help you sleep! they say. Well, I can tell, you, I sprayed my pillow with lavender, and all I got was a streak of essential oil on my wall that I cannot remove from the paint job to this day. It did smell nice, I'll give it that.
  
• Blue-light-blocking glasses — I'm sure you've heard by now that the blue light emitted from all our electronic devices is wreaking havoc on our circadian rhythms. Blue-light-blocking glasses are all the rage, and naturally I had to try and reduce my exposure to blue light once I became an insomniac. I had some orange-tinted sunglasses already that I co-opted for the purpose. They did not have a discernible impact on my ability to sleep, but they are one of the few things on this list that I'm still using. Can't hurt, right?
  
• Banning stuffed animals — I'm saving this one for last, because it's definitely the most paranoid thing I've done in a bid for better sleep! Yes, I confess, I sleep with stuffed animals. Hey, when you're lonely and you want to cuddle, there's no shame in taking what you can get! But after my breakup, I made the mistake of taking solace in this plush elephant that had been gifted to me by my recent ex. Every night I tried to sleep with the elephant, I slept abysmally. Uh, maybe it was because I was sleeping abysmally every night regardless, but somehow I got the notion that the elephant was contributing to my insomnia. I refused to sleep with the elephant after that, and soon eschewed all my plush toys entirely. I don't think the elephant had one shred of influence in whether I slept or not, but I still let it direct my sleeping habits to a rather large extent!
  

My forbidden friend. Look closely and you'll see the streak
of lavender oil trailing down the wall next to her left ear!

 

Now I want to make it clear that there's nothing inherently wrong with doing any of the things on this long, long list! By all means, put away your childish things if you're ready for it. Do all the yoga your heart desires, and go buy yourself a spa if you're really into hot baths! But just be aware that if you're doing these things for the express purpose of eliminating your insomnia, it's probably not going to help much, and it may even backfire.

I had to learn this the hard way, but I'll give it you for free: Sleep cannot be forced. Whenever you put conscious effort into trying to achieve it, it won't happen. Sleep is like your friend's skittish cat—you know the one! The more attention you pay to it, the farther it runs away. But turn your back and stop caring, and it'll be in your lap before you know it!

So I had to stop trying all these useless things to improve my sleep, and learn to just let it take its natural course. We're almost at the part of the story where I had that realization. Stay tuned for the turning point!