Wednesday, December 8, 2021
Luck be a ladies' room
Tuesday, November 16, 2021
Miles to go before I sleep (like I used to)
- 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.
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."
Saturday, November 13, 2021
Lessons learned from insomnia
Get intervention sooner
If you are getting medical care, advocate hard for yourself
Don't believe the numbers you hear—believe how you feel
You don't have to get out of bed if you've been lying awake for 30 minutes.
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!
Wednesday, October 13, 2021
If you love your bed, (don't) let it go
A typical pre-insomnia workday |
- 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.
- I do activities on top of the covers, but I sleep underneath them.
- I don't use pillows when doing activities in the bed, but I do when I'm sleeping.
- When I do activities in the bed, it is sunny out or the lights are on. When I sleep, I sleep in darkness.
- When I do activities in the bed, I always have objects to interact with (food, books, tablet). When I sleep, these are absent.
Sunday, October 10, 2021
Mindfulness over Matter
Friday, October 8, 2021
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.
Pasta With Mustard Cream Sauce and Veggie Dogs
Ingredients
-
1 box rigatoni pasta1/2 box chickpea penne -
1 1/2 tsp salt, dividedummm, some salt -
1 tsp oilDid that say 1tsp? Oops, I misread! Use 1 Tbsp oil -
1/4 cup chopped onionSprinkling of dehydrated onion -
2 cloves garlic, mincedSprinkling of garlic powder -
1/4 cup
chicken brothvegetable stock -
1/2 cup
heavy creamfrozen 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 Parmesanclassy 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
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!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!Add chicken broth and cook for 2-3 minutes.Whisk in mustard and tarragon and cook for another 2-3 minutes.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.- 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.
- 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.
- Add hot pasta to sauce and toss to combine.
Cook for an additional minute. - Add veggie dogs to sauce and toss again.
- 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.
Saturday, October 2, 2021
Mission: Cognition
1. You can sleep.
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.
4. You're probably sleeping more than you think you are.
5. Going without sleep is not a catastrophe.
Thursday, September 30, 2021
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.
Tuesday, September 21, 2021
Early bird to night owl...and back again?
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! |
Wednesday, September 15, 2021
Enter Sandman
Wednesday, September 8, 2021
Insomnia Demystified
Saturday, August 28, 2021
Insomnia Fails
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! |