Getting Clotheslined

I made passing mention of my newly purchased clothesline way back in 2020, promising a whole post about it that was very long in coming. But now it's here! You finally get to learn how a simple string brought joy into my life.

During the lockdowns of 2020, I spent a lot of time obsessing about dog fur. It was all over every surface of my home and every article of my clothes. When I took to the Internet in an effort to find something that would actually remove the fur and that wasn't a lint roller (single-use sticky plastic sheets? Not eco-friendly at all!), I came across someone's claim that hanging clothes out on a line was a surefire way to get the fur off them. Maybe it had something to do with all the flapping in the breeze, I assumed, but I didn't think about it too much.

That was just the final push I needed to get me to buy a clothesline, something I'd been considering for a while. I'd never been happy about using a hot air dryer—it's damaging to fabrics, uses a lot of gas and electricity, and generates indoor heat which is very undesirable at the height of summer. Hanging all my laundry to dry sounded pretty labor-intensive, but if it would reduce both my environmental footprint and the amount of dog hair on my clothes, it sounded like it would be labor well spent.

I ordered a retractable clothesline (made of plastic, ugh—but that was bound to hold up to the elements better than any natural materials) from Home Depot. It was 50 feet long, long enough to run from my shed to a corner of the house which conveniently already had nails sticking out of it, and once I'd figured out a way to attach the clothesline housing to the sheet-metal shed without ripping holes in the metal (I screwed through the shed wall into small wood blocks to help distribute the load), it was laundry time!

I quickly grew to love the clothesline. Although hanging the clothes took significantly longer than stuffing them into a dryer and pushing Start, I found something pleasantly quaint about the whole practice. And, as mindless chores go, it was oddly soothing to perform. At that time, I was working from home, so I could wash my clothes in the morning, and the minutes I spent doing laundry became welcome breaks from work. Plus, the colorful array of garments outside my window reminded me of a festive string of flags—like fun and functional backyard decor!

Of course, there are definite downsides to air-drying your laundry. If you start too late, it'll still be damp when the sun sets; and leaving it out overnight, while possible, tends to result in it getting dewy and slowing the drying process. Sometimes bugs crawl into the clothes or spiders build webs on them! So you really must start in the morning and have the better part of the day to leave the clothes outside. When you don't have the luxury of working from home, timing of the wash can be a challenge.

A 50-foot clothesline, no matter how tautly you pull it, will sag under the weight of its load, unfortunately low enough that even if the clothes don't quite touch the ground, they're still low enough that your dog can pee on them. Yes, it's happened.

I also find something disconcerting about airing my undies for all the neighbors to see, but I've found a way to work around that. I just I drape my more personal garments over the edge of the laundry basket and set them in a corner of the yard where they're hidden by a fence.

And then there's the matter of towels. Cotton terrycloth doesn't get very fluffy on a clothesline, but if you like drying yourself off with stiff sheets of sandpaper, it probably won't be a problem for you!

I wouldn't recommend using a clothesline as the only means of drying your laundry, because there are just some days when it's too wet or too cold for it to be practical. I still have the gas dryer for those days, but I use it a lot less now. The rest of the time, I happily put on my flapping fashion show. For me, the satisfaction of reduced energy use (and the joy of pretending I'm a pioneer woman!) outweighs the drawbacks.

Oh, and remember the reason I bought the clothesline in the first place? That part about line-drying being a panacea for dog-fur infestations? Well, I've left clothes on the line for days. I've left them out in high winds and torrential rains, and the fur in my sweaters remains undisturbed. All the forces of nature combined are no match for the tenacious grip of a single dog hair. So while hanging my clothes on a line has proved a welcome practice in many ways, in the specific area of dog-fur-management, I'll be hanged if I wasn't fed a line!

Valerie-Times Day XXXIX

This is the first time I've been single on Valentine's Day since 2013, so I didn't quite know what to do with myself.

Back then, I made a point of being bitter about my status every year, but I've grown up over the past 9 years and, either I've gained some maturity or I've lost the energy to wallow in self-pity. Who knows—maybe those are actually the same thing! In any case, I don't seem to have it in me to muster up much bitterness. In fact, I'm feeling a little upbeat about the whole thing!

This year, as soon as it became clear I would be without a lover on the day of love, I hatched a plan. At first, I intended to go to a Valentine's Day singles mixer (something I did the last year I was single as well), but as my weekend before it filled up with events, I realized what I needed more than anything was just a quiet evening in my own company. I logged out of the dating apps, turned down all two gentlemen who requested to see me that day, and planned a date with myself. To use an entirely hackneyed phrase, I was going to make it a day of self-love.

I would light all the scented candles in the house and take a shower with scented shower steamers. I would order a stuffed-crust pizza and eat cheesecake for dessert. I would cut my hair and epilate my face (because I've been putting those things off for too long; not because they are particularly indulgent treats). I would take a silly selfie with my dog. I would shop online for a gift for myself (a habit I started when I was single back in the previous decade, and continued even when I was partnered, because — let's face it — men are terrible at gifts). And I would do it all in the romantic ambience of my themed living room, which I had decked out in red-and-purple floral decor as soon as I put my Christmas decorations away for the year.

 

Though I was dead-set on having a true Valerie-Times Day—all by myself and blissfully free of men (who always seem to disappoint me on this most high-stakes holiday), somehow one managed to worm his way in. I'll spare you the agonizing details of what ensued, but it ended with him slinking out my front door like a wounded puppy, still clutching the bouquet that he'd thought to bestow upon me.

I could have handled that better.

It's true I had relished in the idea of a very anti-romantic Valentine's Day, but I hadn't planned on crushing anyone's heart quite so brutally. While I still got my much-anticipated evening of solitude, I spent most of it ruminating about what had gone down and how I could have avoided it, so it wasn't quite the celebration of singledom I'd hoped for.

The irony doesn't escape me. I'd spent most of my adult life feeling gypped on Valentine's Day—whether because of lack of a man or lack of effort from a man, but this was the first year ever where I wasn't going to let my happiness be influenced by men. And yet somehow, at the eleventh hour, my Valentine's Day was ruined by a man! 

 

At least I still got my cheesecake.

This Adventure in Cooking had a longer timeline than any before, and it was worth the wait. It's so delicious it needs no further introduction (or maybe that's because the painfully descriptive title says it all!), so I'm going to be like no food blogger ever and jump right to the recipe!

Mini cheesecake with lemon curd topping and a gingersnap crust

Prep time: 1.25 years

Cook time: zero minutes

Serves: 1

Ingredients

• 1 lemon tree + 1/2 Tbsp lemon zest
• Some gingersnaps you got from a Christmas cookie exchange
• 1 8-oz box cream cheese, room temperature
• 1 can sweetened condensed milk
• Sugar, Butter, Eggs, you know, all the usual suspects when it comes to making a delightful dessert

Instructions

The Lemon Curd

1. Start with a lemon tree. You'll probably want a dwarf Meyer lemon tree, because you want to be able to pluck those juicy ripe fruits right from the comfort of your living room in the middle of a January blizzard. You'll want to acquire this tree about a year and a half in advance, because you'll need time for it to flower, nearly die from overwatering, flower again, produce lemons, and ripen said lemons before you can move on to step two. Which is...
   
2. Harvest 2 lemons from your indoor lemon tree.
   
3. Use aforementioned lemons to make a mouth-watering lemon curd. Now, I know you can probably make lemon curd in your sleep, but if you have forgotten some of the steps, you can use this handy recipe. It is a little known fact that if you follow a recipe to the letter, the creativity gods will smite you, so make the following changes:
   1. Grate both of your lemon peels until they are limp as wet rags, but still be short by an entire half tablespoon of lemon zest (that's half the required amount)! Now you're faced with a dilemma: you can either harvest your last remaining lemon, grate its peel, and still be short 1/4 tablespoon, plus have a naked lemon to deal with; or you can top off the tablespoon with the dried lemon peel you always keep in the pantry. It really is no contest, but you should spend an inordinate amount of time deliberating before choosing the second option.
   2. Decide to use up the old pats of butter you pilfered from restaurants over the past month, rather than carefully measuring out your butter like some kind of square. Three single-serve pats and a big old slice from Cheesecake Factory oughta do it!
   3.  At least one more change of your own, to appease the creativity gods.

The Cheesecake

No-bake cheesecake is one of my favorite treats to have at the ready when I get a sugar craving. It's so easy to make, and there is no limit to the things you can top it with. I make this stuff on the regular, so believe me when I say I have pro tips!

1. Open the can of condensed milk and pour about 1/3 of it into the bowl of an electric mixer. This step is important to do first, because it will prevent the cream cheese from sticking to the bowl and failing to blend.
   
2. I hope you did allow your cream cheese to warm up to room temperature, because this will also enable it to mix more effectively. Another pro tip is to use real cream cheese, not the low-fat or neufchâtel variety. While those are very tasty and indistinguishable from full-fat cream cheese in most applications, in this recipe, they will remain gritty and produce a thinner mixture. Add the cream cheese, in small chunks, mixing with the electric mixer the entire time. I like to use the "cake mixes" or "cream" settings for this, which are medium speeds on my mixer.
   
3. Once all the cream cheese has been incorporated, drizzle more condensed milk into the mixture until it has reached your desired level of sweetness. It is possible to make this recipe using an entire can of condensed milk, but you get a thicker filling and less of a hit to your blood glucose if you hold back some of the milk.
   

The crust

No judgment if you like to eat your no-bake cheesecake straight out of the mixer bowl (it's that good!) but if you want your creation to resemble a proper dessert and have an additional layer of texture and flavor, then you should give it a crust.

1. Start with a slightly disappointing neighborhood Christmas cookie exchange. Now, you're no master chef, but even you know the difference between a burnt cookie and one that's fit to give as a gift. When you bust your butt making buckeye bars (one of your favorite desserts!) and give them all away, you hope to get something of comparable value in return. Not—just as a hypothetical example and not a real-life one, naturally!—3 different varieties of overcooked cookies and a baggie of "Soft Chips Ahoy." To be fair, there were some real winners in this cookie exchange of yours, but among them, the gingersnaps were not. They were a little bit tough, if you're being perfectly honest. While tough cookies are not a joy to bite into, they do make a decent pie crust.
   
2. So deposit one on your cutting board or crushing surface of your choosing, and
3. Have at it with a rolling pin! One cookie makes a nice crust for a single-serving  cheesecake, but you can feel free to crush all of them at once and make a full-size pie.
   

The assembly process

1. Spread a layer of crushed gingersnap into a bowl or pie plate.
   
2. Spread several healthy dollops of cheesecake filling over that.
   
3. Top it all with another healthy dollop of lemon curd!

This Insta-worthy dessert (Sorry, I still have not earned my food photography badge, but it really can be pretty if done right!) tastes even better than it looks! The best news is you'll have tons of lemon curd left over, so you can really knock the creativity gods' socks off when you come up with other things to do with it (and share them with me, please)!

This is one Adventure in Cooking that cannot be categorized, in even a small way, as a misadventure!

Luck be a ladies' room

 

I could be mad about being forced to come back to the physical workplace for no valid reason. I could be mad about having to spend my days soaking up asbestos in a dreary basement office and dodging cockroaches as I pick my way through the cluttered storage room that doubles as a kitchen mini-fridge station. I could be mad.

But how could I be mad, when I work in a building that has at least four women's restrooms!? When you work in a building with four restrooms, you're spoiled for choice! You're literally flush with options!

Whenever nature so much as whispers, you can answer the summons in any of three vastly different directions, entering a choose-your-own-adventure world limited only by your imagination! ...And the probably-finite number of restrooms.

To be perfectly honest, I have not made a full exploration of the sanitary options offered by my building, and so cannot say for sure just how many restrooms there are, or whether indeed the supply is limitless. But I can say that my journey of discovery has unearthed no less than three ladies' rooms that I employ regularly to the benefit of my worktime productivity.

It is oft said that low morale hampers motivation, but it can surely not be said that my morale is at any risk, as long as I have unfettered access to the smorgasbord of restrooms in my office building! Oh, the variety!

There's the OG main bathroom, with the most privacy out of all the restrooms. It has 2 regular stalls and one handicapped stall, so it's unmatched for providing personal space, and there's a single sink in a little alcove that I enjoy when I want to brush my teeth in solitude. I used this bathroom exclusively my first year on the job, until one day I noticed a coworker making frequent trips across the courtyard.

A brief investigation led to my rediscovery (I say "re" because this is the bathroom I employed when I was having wardrobe malfunctions the day I interviewed for my job) of the little 2-stall bathroom at the other end of the building. While the main bathroom will always hold a special place in my heart, the little bathroom boasts an indispensable full-length mirror in case I need to check my outfit before one of those valuable, frequent, and extremely necessary in-person interactions I'm always having at least once every 4 months.

Between the OG and the Little bathrooms, I happily divided my attention for years. The Little soon became my favorite because of its mirror, and also its location, which affords me a quick jaunt in the outdoors as I cross the courtyard to reach it. But on the flip side, it is right next to a classroom and gets clogged with students during breaks, so the main one with its three stalls was usually a safer bet.

Then one day, a little niggling discontent led me to a grand discovery. In my building (with two parallel wings and a main corridor between them), there are no bathrooms in my wing. There is a men's room just around the corner, but the nearest women's room on my floor (the OG bathroom) is almost twice that distance from my office. I was jealous of the men, and during one of my lazier days, I began to question whether it might be preferable to walk up to the second floor, where that coveted spot just around the corner is occupied by a women's room. Climbing the stairs would probably be better for my health and less time-consuming than walking all the way to the main bathroom or the little one, so I now use this bathroom more than any of the others.

The bathroom upstairs really has nothing to recommend it. It has three small stalls, one of which is usually blocked by the main door, and two of the toilets leak from the base, so there is always water on the floor. The other toilet constantly flushes when you're sitting on it. But this restroom is an option if you're ever trying to escape the crush of students between classes, or if your Fitbit is reminding you that you still need to climb more stairs today.

You could climb even more stairs and get to a treasure trove of other toilets! For example, I know there's one on the top floor—the dimly lit floor with the dormer windows that looks like it could double for Bastian's attic hangout during the scariest storm scene known to cinema...but then again, maybe three bathrooms are good enough!

Enough? No, three bathrooms are a gift! A blessing! No way I could have that kind of luxury working from home! How else could I experience the joy of relieving myself in cozy companionship, with only a thin metal slab between me and my nearest partner in pooping? And how else could I have one of those vaunted informal hallway conversations—you know, like the last one I had, about 3 years ago, wherein I was informed how great my pants were—that are the lifeblood of our college's mission? It would be impossible.

So I'll luxuriate in my wealth of options, dwelling in the possibilities, maybe changing my mind on the way to one bathroom and choosing another, because that is the kind of self-indulgence you can only afford when you are fortunate to work in a building with multiple restrooms. Luck truly is a lady—or rather, a ladies' room.

Miles to go before I sleep (like I used to)

Once upon a time, long before I ever had insomnia, I used to tell people I needed nine hours of sleep a night to feel well rested. Those were the good old days, when I went to bed around 10:30, hopped out again around 7:30, and spent most of the intervening hours sound asleep. Or so I thought.

In 2019, I inherited a used Fitbit with a sleep tracker, and for about a month, I used it to monitor my sleeping patterns. I never once slept nine hours—reaching a maximum of 8 hours and 19 minutes one night, and averaging about 7.5 hours. Of those 9 hours I was spending in bed every night, I was usually awake for one and a half of them! So it could be said that I was an objectively bad sleeper even when I didn't have insomnia...which is helpful to remember now that I'm attempting to get over my insomnia.

These days, just like then, I usually head to bed around 10:30 and drag myself out of it around 7:30. Most nights, just like then, my Fitbit reports dozens of forgotten wake-ups and a total sleep time of around 7 and a half hours. By all standard measures, I'm sleeping like I used to.

There's just one difference: back then, I never had anxiety about my sleep, and now I do. Here is the way things used to go in my good old pre-insomnia days:

• Some nights, I would go to bed at 9 just because I didn't feel like being awake any more. There was no way I was going to sleep that early, but I would lie in bed and rest until I fell asleep. I never worried about it.
  
• Some nights, I would get into an organizing frenzy and stay up until past 1AM moving furniture around. I never once told myself that I needed to stop and get to bed or I would hate myself in the morning.
  
• Some nights, I would go to bed and get captivated by a cascade of interesting thoughts. Before long it would be almost 1, but I still wouldn't feel bad about it. In fact, I'd be excited about all the cool new ideas I was having!
  
• Some nights, for no particular reason, I found myself still tossing and turning at 2AM. At that time, I'd usually put a few hours of sick leave on the calendar for the next day at work, so once I did fall asleep, I'd have the chance to stay that way until I was ready.
  

In all those circumstances, I never stressed about my failure to sleep. I knew I'd fall asleep eventually, and more than likely, I'd catch up by sleeping earlier the next night.

Then, insomnia. What insomnia took away from me was not my ability to sleep, but my confidence in it. After several nights of terrible sleep, I could no longer trust that I'd catch up the next night. And once I lost my confidence about the next night, I lost my equanimity about being awake right then. Soon, every moment that I was awake at night was a cause for extreme anxiety!

Well, since my sleep training and several months of practicing mindful sleeping, I no longer have the kind of anxiety that keeps me awake all night worrying about whether I'll be awake all night. But I'd be a liar if I said I had no anxiety at all. Most nights, there's still a brief wave of it—a moment or two after I pull up the covers, when my stomach does a backflip and my mind melodramatically proclaims, This is the moment of truth! The moment that separates the sleepers from the non-sleepers! When the dust settles, which side are you going to be on!?

Fortunately, I now have a pretty large bank of decent sleep saved up to give me confidence, and all it takes is a little mental un-pep talk to calm the irrational panic enough to let my sleep drive take over. Most of the time. But woe to me if I go to bed too early! Then I will lie under the sheets, my thoughts buzzing around like bees, until they inevitably turn to the question of whether this is going to be the night that I just don't fall asleep at all! Dun dun dunnnn!

Then I still have to resort to the stimulus-control tactic of dragging myself out into the living room, calming myself down, and only returning to bed once my eyes are like sandpaper and I can't string 2 thoughts together and it's almost certain that I'll fall asleep as soon as I hit the pillow. By this time, it's usually close to 4AM, so I can say with assurance that going to bed early usually backfires spectacularly. But on the plus side, just like the good old days, this night of terrible sleep is usually followed by catching up during the next one.

It is quite clear that thinking about my sleep is the largest contributor to my not getting enough of it, so it's probably time that I quit it for good. I recently read the story of a recovering insomniac's conversation with a recovered insomniac. The recovered one's way of dealing with insomnia after her sleep had started to improve was this: "I paid absolutely no attention to ‘it’ whatsoever. I pretended it wasn’t there. I decided I’m not going to give up another second of my life to this ridiculous problem."

I think it's time for me to do the same. While I'd say my insomnia is more in remission than absolutely cured, I don't believe there is any more that I can do on a conscious level to improve my sleep. There's nothing I can say to help other insomniacs that I haven't already said.

So, after 4 months and 16 posts, I'd like to declare this chapter in my blog closed. I sincerely hope I'll never have to write another post with the label "insomnia." I hope that soon, this entire saga will feel like nothing more than a bad dream. The best way to make that happen is to move on and abstain from insomnia blogging.

So, in closing, allow me to paraphrase the immortal words of everyone's favorite fictional insomniac: "The first rule of Sleep Club is you don't talk about Sleep Club."

Thank you, and good night!

Lessons learned from insomnia

It took me about 4 months to go from normal (though light) sleeper, to full-fledged insomniac, and back again, and let me tell you—sometimes it felt like 4 years! Time does have a way of dragging out when you're awake for 20 hours a day, and so much of that time was wasted in delays and false starts. If I could go back into the past and apply my 20/20 hindsight, I think I could have shrunk those 4 months down to just one, or maybe to none at all.

But the next best thing to saving myself from 4 months of sleepless torture is to save someone else! So all you fledgling insomniacs out there, take note!

Here's what I would do differently if I had to live through my insomnia all over again.

Get intervention sooner

The longer you have insomnia, the more difficult it becomes to treat. I slept poorly for 6 weeks before I even considered seeing a doctor, 7 weeks before I was able to get a prescription for sleep aids, and about 8 weeks before I actually took my first dose. By then, my insomnia was so entrenched, it had become a part of me, and no pharmaceutical was going to take it out. Looking back, I am confident that if I had had just a little help getting me over the stress of the first few days of my breakup, my sleep would never have become so disordered in the first place. I wish that I'd sought treatment for my sleep troubles as soon as I started worrying about them. It may have been difficult to get a prescription for sleep aids at that early phase, but I think I could have persuaded my doctor to give me a small supply of Lunesta if I emphasized that my sleep was getting progressively worse instead of better, and I wanted to break the cycle.

If you are getting medical care, advocate hard for yourself

I felt like I was swimming alone in the ocean during my brief stint as a psychiatric patient. I was given very little information about how to take my prescriptions and no information about what I should do if they weren't working. Since my appointments were 4 weeks apart, I wasted precious time, allowing my sleep to deteriorate even further, waiting to find out what I could try next. In retrospect, I wish I had been a lot more proactive. First, I should have only filled a small portion of my prescriptions, rather than a whole 30-day supply which subsequently went to waste along with my money. I should have also asked my doctor for a lot more information, such as: How long should I wait before I can expect to see an improvement in my sleep? In my experience, a sleep aid works best on the first night, and if that's not happening, then you need to try something else. If that were the case, I should have asked my doctor what I should do next. Try  changing the dosage? Try changing when I took it? Could I possibly have small quantities of multiple drugs to try on successive days, to make the most of the time between appointments? I don't feel like the psychiatrists I saw were invested in finding a solution with me, so I wish I had put less faith in their expertise at the beginning and worked harder to chart a course that would work for me, even with minimal participation from them.

Don't believe the numbers you hear—believe how you feel

When I finally diagnosed myself with insomnia, I took great stock in the published dichotomy – acute if it's been occurring for less than 3 months, chronic if more – and patiently waited for it to go away on its own, until it was officially chronic. Three months is an awfully long time to wait when you have a health condition where time is of the essence. Pretty early on, I knew instinctively that my insomnia had become self-perpetuating, but still I waited to get serious about treatment until I had crossed that arbitrary 3-month threshold. It is also helpful to remember that each individual has her own individual sleep needs. Many people start to develop insomnia because they start worrying about their sleep, even though there's nothing to worry about. They hear that you should be getting 8 hours of sleep a night (or you will die a horrible, slow death of cognitive decline and cardiac failure!), and they start to panic because they're not sleeping that much. Some people feel like they're not sleeping at night when they really are, and so they worry about it incessantly even though they're not tired during the day. When it comes to sleep, what's most important is how you feel. If you're not tired, you're probably getting enough sleep! Stop watching the clock and counting the hours, and just let your body do its thing!

You don't have to get out of bed if you've been lying awake for 30 minutes.

Another case where the numbers you hear are all but irrelevant is what I'm going to call the 30 minute rule. It goes like this: If you've been in bed for 30 minutes and you're still not asleep, get out of bed and do something relaxing until you feel sleepy. I saw this rule everywhere as soon as I started having sleep troubles, and it is by far the worst insomnia advice I ever got. I followed it religiously, which was silly, because never in my life had I been able to fall asleep within 30 minutes, and now I was expecting it to happen when I was having more trouble with sleep than ever before! For me, following this rule was 100% counterproductive. If I had been in bed for close to 30 minutes, I'd start to get anxious, knowing that in a few minutes, I would have failed in my endeavor and would be forced to get up. It put me in a constant state of anxiety that of course made it impossible to sleep! I believe that following the 30-minute rule actually made my insomnia even worse. A much better wording of this rule, and only one I learned after several months of doing it the wrong way, is "If you've been lying in bed for a while and you're starting to feel stressed out or increasingly awake, get out of bed and do something relaxing. But if you're lying in bed and you're still comfortable and relaxed, feel free to stay in bed!" This rule follows stimulus control principles, without the stressful feeling of being in a race to get to sleep.

So there you have it: 4 ways to make 4 months of insomnia a much less likely prospect. If only my past self could have read this blog...this blog wouldn't even exist!

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!