If you love your bed, (don't) let it go

A typical pre-insomnia workday

The hardest part about getting over insomnia (yes, I say every part was the hardest part!) was divesting from my bed.

As I mentioned in "Bye, Bye, Beddie," a good portion of my pre-insomnia leisure and relaxation time was spent in my bed. But the rules of stimulus control are clear: your bed should only be used for sleep (and, as they almost always tack onto the end, sex). So I stopped using my bed as a hangout spot.

You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone, and as soon as I stopped using my bed for recreation, I realized how much I had loved it. And how much I missed it!

When I would pass my bedroom during the day and glance inside, just the sight of the bed filled me with longing. Not a longing for sleep, but merely for a comfortable place to lie down.

Though I tried to replace the bed with a yoga mat, it was kind of like trying to replace ice cream with non-dairy frozen dessert—disappointing! A yoga mat is a poor substitute for a cushy (or even medium-firm, as I prefer it) mattress, and the necessity of unrolling the yoga mat every time I wanted to relax took a lot of enjoyment out of it.

The living room couch was a much softer option, but it wasn't big enough for me to chill out in one of my favorite positions—on my stomach with a game or book in front of me. I wasn't able to chill out at all when DC's famous July heat and humidity hit full force, and the only comfortable room in the house was my bedroom with its window air conditioner. The bedroom was also a place of blessed privacy—whereas in the living room, I always felt like I was on public display.

On some days when the yearning for my bed grew to be too much, I would rebelliously grab my iPad and try to take my lunch break there like the old days. But the guilt about breaking the rules always ruined it for me. I'd start to wonder whether I was sabotaging my sleep, then I'd get nervous and lose my appetite, and eventually I just gave up, abandoning my guilty pleasure and returning to an approved daytime venue.

I constantly debated with myself about whether this sacrifice was really necessary. On the one hand, I'd spent years flopping into bed whenever the mood struck, with nary a negative consequence (though it could be one reason I was never a great sleeper). I'd spent the past year+ spending almost all my down time in bed without it having any measurable impact on my sleep.

But rules are rules. The sleep experts wouldn't tell me not to do it if there weren't a good reason! Or would they?

When justification for this rule was given, it was always that you want to make your bed a subconscious trigger for sleep. If you're always doing other things in your bed, then you weaken that association.

But the rule almost always makes a clear exception for sex, and if you can make an exception for one activity, then why not make exceptions for others? How much harm would it really do, if I were to lie on top of my bed doing non-stressful activities like reading and eating? Would that innocuous behavior really jeopardize my sleep that much? Has this been quantified anywhere?

I looked it up. Although I could find plenty of evidence that stimulus control therapy does help people improve their sleep, it was unclear how much, if at all, the one behavior – avoiding the bed during the day – really contributed to the overall success, as it was seemingly never evaluated separately from other behaviors—such as leaving the bed when you're having trouble sleeping at night.

My personal suspicion was that it wouldn't make much difference. I even made a list of reasons why my patterns of recreation in bed would have minimal impact on its sleep-stimulus effect:

1. I almost always do activities in the bed in a face-down position, but when I am sleeping in the bed, I lie on my back or side.
2. I do activities on top of the covers, but I sleep underneath them.
3. I don't use pillows when doing activities in the bed, but I do when I'm sleeping.
4. When I do activities in the bed, it is sunny out or the lights are on. When I sleep, I sleep in darkness.
5. When I do activities in the bed, I always have objects to interact with (food, books, tablet). When I sleep, these are absent.

Solid reasons, sure, but all the logic in the world couldn't hold a candle to my paranoia. I didn't want to take a chance on being wrong and ruining my sleep because of it.

 

 

So I set up a bed-beside-the-bed. I folded a comforter into fourths and placed it on top of a spare yoga mat, and rolled it up for storage. When I wanted to lie down during the day, I'd unroll it onto the floor, throw down some pillows, and left it out to use whenever I felt like it that day—reading, gaming, and eating to my heart's content, secure in the knowledge that no rules were being broken.

Problem solved! But not for very long. After I'd been using my "insomnia bed" for a couple months, I began to feel discontent again. Sure, it was an improvement over the couch and the yoga mat, but it still wasn't the ideal hangout spot. It was still more rigid than a mattress, and when I lay on my belly, my splayed elbows were always contacting hard objects like the flooring and furniture. Plus, my dog, who believes that everything on the floor belongs to him, missed no opportunity to steal my food whenever I left it near this ersatz bed. When he wasn't slobbering into my water cup, he was tracking dirt all over the bedroll itself; being on the ground, it was always gritty and festooned with dust bunnies. And the final (perhaps most weighty) fact remained: there's something deeply gratifying about being able to throw yourself dramatically onto a bed and instantly relax—something that cannot be replicated when you first have to unroll the bed, arrange some pillows, and then gingerly lower yourself into the narrow space between your real bed and the cedar chest.

I missed my real bed so much! I had to put in a lot of work to overcome insomnia, but most of it made me feel good that it was helping me progress. Giving up the bed was the only part of it that actually made me sad!

In September, when I had worked myself up to at least 6 hours of sleep most nights, I began experimenting with using the real bed for activities other than sleep (or even sex!). I figured if I were facing a different direction, the conditions would be so different from the conditions for sleep, that they wouldn't interfere. I eased into it slowly, starting by lying on the bed crosswise and setting my books and entertainment on the bedside table so I wouldn't see any part of the bed. Then, I graduated to a diagonal position, facing the corner of the bed on the the side opposite where I usually sleep. This abundance of caution may sound excessive – even superstitious – to someone who has never had insomnia, but I was truly afraid to break the rules, because I didn't want to risk triggering a relapse.

Then on September 25, while researching material for this blog, I stumbled across the truth that finally set me free!

Daytime bed avoidance is a key part of of stimulus control therapy for insomnia, but it is also an element of sleep hygiene. While most insomnia experts admit that sleep hygiene is known to be ineffective in curing insomnia, I only know of one to claim that "sleep hygiene is %@$&*" and that it "makes insomnia worse!" That particular expert is Joseph Pannell.

In his video, "10 evidence - based techniques to treat Insomnia..." he cautions the viewer against making "sleep efforts," because, as we now well know, the harder you try to sleep, the harder you make it to sleep. He specifically mentions "avoidance sleep efforts," which are the things you avoid doing because they could negatively affect your sleep. Avoiding some things sometime, like caffeine and alcohol, is all well and good, but Joseph's point seems to be (and I'm paraphrasing a lot here!) that if your fear of sleep disruption leads you to constantly avoid things that make you happy, then you're reinforcing the control that insomnia has over your life.

Or, to quote his video, "Whilst these things can impact your sleep...treating your sleep like it's something fragile just causes you to obsess and worry about sleep more, and it causes you to limit your life...and take your feeling of control and agency over it. So the best way to...get that agency back...is if you've got something you enjoy and you love to do, teach your brain that insomnia is not a threat....Go and do it anyway."

To me, that was a clarion call to dive headfirst into my bed and do things! Not just sleeping and sex, but any darn thing that happens to bring me joy! My weeks of sorrowful abstinence had made it clear that using my bed as a spot for daytime relaxation does bring me joy. It's possible that doing so could slightly weaken the association between the bed and sleep, but I have an indomitable sleep drive, and this one little habit was not going to make or break it. And so I returned to unrestricted bed use.

I can't recommend that everyone follow my lead and completely disregard any rule of sleep hygiene or CBTi as they see fit. After all, I'd been playing by the book for over 3 months (longer than I'd had insomnia before starting CBTi!) before making this change. So the therapy had had plenty of opportunity to do its magic.

But for me, it was time. Once you become an expert in the rules, that's when you can start to break the rules—and I think I have reached the point where I am an expert in sleep. To me, returning to this beloved pre-insomnia habit was one of the best (and most delightful) indicators that I'd finally gotten a handle on my sleep.

I'd always loved being in bed. Now, without the fear of insomnia getting in the way, I was finally able to follow my heart and treat my bed, not like some sacred relic, but like a good friend.

Mindfulness over Matter

One thing I've heard from several recovered insomniacs is that their sleep only improved once they stopped caring about their sleep. That's something I really struggled with.

In my last post, I addressed how I stopped (or at least reduced!) my worry about sleep by acknowledging that my fears about insomnia were disproportionate to the actual harms of insomnia. But not worrying is a step below not caring. Only by not caring could I truly break free of my attachment to sleep and avoid the pitfall of simply finding a new aspect of sleep to fret about.

For me, not caring was probably the hardest thing about recovering from insomnia. Even armed with an arsenal of reassuring facts, I would still go to bed many nights and be subsumed by a wave of performance anxiety. Because I still really, really, really, wanted to sleep! And because sleep is a contrarian little cat, that of course made it really, really, really difficult to actually sleep!

To address this issue, my sleep training introduced seven principles of mindfulness for sleep, which I could use to become more calm about my situation and consequently make sleep more likely. 

 

To ensure I would remember them, I made a big, ritualistic production of writing them all out in colorful calligraphy inks onto a piece of cardstock. Then I leaned them up against the back of my medicine cabinet, so I could look at them every night as I was brushing my teeth.

In an apropos twist, I was so eager to finish my work of art that I left off the final principle – patience – but I don't think I was harmed too much by its absence.

On my difficult nights, I would try to recite them all by heart, to remind myself to LET GO of my frantic desire to sleep and TRUST that my body would sleep when it was ready. And even if that wasn't to be that night, I should be able to ACCEPT my sleepless state and avoid working myself up into the kind of despair that I experienced in the past.

For a while there, during my insomnia's darkest days, "I'm at the end of my rope!" was basically my catchphrase. But I learned  to approach insomnia with equanimity, and that has made all the difference! I can't always control my sleep, but I can control how I react to it. 

If you choose to dwell on the positives rather than the negatives, you find that even when you do have insomnia, it's really not that bad. And if you truly believe that, your mind can relax and finally give you the sleep that you finally stopped striving for.

It's paradoxical, but it works!

Adventures in Cooking: Pasta with veggie dogs and mustard sauce

When I first became a vegetarian as a teenager, I was cuckoo for veggie dogs. But, over time, they became less and less appealing, until, the last time I bought them, I ate one and realized I just couldn't eat any more. But not wanting to waste food, I stuffed the remainder of the package in the freezer, and tried to think of ways that I could make them more palatable.

I think the veggie dogs alone have a texture that could make any processed-food-lover run for the hills, but I had always enjoyed them more when encased in a hot dog bun. The only problem with that is I'd stopped buying bread a long time ago, making do with whatever happened to come along with my restaurant orders, so I never have enough bun-like material at home to accompany an 8-pack of veggie dogs. Besides, vegetarian food is pretty high in carbs already, so there's no need to stack the starches by adding a nutritionless hunk of white bread. What other flavors could I use to give these veggie dogs a second chance?

Pasta was my first thought. While I have nixed the purchasing of bread, I still make an exception for chickpea pasta, which is relatively high in protein and low in carbohydrates. I always keep a box in the pantry for emergency situations like this. The solution to my glut of veggie dogs was a pasta dish with veggie dogs mixed into it. 

 

The next question was, what should I use to give the pasta flavor? I hate, like many foods, the most popular pasta topper: tomato sauce. So that was a no-go. I have some jarred alfredo sauce, but I didn't want to ruin it on a dubious experiment. Using the memory of my once-boundless love for veggie dogs, I recalled my favorite condiment on them was mustard. So if I could find a pasta sauce based with mustard, I'd be golden! (Just like the mustard! Get it!?).

You might think a mustard-based pasta sauce sounds a little unusual (I did), but the Internet usually delivers. A quick Google search turned up a recipe, and I was on the road to an Adventure in Cooking! And now, lucky reader, so are you!*

Pasta With Mustard Cream Sauce and Veggie Dogs

Ingredients

• 1 box rigatoni pasta 1/2 box chickpea penne
  
• 1 1/2 tsp salt, divided ummm, some salt
• 1 tsp oil Did that say 1tsp? Oops, I misread! Use 1 Tbsp oil
  
• 1/4 cup chopped onion Sprinkling of dehydrated onion
  
• 2 cloves garlic, minced Sprinkling of garlic powder
  
• 1/4 cup chicken broth vegetable stock
  
• 1/2 cup heavy cream frozen half-and-half, thawed and reconstituted as well as you can get it, though it will never return to its formerly creamy glory
  
• 3 Tbsp Dijon mustard
• 1 tsp dried tarragon ... or, if you don't have tarragon, just consider what you think tarragon probably tastes like, and then pick the most similar spice you have, which for me, turned out to be my last few desiccated sprigs of rosemary.
  
• 1/4 tsp black pepper
• Fresh Parmesan classy Kraft Parmesan from a jar
  
• Fresh basil
• Veggie dogs
• Canned mushrooms (but only if you happen to have the remains of an unfinished can in your freezer).
  

Instructions

1. Heat a large pot of water over high heat. Add 1 tsp salt and pasta. Cook for 6 minutes. Seriously, my friend, your time is too valuable and your indoor humidity too high to be cooking pasta over a stove. Get thee an Instant Pot (or a low-budget alternative), and cook your pasta according to this formula... or just wing it from memory, add two minutes instead of subtracting two, and still come out with most acceptably cooked pasta, and some overcooked bits of it splattered all over the inside of your pressure cooker. Don't forget to add the salt, though—that's one rare thing the original recipe got right!
   
2. In a medium skillet, heat 1 tsp oil over medium heat. Add onion and cook for 3-4 minutes or until softened. Add garlic and cook for one minute. Y'all, what is this obsession in the cooking world with pre-sautéing your aromatics!? Does it really taste so much better that it's worth the additional time and oil burns all over your arms? I think not. You have my blessing to just dump your powdered spices straight into the mixture without following this gratuitous step. But if you're curious, as I was, and realize you're going to need to turn on the burners eventually, you might as well try to pre-roast the spices in a dry saucepan before adding the remaining ingredients. Does it improve the flavor? Does it ruin it? I don't know, but at least it will neither take very long nor result in oil splattering everywhere!
   
3. Add chicken broth and cook for 2-3 minutes.
4. Whisk in mustard and tarragon and cook for another 2-3 minutes.
5. Whisk in heavy cream and cook for 1 minute. Forget about all this laborious adding of ingredients and stirring and adding more! What are you, made of minutes!? You can put all the remaining ingredients (except the basil, Parmesan, pasta, and dogs) in one saucepan, stir it up, and set it all on the back burner to simmer while you work on the main event: the dogs. Stir periodically if the spirit moves you.
   
6. 
   Since you never used the oil that was intended for roasting the garlic and onion, you can use it to fry your veggie dogs. Pour some liberally into a skillet and let it heat up, while simultaneously slicing your still-slightly-frozen veggie dogs as thin as possible (the better to minimize their flavor when you eat them!) into the skillet.
   
7. Dump the frozen chunk of mushrooms into the skillet with the veggie dog slices. As it thaws, you can peel off mushrooms until all of them are mixed in and somewhat warm. Simultaneously push the veggie dogs around in the oil until they start to look cooked.
8. Add hot pasta to sauce and toss to combine. Cook for an additional minute.
9. Add veggie dogs to sauce and toss again.
   
10. Wonder why the original recipe mentioned basil and Parmesan in the ingredients list, because that was the end of the instructions, and their function was never explained. Figure they're supposed to be for garnish, so pour yourself a bowl of this pasta mastapiece, sprinkle with some Parmesan cheese, and then top with a few leaves of basil from your garden. You had a fresh herb on hand, which totally gives you chef points! High fives!
    

High fives also, for completing this recipe! When you eat it, you will no doubt be delighted. Or at least you won't go hungry for the night.

It's actually not that bad, and it looks so cute with the fresh basil on top and the fall decor in the background! But the veggie dogs are still barely palatable. Let this be a reminder to never buy veggie dogs again, no matter how cheap they are on sale!

 

*If you're not an adventurous cook, but you like the idea of pasta in creamy mustard sauce, I suppose you can try the original recipe, here.

Mission: Cognition

Sleep restriction and stimulus control were the main behavioral interventions for tackling my insomnia, but they don't call the treatment cognitive behavioral therapy for nothing! A large portion of it involved addressing the thoughts and fears that were contributing to my lack of sleep.

It's easy to follow a bunch of rules: Get out of bed at the same time every morning! Don't go to bed if you're not sleepy! Don't stay in bed if you can't sleep! It's a lot harder to change your unconscious responses and entrenched beliefs, but these were probably the biggest factors that were keeping my insomnia alive.

"I can't sleep." "Why am I still awake?" "I have forgotten how to sleep." "OMG, the sun is rising in 2 hours and I still haven't slept!" "What if I have fatal insomnia?" Thoughts like these are not restful thoughts! They are the kind of thoughts that get your your mind racing and your heart to follow suit, until your entire body is on high alert.

Learning to recognize these thought patterns and how they were sabotaging my sleep was vital in my recovery. And the first step was gaining a basic comprehension of how sleep works. I don't want to pass myself off as any kind of expert, but here's the gist of what I learned, told maybe just slightly more dramatically than how I learned it.

 

Sleep is basically controlled by a constant, epic battle between two forces: sleep drive and arousal. Sleep drive is, in essence, a measure of how badly your body needs to sleep. When you first wake up in the morning, your sleep drive is low because you're well rested, and it builds up over the course of the day until you're (normally) ready to fall asleep again at night. Sleep drive is controlled by one factor and one factor only: how long you've been awake. Longer wakefulness = more sleep drive, and enough sleep drive always leads to sleep eventually.

However, sleep drive doesn't operate in isolation. It can be suppressed by the other major player in the sleep arena: arousal. No, I'm not talking about sexual arousal—come on guys! It's just a word that means... well... the opposite of sleepiness. Lots of factors can contribute to arousal—being uncomfortable or in pain, chemical stimulants, excitement, emotional distress, and fear. When you have enough mental arousal, it overrides your sleep drive, and you will not be able to sleep.

Arousal typically has an edge over sleep drive, because you need to be awake in order to respond to potentially dangerous situations. However, in the mind of an insomniac, sleep itself gets conflated with a dangerous situation (because of all the conditioning that has linked bedtime with worry and wakefulness). Consequently, the insomniac develops more fear and worry about sleep, experiences more nighttime arousal, and sleeps even less!

It seems so obvious when I see it explained like that, but it was a breathtaking revelation to me when I was still in the thrall of insomnia. My sleep wasn't some magical entity that had decided to abandon me; I had driven it away with my own thoughts! In order to sleep well again, all I had to do was replace my negative and erroneous beliefs with reassuring facts, and gain control of my feelings about sleep.

Here are the facts that helped me turn the corner on insomnia.

1. You can sleep.

This is the tagline on all of Martin Reed's Insomnia Coach videos, and with good reason. When I was struggling with insomnia, I worried extensively about my ability to sleep. At times, I thought I really had lost it entirely. This was of course completely silly, because I did sleep, every night. Maybe for only one or two hours, and maybe only with the aid of some substance or other, but I always did fall asleep. This should have clued me in to the fact that I hadn't lost my ability to sleep, but I needed to hear it in words. And I did. At the height of my insomnia, I would watch a Sleep Snippet video every evening, just for the reminder.

2. You can't force sleep.

Learning how sleep drive is the one and only thing that can make a body sleep was an immense weight off my back. I was immediately liberated from all the time-consuming practices I'd adopted to help me sleep. All that nighttime yoga, the binaural beats, the experiments with meals and their timing, the neverending guided meditations and breathing exercises—I could throw them all away, because none of them were going to make me sleep! They might help me relax a little, and they certainly weren't harmful, but they weren't going to make any significant difference. All I really needed to do was wait to sleep until my body was ready for it.

3. Sleep always wins.

This is another direct quote from Martin Reed, but I found it incredibly reassuring. In the epic battle between sleep drive and arousal, arousal may take the upper hand for a while, but even chronically sleep-deprived folks experience micro-sleeps, and even hardcore insomniacs crash after several days awake. It's impossible to go without sleep forever, and once I internalized that fact, I was able to go to bed with confidence that eventually I would fall asleep again. In the past, I had felt like I was at the mercy of my insomnia, but now I realized, my insomnia was only just barely holding its own against my indomitable sleep drive.

4. You're probably sleeping more than you think you are.

One fact (backed up by research) I keep hearing is that "normal" sleepers generally overestimate how much sleep they get, whereas insomniacs tend to underestimate it. I found a video explaining that if you are woken up during stage 2 non-REM sleep, you only have a 50% chance of believing that you were asleep at all! Knowing this, I could recall plenty of nights when I thought I hadn't slept, but time had seemed to pass much too quickly for me to have been awake. Another sleep expert said that if you can't tell whether you were asleep or awake, you were probably asleep. Deciding to believe that I'd actually been asleep during those ambiguous times made me feel a lot better! Even if I wasn't sleeping great, I was still probably getting some amount of much-needed rest.

5. Going without sleep is not a catastrophe.

This one walks the line between fact and belief, but it's rooted in logical analysis and an evidence-based conclusion. One of the things I was encouraged to do in my sleep training is interrogate my beliefs about sleep. For example, when I was lying in bed at night and starting to panic over the fact that I was still awake, I was supposed to ask myself things like, "What is the worst thing that could happen? What is the most likely outcome?" When I put my thoughts to the test, I realized the worst-case scenario was that I would not sleep at all and start a run of several nights of no sleep, resulting in a mental breakdown and administration of benzodiazepines in the ER (it's a story oft told in my insomnia support group). Honestly, I think that would be a catastrophe—but it had never happened to me. It was much more likely that I'd at least sleep a couple of hours once I calmed down, and the sleep deprivation from this night might even make it easier for me to sleep the next night.

Arming myself with these facts had an almost immediate positive impact. I no longer stressed about sleep all day long. Once I stopped thinking about sleep all the time, I also stopped feeling tired all the time. So even though I was sleeping much less than I ever had before, I still felt pretty energetic during the day. It was a great shift, and it helped give me the emotional strength to tackle the greatest challenge yet—adjusting my attitude.

But I'll save that topic for another post.

Bye, Bye, Beddie

Before I developed insomnia, I always made sleep a priority—I stuck to a strict bedtime, never allowing myself to get derailed by Netflix binges or the other pitfalls of less dedicated sleepers. I was proud that I almost always woke up before my alarm and never needed coffee to help me function. You could say I was a bit smug about my superior sleeping habits.

Once I developed insomnia, I learned pretty quickly, though, that I'd actually been routinely committing one of the cardinal sins against sleep: I was hanging out in my bed pretty much all the time.

Do any quick Internet search for how to sleep better, and you'll find a list of tips. It is a very rare list among them that doesn't mention the following: "Use your bed only for sleep and sex."

Well, whoopsy-daisy; I'd made a habit of using my bed for pretty much everything! As someone who's spent most of her life in group living situations, I've long been used to spending much of my time in my bed, as it's the only private space where I can relax. During the COVID stay-at-home orders, my bed turned into the home base for all my leisure activities. iPad gaming, book reading, virtual happy hours, movie nights, lunch, dinner, snacks—it all happened on my bed!

As soon as I learned that daytime bed use is a sleep-hygiene no-no, I stopped. When I wanted to play iPad games, I did it at my desk or on the couch. I started eating my meals at the coffee table. On those occasions when I really needed to be alone and horizontal, I'd unroll my yoga mat and have a quick lie-down in my home office. I missed my mattress, but I was going to do whatever it took to sleep better!

Whatever it took to sleep better meant not only staying out of bed during the day, but also leaving the bed frequently during the night—specifically, I was supposed to follow this rule: "If you've been in bed for 30 minutes and still can't sleep, get up and do something relaxing until you feel sleepy."

I didn't know it initially, but this practice of getting out of bed, along with the sleep restriction that I described in my last post, is one of the hallmark techniques of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, and it's known as stimulus control.

"Stimulus control" isn't a very self-explanatory term. What's the stimulus, what are you controlling, and what does it have to do with insomnia?

As it turns out, the meaning is rooted in behaviorism and the concept of conditioning. I am not a psychology professor, so if you really want to learn more about sleep-related conditioning, you might want to hear it from someone other than me, but in a nutshell, it means that if you stay in bed when you're wide awake, frustrated, or unhappy often enough, you're creating a subconscious association between the bed and those negative feelings. Pretty soon the bed itself becomes a stimulus for anxiety, stress, and subsequent sleeplessness! That explains why every time I went to bed, even if I was sleepy, I'd instantly become overwhelmed with panic and lose my sleepiness.

In stimulus control for insomnia, you get up before you start feeling frustrated, and you stop spending so many wakeful hours in bed, so it ceases to be a stimulus for those stressed-out wakeful feelings. Ideally, it should be a stimulus for the exact opposite – relaxation and sleep – which is why you're supposed to reserve the bed only for sleeping and not for all the myriad activities I had once used it for.

This is all well and good and logical, but – like all things about insomnia – not easy.

Since I'm basically a semi-sentient corpse when I'm awake during the night, I found it hard to get out of bed and find things to do, but I was committed to the cause! In early spring when my insomnia was still relatively young, I made myself a kit, complete with blanket, warm sweater, solitaire word game, book and book light, and a mug with a chamomile tea bag at the ready. With all these supplies next to my bed, I hoped to be able to drag myself to the couch and get comfy without having to exert too much brainpower.

The insomnia kit helped me feel a little more in control for a few nights, but I soon realized that reading a book on the couch wasn't always what I needed or wanted. Sometimes I was too tense to lie still. Sometimes my eyes hurt too much to read. Sometimes I was too hot for a blanket. But always, I was too tired to think. So the next development in my get-out-of-bed kit was an auxiliary brain.

I made a list of all the problems that plagued me when I couldn't sleep, and I came up with simple solutions that had worked for me in the past or that I had read in one of the many articles about sleep I'd been consuming. I compiled all these into a cute tiny deck of cards so that when I was awake during the night, I could easily reach for it, flip to whatever problem seemed to be the worst at the moment, and draw a random solution that I could try.

I was so proud of my deck of insomnia cards, but I never even cracked it open once! Turns out, when I'm awake at night and too tired to think and too frustrated to sleep, I'm also too tired and frustrated to remember new tricks. Instead of trying any of the constructive activities I so lovingly curated for myself, I resorted to the tried and true: sitting semiconscious on the couch, trying (and mostly failing) to read, or doing some light exercise until my panic would ease up. It was better than nothing, but never felt like victory.

I still struggle with stimulus control to this day. Thanks to my sleep training and several months of practice, I sleep relatively normally at present, but every once in a while, I'll think too much about insomnia during the day, and I'll get a little too anxious when I go to bed at night. Or I try to push the envelope and go to bed too early, or I have a bad night because I'm not feeling well. Then I find myself back in my old shoes, tangled up in the sheets and painfully conscious of the minutes ticking by. So I get out of bed, and wonder what to do with my time.

 

My latest idea was that I could sit on the couch and try to tell myself a story. It doesn't have to be a good story, just something to fill the time—but since sleepless nights usually find me with the mental capacity of an amoeba, I'm not sure I could even handle that. 

 

 

I haven't had much trouble falling asleep in the last month, but I know my time will come again. I can only hope that when it does, I'll be able to overcome my primal fears and waste no time getting back to bed, where I really prefer to be!

Early bird to night owl...and back again?

 

Early to bed and early to rise—that's been my philosophy ever since I was able to set my own sleep schedule. One of my boyfriends once called me "solar powered," because I always rose just after dawn and felt my energy start to wane as soon as sunset approached. To me, mornings are the best part of the day, and nights are only good for one thing: sleeping!

So for me, one of the worst parts of insomnia is that I'm forced to be awake during the night—when, even if I'm not sleepy in the slightest, I still have absolutely no motivation to do anything. Time awake at night is time completely wasted.

And yet, as I mentioned in my last post, a huge part of my treatment plan for insomnia involved deliberately staying up until very late at night in a technique called sleep restriction. It was one of the least enjoyable experiences I ever put myself through.

To implement sleep restriction properly, I had to set a "sleep window" during which I was allowed to be in bed. This sleep window was supposed to equal the approximate number of hours of sleep I averaged every night, plus 30 minutes for falling asleep—but never shorter than about 5.5 hours, because I wasn't supposed to deprive myself of too much sleep, should it miraculously occur. The sleep window was supposed to start and end at the same time every night, so that it could be the basis for a solid circadian rhythm. The start time was also known as my "earliest in-bed time." I was allowed to go to bed later than that if I wasn't sleepy yet, but was not allowed to go to bed earlier. The end time was my "latest out-of-bed time," because I was allowed to get up earlier if I was ready, but never supposed to sleep in past it.

The out-of-bed-time is the most important part of the sleep window, because getting up at the same time every day is the best way to set your internal clock and help you sleep at night. When I started this process, it was the height of summer, and the sun was rising shortly after 5am every day. Being solar powered, I would have preferred to set my wake-up time to around then, but there was a confounding factor: my social life.

It was a Hot Vax Summer, and I was taking every opportunity to go to concerts and other late-night activities. I was also dating this guy who happened to be a night owl. I wanted to align my sleep schedule more closely with his so we could have more quality time together, so I opted for a later end time of 7:30. I knew that on the nights I wasn't going out, I'd probably be able to wake up closer to 6:30, but that extra hour gave me a little cushion so I would still get a modicum of sleep on the nights I wanted to have fun.

The week I started my sleep training, I was averaging 4.3 hours of sleep a night, which meant I should set my sleep window to the minimum recommended time of 5.5 hours. Counting back from 7:30, that meant my bedtime would have be be no earlier than 2AM. Two A.M.! Every night! This early bird just about had a hairy canary before deciding 1:30 was good enough. If the sun was usually going to wake me up before 7, that made for a solid 5.5-hour sleep window most days. If a few days, I were to sleep an extra half-hour, it probably wouldn't ruin me.

What did seem to nearly ruin me, however, was actually staying awake. For someone who could easily lie sleepless in bed until dawn, I had a surprisingly difficult time staying up until 1:30.

A lot of people with long-term insomnia experience disruption to their internal clocks, and some claim to never get sleepy at all. I was (un)fortunate enough to have my prior circadian rhythms stay mostly intact, which meant that every night, like clockwork, I would start to feel extremely tired around 10 PM. Like eyes-refusing-to-open-staggering-around-the-house tired. You'd think being so tired would mean I'd sleep like a baby, but with insomnia, that is usually not the case, so it was vital that I power through the sleepiness and stick with the plan. I still had 3 and a half hours left until my sleep window, so I had to devise all sorts of techniques to keep me from crawling into bed early.

I began doing all my exercise late in the evening, just to keep me busy. I would wait until 11 pm and take my dog for a walk (fortunately we have a light-up leash that was practically made for this moment!). I would get home and do yoga at 12. Sometimes I would just pace the kitchen until bedtime approached. Occasionally a friend would call, and we'd have lengthy conversations that kept my mind off my tiredness. But often I would often get so exhausted that all I could do was sit on the couch and stare into space. At these times, I often accidentally nodded off for a few minutes.

And then, finally, the sleep window would open! I would drag myself into bed...and suddenly find myself wide awake, panicked again that I wasn't falling asleep!

One of the essential rules for recovering from insomnia is that you should never stay in bed when you are unable to sleep (I think I'll do a whole post on that topic, so hang on and find out why later), so at this point, I'd be obligated to get back out of bed. I'd return to the couch, sitting with that familiar dizzy, discombobulated, burning-eyed feeling that I get when my brain won't let my body sleep, until finally I felt calm enough to go back to bed for another try.

With results like that, was sleep restriction actually good for anything? Well, it's hard to say because it wasn't the only CBTi technique I was trying, but over the course of a few weeks, I did start to sleep longer on average. There were two things that sleep restriction definitely accomplished for me: 1 is that it helped me recognize what true (extreme) sleepiness feels like, so I could know what's an appropriate time to go to bed (hint: not when I'm just lazy and bored and tired of being awake!). 2 is that it helped me internalize the idea that you don't need to hop into bed as soon as your usual bedtime arrives. If you stay up later because you're not tired, it's totally fine—as long as you wake up at the same time in the morning to anchor your circadian cycle.

Over time, the sleepless portions of my night got smaller and smaller. When I was sleeping at least 85% of the time I was in bed, I was allowed to extend my sleep window. In early July, I pushed my bedtime up to 1:15, then two weeks later, 1:00. Only a few days after that, I pushed it again to 12:15 and then to midnight. By early August, I felt like I was making so much progress, that I stopped enforcing a bedtime, and just focused on waiting until I was sleepy and not really worrying too much about the clock. Nowadays, my bedtime seems to have stabilized at around 11 PM—more or less what it was before my insomnia started.

But if I'm being honest with myself, I have to say that I still want to do better!

During those early days of sleep restriction, I came to appreciate just how much I value the sunshine. I deeply regretted that I was missing out on an hour or more of perfectly good daylight by waking up so late, and I hated that I was spending so many of my waking hours in the pitch dark, just counting down the minutes until I could crawl into bed.

Unfortunately for me, my late-sleeping love interest didn't stay in my life very long—and as soon as we stopped hanging out regularly, I shifted my wake-up time to 7AM. Just today, I decided there was no good reason not to push it to 6:50. I am inching slowly towards the goal that partially set me on my path to insomnia in the first place—being able to wake up with the sun!

When I first started my sleep training, I was asked what my goals were. I said something about wanting to get enough sleep that I wouldn't feel like a zombie all day. To my surprise, I accomplished that very early in the training, so my goals quickly shifted: Now I want nothing more than to be able to wake up as soon as it's light and to sleep when it's dark. After having been a reluctant night owl for several months, I believe more confidently than ever that the mornings are the best part of the day and the nights are good for nothing but sleep! I never want to waste another hour of precious sunlight again! 

My old alarm clock / future self!

Enter Sandman

My insomnia story is taking longer to tell than it has taken to play out. For the parts that are chronological, I've only shared as far as early June, and here it is halfway through September! In that time, my sleep has improved a lot, but it's a slow process, and sometimes it regresses. Insomnia thrives on attention, and I have noticed that my sleep tends to be worse on the days I've been writing blog posts or spending too much time in insomnia discussion forums. I'm glad I've finally reached the part of the story where things started looking up. Hopefully the gains I experienced in my past will translate to gains in the present!

I had barely been an insomniac a month before I heard about one of the more effective techniques used in treating it: sleep restriction. With this strategy, you give yourself a "sleep window," a limited set of hours during which you're allowed to be in bed—typically about the same number of hours as you're actually sleeping, on average. With this restrictive window, you're more likely to actually be sleepy when you go to bed and thus more likely to actually fall asleep, and your sleep time is compressed, which generally means it's going to be higher quality with fewer mid-night awakenings.

Sleep restriction is just one of a whole suite of techniques for overcoming insomnia, known collectively as cognitive-behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBT-i.

I decided to try it for myself, choosing a sleep window between 2am and 7:30am on April 20th. Trying to keep myself up until 2 felt like the hardest task I ever set myself to! To keep myself occupied, I watched the 1997 version of Cinderella on Disney+, and – I'm sorry Brandy – but you will be forever associated with that traumatic night. All for nothing, too, because since I was doing it on my own with limited knowledge and no support, I failed miserably. I only tried sleep restriction 5 days, never once actually making it to my target bedtime, before I gave up.

I decided that if I was going to do CBT for my insomnia, I was going to have to do it with the assistance of a professional. The psychiatrists I saw never even suggested therapy as an option, and I was reluctant to seek out a therapist on my own while I was still receiving treatment. I was also still hoping against hope that my insomnia would resolve itself, as I still hadn't hit the magical three-month mark at which insomnia officially becomes "chronic."

On June 7, I hit that mark. Three days later, the day my second dose of Lunesta utterly failed me, I acknowledged that this brand of treatment was a waste of my time, and if I was going to get serious about fixing my sleep, I was going to have to start therapy. However, given what I knew about the availability of real-time therapists, and the inevitability of their costs, I decided to try a free option first: a 2-week email sleep training course, taught by none other than Martin Reed, the mystical Insomnia Coach from last post! I had become a huge fan of his Sleep Snippets videos and found lots of useful information in the forums on his website, so I figured I'd give his sleep training a try before forking over any big bucks.

Spoiler alert: It changed my life! 

The sleep training consisted of reading an email a day with behavioral tips, mindfulness tips, and information about how sleep works. Each day there was a question that I was expected to send in an answer to. Occasionally Martin even wrote back with personal replies! In the second week, the rubber met the road, as I was instructed on how to properly implement sleep restriction.

In the course of the two weeks, I didn't really start sleeping any better, but I gained a ton of confidence about my ability to sleep. I no longer felt like a prisoner of my insomnia. And even though I was barely sleeping any more than I had been, I felt 10 times happier and better rested during the day, simply because I had gained knowledge and skills and no longer lived in a constant state of despair.

After months of waiting, the Sandman had finally entered the building. But he wasn't about to sprinkle me with magical sleeping dust just yet! I was going to have to work for it.

 

In a future post, you'll hear exactly what that work looked like.

Insomnia Demystified

My insomnia story is just one among millions, and as it turns out, it's very similar to that of others. It's so similar that it can be predicted, with uncanny accuracy, by a fake mystic with a fake crystal ball in a pre-recorded video! Take a look.

In the video, Martin Reed, Insomnia Coach extraordinaire, tells me exactly who I am: "You're perhaps someone who's a bit more predisposed to sleep issues. You might just be a naturally light sleeper....Maybe you could be someone who's a little bit more reactive to stress, maybe a little bit more susceptible to anxiety." Right on, Insomnia Coach, right on! As you read in a past post, all of those claims are true.

In the video, my clairvoyant sleep coach continues: "Now I can see an event...something that triggered this sleep disruption and made sleep more difficult." That would be my breakup and ill-advised installation of programmable window blinds.

So far the crystal ball had a 100% success rate at predicting the course of my insomnia, and it's not about to disappoint me now! As Martin the mind reader describes it, "Even after this initial trigger was no longer an issue and not really relevant any more, your sleep issues remained....You might have maybe started thinking about sleep more than you ever had before...researching insomnia, worrying about sleep....More and more time during your day was spent thinking about sleep....You just started to modify your life in response to your insomnia."

Modifying my life in response to insomnia? Heck yeah! In addition to all the terrified researching and self-medication and desperate consultations with the doctor, there were loads of things I tried unsuccessfully to get my sleep back on track.

At this point, if Martin were a real psychic and not just playing one on YouTube, I'd be nodding eagerly and ready to hand over my life savings in order to find out what the spirits said about my prognosis. But in reality, what he does next in the video is debunk the entire magic act and explain exactly how he knew what was wrong with me, without actually knowing me!

I'm no special snowflake, he seems to imply as he shakes the snowglobe he was passing off as a crystal ball. Like that of practically every insomniac since the dawn of insomnia itself, my condition followed, as he describes it, "a well trodden and predictable path." Fortunately for fans of alliteration, that path is marked out by three easily remembered P-words: Predisposing factors, a Precipitating event, and Perpetuating factors.

For me, the predisposing factors were my natural tendencies that made sleep a little more challenging throughout my life. The precipitating event was the breakup that broke my brain. But most people survive a stressful event without becoming insomniacs. I myself have suffered many a previous breakup without permanently breaking up with my sleep! So what gives?

Here's a fun fact about sleep: Sleep deprivation can cause anxiety. Anxiety can cause sleep deprivation. In worrying so much about my breakup, I caused a major disruption to my sleep. The less I slept, the more I ramped up the anxiety, and the more the anxiety, the more likely I was to sleep poorly! And then, (because who wouldn't worry when they hadn't had a good night's sleep in 2 months!?) I began feeling anxious about that.

And thus, I introduced the third P of insomnia into my life: perpetuating factors. Perpetuating factors are the behaviors that insomniacs adopt, unwittingly, to keep their insomnia alive and kicking — and I had plenty of those. All that time I spent obsessing over my sleep, researching fatal sleep disorders, and whining to everyone who would listen about how horribly I was sleeping? Those were all actually making the problem worse! The more you worry about sleep, the harder it is to sleep. The harder you try to sleep, the more elusive it becomes!

While the predisposing and precipitating factors were basically just dealt to me by fate, the perpetuating factors were things that I actually had control over. In other words, I broke my own brain!

I discovered the YouTube video in this post after about 2 months of suffering insomnia. It was right around the time that I was beginning to worry in earnest about fatal insomnia...so this reality check was a huge relief to me. If I was just like every other person with insomnia who had ever lived, then I probably wasn't going to die of it. I might even be able to be cured! It was shortly after watching this video that I decided to take more deliberate steps towards fixing my sleep, by adopting the evidence-backed approach advocated in the video: cognitive behavioral therapy.

In a future post, I'll be telling you all about how that went!

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!

What does insomnia feel like?

"It's ___ A.M. and you're staring at the ceiling."

Insert any random hour between 1 and 3 in the blank, and you'll have the most clichéd line in the history of insomnia literature. Clichéd and completely untrue—at least in my experience!

When my insomnia was at its peak, I definitely spent many a 1-3 A.M. period painfully, miserably awake. But never, in all my sleepless nights, did I occupy my time staring at the ceiling. My eyes stayed firmly shut most of the night.

"Am I some weird freak of nature?" I wondered. "The only insomniac in the world who keeps her eyes shut?" My experience was so contrary to the stereotypical presentation of insomnia, that I began to wonder, To get a sense of what other people were going through, I asked Google what insomnia feels like. But I came up with almost nothing (except this one discussion from Quora, which was more about how people feel about their condition, rather than how the condition itself feels).

So here's how my condition feels to me! I'm sure everyone's not the same, but at least it's a glimpse into the life of one insomniac.

Nighttime

Every sleepless night starts about the same way. I usually crawl under the covers, turn to my side and roll up into a cozy ball. It's very pleasant and just right for falling asleep...except that never happens! This is the point where a lot of insomniacs report "racing thoughts." I have just the opposite problem—no thoughts at all!

If you're a normal sleeper and you're aware enough, you can usually tell you're falling asleep because your thoughts change from an internal narrative to a more dream-like quality—you hear voices that aren't your own, and see scenes play out in your mind's eye. When I'm trying and failing to fall asleep, these things don't happen. It's like as soon as I shut my eyes, my brain shuts off too! It is an absolute blank.

Sometimes (in better times), I play a game to help myself sleep, wherein I think of things in alphabetical order that fit into a given category. It's a simple game, just interesting enough to keep me focused, but just boring enough to easily drift away from into sleep. When I'm having an insomnia night, this game does not work! I am too tired to think of anything, categorizable or otherwise! I am struggling to form a thought, but nothing happens! I will lie there in a semi-comatose state, and after a half-hour to an hour, will realize I'm still awake and have nothing to show for it.

Sometimes I get tantalizingly close to sleep. It's at times like this that I feel sleep is an iced-over river. It's flowing just beneath me. I'm skittering along on the surface, so close, but I can't break through the ice! The moment I feel I'm about to fall into the stream of unconsciousness, I'll become aware of what's happening, and come fully awake with a jolt! I know at least in this I'm no weirdo; it's one of the most common topics of discussion in my insomnia forums.

Anyway, after several episodes of this, checking the clock each time and seeing the hours march relentlessly onward, I start to get anxious. My heart starts to pound, my entire body will get hot. I begin to feel trapped, like I have to escape! It's my fight-or-flight response kicking in, and once that happens, it is actually terrifying to stay in bed. I'll get up and try to do something physical – squats or pushups, laps around the kitchen – to release some of the tension.

The funny thing about this late-night wakefulness is that even though my mind is fully alert, my body most definitely is not! Some people supposedly do constructive things when they're unable to sleep at night: cleaning, or reading, or art. Most of the time I'm way too tired to do any of those. The best I can manage is to just sit on the couch and zone out. I'm slow and clumsy when I move; I can barely keep my eyes open. If I try, they burn with the fire of a thousand suns! Late enough into the night, not only are my eyes hurting, they're also rolling all over the place because I can't even get them to focus. Whatever I'm doing, I am definitely NOT staring at the ceiling!

Daytime

The amount of sleep I got on any given night actually has very little bearing on how I feel during the day. Some days I feel very tired; others, only a little tired. But yes, always some tired! 

 

The day after a night of bad sleep (which was, for me, for a while, every day), I always feel dazed and a little disconnected from the world. I want to constantly lie down and close my eyes. I feel run-down, unmotivated, and a bit stupid. My memory is like a sieve. Creativity is almost nonexistent. This is pretty much the same for every insomniac everywhere, so I don't feel the need to go into a lot of detail about those symptoms here.

One thing that felt a little unique, at least to me, was the anxiety. I've always been a mildly anxious person, so no stranger to the occasional panicky moment, but the early insomnia days were very intense. The slightest thought or startling sound would set off a cloud of butterflies in my stomach. Sometimes I'd even feel the shock like a kick in the head. I was always on edge and felt nauseated pretty much all the time.

While the constant nerves calmed down after a couple of months, I still to this day have a symptom that I have labeled "twitchiness." Sometimes I just get hypersensitive to the sounds that are around me. It feels almost like there's a direct line from my eardrums to my stomach, and whenever I'm in a quiet place and there's a sudden sound—even one as inocuous as a door opening down the hall, or my dog sighing—My stomach lurches, or sometimes my eyes blink or my head jerks involuntarily. It's as though I'm about to leap out of my skin but just don't have the energy for so much action. There are moments when I'll feel suddenly startled, and I won't even know why...until I review the past few moments and realize it was triggered by a sound that I wasn't even paying attention to consciously. I've asked other insomniacs about this and they say that it's relatively common. I've heard it varyingly labeled hyperacusis, misophonia, or even myoclonus, but it doesn't seem to be well documented as an insomnia symptom, aside from anecdotal accounts. 

This twitchy feeling can get quite irritating, especially when there are several incidents within a few seconds of each other. But the good news is, I've gotten pretty good at just ignoring all the other symptoms of insomnia and powering through my day!

 

The even better news is that lately, insomnia has barely bothered me at all! While I'm by no means achieving the amount of sleep I used to get before insomnia, I am sleeping much better than I was back in May and June. There's hope for insomniacs yet! Stay tuned—in the next posts, I'll be sharing how I finally started to turn my abysmal sleeping situation around.