Insomnia: The self-medication phase

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insomnia: How it all began (for real)

When people ask me, I tell them my insomnia started with a bad breakup. But looking back, I can really see that I'd been working my way up to insomnia my whole life. So let's hop into the wayback machine and dig up this case of insomnia right at its roots!

I've had minor trouble with sleep for as long as I can recollect. Some of my earliest memories involve nap time—specifically, hating it because I wasn't tired at all and I certainly wasn't sleeping! Or a few years after that, lying awake in my childhood bedroom, weeping because it was taking me so long to fall asleep!

The late-night pity parties ended once I realized I always did fall asleep eventually, and I learned to compensate for my poor sleeping skills. As an adult, I routinely budgeted 9–10 hours for sleep every day—just so I could spend 1-2 of them waiting to fall asleep at night and trying to drag myself out of bed in the morning. If I missed out on sleep (which wasn't often, because I valued it immensely and was zealous about protecting it), I was completely unable to nap. I also couldn't sleep on airplanes, or sleep in a car, or sleep pretty much anywhere except lying down with no ambient light (not even the tiny LED on a laptop charger!) and no distracting sounds. I always needed a long wind-down period before sleeping; if I did anything stimulating whatsoever in the hour before bedtime (including watching a movie or listening to slightly upbeat music), I'd find myself struggling to fall asleep. Even being in a little too good of a mood before bed was a guarantee I'd take longer to drift off than usual.

"Light sleeper" was practically my middle name. I used to pride myself on being able to wake at sunrise without an alarm, or to be up and ready with a receptacle in time to catch the mess before it hit the bed when my dog indulged in some nocturnal puking. Similarly, I always thought I was great at being able to stay up when needed. Though I had an early bedtime by choice, if something exciting was happening—a party or a great concert—I was always one of the last ones standing at 4 AM. One time I spent the whole night wide awake on an airplane, because a kid in my traveling party had gotten sick. Every passenger was catching Z's (including the sick kid himself!), but I couldn't even rest my eyes, so vigilant was I to make sure nothing else would go wrong. Those "skills" may have been useful when my sleep was more consistent, but they also made me a prime candidate for insomnia when my sleeping conditions changed.

What changed my sleeping conditions? Well, as you already know, the breakup was a huge factor, but it might not have knocked my sleep completely off the rails if it hadn't been for another disruptive circumstance that preceded it.

The story goes like this. Being the light sleeper and easily stressed person that I am, I hate alarm clocks because they startle me and subsequently put me in a bad mood. I prefer waking up naturally to the sunrise, but that became impossible when, around the beginning of this year, the city installed an impossibly bright LED street light right across from my bedroom window. I loathed it. I had to find a way to cover up my window completely...but still allow sunlight in the room in the morning.

I settled on programmable window blinds. I got thick wood ones that blocked out most of the light at night, and I set them to open slowly around 6 AM, so the morning sun would filter into the room and awaken me in a peaceful way. In reality, what happened was the blinds lurched themselves open in a series of loud tick-tick-tick noises over the course of 5 minutes. That did not make for a peaceful awakening.

Photo taken before I knew my new blinds
were going to ruin my life!

Over the next few weeks, I tried various things to get myself accustomed to the blinds (like having them open at 5AM, when I'd be more likely to be deeply asleep), but all I succeeded in doing was conditioning myself to wake up extra-early, even before the blinds! Being the sound-sensitive soul I am, I would rather (says my subconscious, apparently) wake up unprovoked in pitch darkness than be jolted awake by the ticking time bomb of a motorized blind.

I began to take Benadryl right before bed, in the hopes that the drowsiness usually persists in the mornings after taking it would keep me asleep. It didn't. I also tried melatonin and CBD, with the same effect. Finally, I decided to just give up on the smart blinds and go back to an alarm clock.

This is the state I was in when my boyfriend broke up with me. I was already accustomed to waking up too early in the morning. My sleep was already mildly disturbed. I was already in the habit of consuming chemicals to ostensibly help my sleep. If the blinds had been the only issue, I think I would have returned to normal soon, but then the breakup sent my sleep into a nosedive from which I could just not recover. Goodbye, boyfriend; hello, insomnia!

And that's the whole story this time!

Or is it? The real story of my insomnia doesn't begin when I started having trouble sleeping; it begins when I continued having trouble sleeping! So next post, I'll share all the gory details of exactly how trouble sleeping turned from a minor issue into a major ordeal.

Insomnia: The breakup that broke my brain

Back when I had a boyfriend, we used to laugh about our respective sleep habits. He was the type who could fall asleep any time, anywhere; he called it his superpower. But me, on the other hand—everything needed to be perfect, or I'd have trouble sleeping. Any amount of light was too bright, any amount of caffeine too much, any hour before 10 pm too early, any position but the perfect position too uncomfortable. As he put it, if I could find any possible reason to not be asleep, I would not be asleep. We used to laugh about it because, as I put it, at least I didn't have insomnia!

Haha. The joke was on me, because within a few months, he stopped being my boyfriend, and I stopped not having insomnia.

It began the very night of our breakup. After crying almost incessantly, all day long, I went to bed early, hoping to take refuge in unconsciousness. This is a coping strategy that has always served me well through previous periods of depression, but it didn't work this time. This time, I woke up around midnight, and immediately was inundated with a flood of the same miserable thoughts that had plagued me all day. In no time flat, I was wide awake and crying again.

The hours ticked by, but I didn't see any sign that I was going to fall back asleep. I thought about having a drink to help me return to dreamland. I usually make a habit of avoiding alcohol when I'm sad, as I know it can turn normal sadness into extreme sadness, but I had cried myself out and was feeling calm by now, plus I'd just had the worst day of my life—maybe I was entitled to a treat! Around 1AM, I had a shot of vodka, but it didn't make me sleepy. Around 2, I had another shot of vodka, but still didn't feel sleepy. Then I had a third shot of vodka, and, predictably, turned into a hysterically crying mess who finally fell asleep around 3 am.

Pretty much every night after that proceeded in the same way. I'd go to bed, maybe fall into a light sleep for a few hours, then wake up between 12 and 2 and not be able to get back. I'd try all sorts of tricks to fall back asleep, some of which helped some of the time, but most of which didn't most of the time. The only thing that reliably got me to drift off again was alcohol, which of course made me feel worse the next day.

Probably around 3 weeks after the breakup, I realized my grief had largely subsided. I'd decided to drown my sorrows by jumping back into the dating pool, and it was working. I no longer saw the loss of my boyfriend as the loss of all hope for my future. I was developing a more optimistic attitude about my prospects...but it wasn't doing anything to improve my sleep.

After a little less than a month, I finally admitted to myself that I had more than just temporary trouble sleeping. I had insomnia. The thing that I'd always been grateful to avoid had finally come to claim me, and it wasn't letting go.

So that's how it all began. Sort of. In truth, it was more complicated than that, and if you want to hear what I mean, just wait for my next post!

An Insomnia Story

Have you ever wished you could have more hours in a day? Well, now you can!

What's the secret, you ask? Just a little thing called Insomnia!

The average human spends 1/3 of her life sleeping! What a waste! With Insomnia, you can go from spending 8 hours a night snoring away, to 20+ hours a day wide awake, completely unable to function because you've done away with that boring thing called sleep!

Try Insomnia, and you will see: your energy levels plummet! Your cognitive ability regress to a fourth-grade level! Your mood hit an unfathomably new low! Your every daily activity become 20 times harder! And much, much more!

If you're interested in Insomnia, it's easy to get started—just subject yourself to a minor stressful life event and lose some sleep over it! It's that simple! Before you know it, you'll be on your way to months or years of intractable sleeplessness! And this can all be yours, for the low, low cost of your last shred of sanity!

DON'T WAIT! CALL TODAY!

Hello, friends, family, and fellow denizens of the Internet. I hope you enjoyed my little commercial and have decided Insomnia is right for you, because misery loves company, and there are a lot of miserable insomniacs out there who would love you to join their ranks. I myself have insomnia (temporarily! You'll soon learn why I say that) and felt it was time to process the experience in the way I know best: by blogging!

Insomnia (which is, in a nutshell, an inability to get satisfying amounts or quality of sleep) is literally an epidemic in the United States. They say that anywhere from 10-60% of people live with some form of chronic insomnia. When I speak of chronic insomnia, I don't mean an occasional night of trouble getting to sleep, but rather the long-term, life-destroying form of the ailment (though the word "insomnia" can be used to mean any trouble sleeping, even for one night, in my writing I'll be using it as shorthand for "chronic insomnia").

When I was a new insomniac, I searched the Internet for stories, maybe reassurance that my feelings were normal and I wasn't completely alone, but I found almost nothing. If 10% of the US population has chronic insomnia, and the US population numbers 328 million, then at least 32 million Americans are dealing with chronic insomnia at this moment! Where are all their stories? I don't know, but I'm going to share mine. Hopefully the next poor soul struggling through another sleep-deprived day will run across this one and feel slightly less alone.

It's a good thing this blog already has a celestial theme, because my nocturnal issues are going to be its new biggest subject. I'm going to talk your ear off about insomnia, including my personal anecdotes, and maybe those of insomnia sufferers I've met along the way! I hope you're ready for a long-winded discussion on everything related to insomnia—if you're not, at least I hope I can bore you to sleep!

Nerds, Part 2: Nerds as difficult writing prompt

Well, the second half of my post on nerds is still looming over me like a playground bully, and guess how much progress I have made on it. None! This is what I get for making promises about a project I hadn't even started!

My initial idea was that I'd dig deep into the nebulous topic of what defines a nerd and how that definition has changed over time. My early experience with the term indicated that it was exclusively pejorative, but in my later years, I've come to sense a warmer tone to people's attitudes about nerds. Is that just because our world has become more friendly to those who are intellectual and socially awkward...or is it just something that happens naturally as you grow up?

Dictionaries can tell you the definition of "nerd," (generally speaking, a person with overly intellectual interests and little social ability), but they can't tell you the prevailing connotations of "nerd." That's something you can only learn from direct communication with other people. 

 

As I've been doing a lot of dating lately, I thought I'd poll my matches who identify as nerds (there are a surprisingly large number of them) about their feelings on the subject, and round up a consensus opinion.

Unfortunately, whenever I'd matched with a temptingly promising nerd, the conversation always dried up before I could manage to work it around to the topic of why he considered himself to be one. I'm now almost 2 months into this project, and I have yet to interrogate even one nerd! In retrospect, it was silly to expect myself, a self-proclaimed nerd, to accomplish much in an endeavor that requires successful social interaction with another self-proclaimed nerd! I suppose I could set up an anonymous poll someplace geeky like Reddit, but that sounds a lot like investigative journalism, and I'm not getting paid for this job!

So I stop here. I abdicate my responsibility for dissecting this topic, and I leave it to you, my beloved readers! What do you think makes a person a nerd? Is it cool to be a nerd, or is it still the worst insult a 7-year-old can come up with? Discuss. I believe you're up to the challenge...but only if you're nerdy enough!

 

Immune Defense Day

Apparently a year of avoiding all potentially pathogenic human contact has completely crippled my immune system, because as soon as I started leaving the house with no mask on, I caught a cold. And as soon as I recovered from that cold, I caught another one.

It is now Independence Day—a day for socializing and celebration—and I am holed up in my house with 120mg of pseudoephedrine coursing through my veins and a mean mood.

There are a lot of things I could have been doing today. I could have gone down to celebrate with a friend in Charlottesville. I could have gone out to celebrate with a different friend in Annapolis. I could have met another friend to watch the fireworks in Alexandria. I could have gone to an EDM party in DC. I could have accepted the invitation to go have sex with this one guy I met 3 months ago on a dating app (um, no thanks?). 

I could have done any of those things. But because I was unwell, I chose to stay home. Now let's be clear, I'm not that sick. I spent the morning mopping my floors. I could easily dance a jig and do a couple of cartwheels and not get winded. I'm not staying home because I feel like death; I'm doing it because it's the right thing to do.

If there was one thing that I thought we all learned throughout this year-long-and-still-strong pandemic, is that you don't go out when you're sick! It doesn't matter if your symptoms are mild, or if you have a really important deadline, or you don't want to miss out on the most epic party of your week. It's not a badge of honor to power through your illness, shedding viruses to all and sundry—if you have a transmissible infection, you owe it to your fellow humans not to spread it around!

Apparently, though, it seems that many people didn't get the memo. The fact that I caught two colds in two weeks is a strong indicator that there are plenty out there who are more than willing to go out and share their viral wealth. 

When I informed one person that I'd be staying home today due to my illness, he told me to come out anyway because a margarita would make me feel better (first off, factually wrong! Second off, it's not about how I feel; it's about protecting other people from having to feel the same way). When I declined on the grounds that "I prefer to not spread my germs all across creation," he continued to push the issue. 

Don't be that guy! If someone you know wants to keep their distance in the interest of public health, just let them! And if you yourself are mildly ill and on the fence about whether to play it safe or go to town, just play it safe!

"It's just a cold" is not a legitimate excuse to willingly expose other people to illness! If there's anything we learned from the wide variability in COVID effects (ranging from completely asymptomatic all the way to death), it's that infections can affect different people in different ways. What's just a cold to you could possibly kill the next person to catch it!

I'm staying home today. I'm eating ice cream alone and getting takeout for dinner and showing off my patriotic pedicure to my dog. And I'm writing a grumpy rant on my blog. If you want me to feel better, don't try to coax me into drinking margaritas; just promise me that the next time you get sick, you won't let it spread any farther. Tell me that you've learned the lesson that could stop the next pandemic. Just tell me, if you're sick, you'll stay home!

This post needed a picture, and my patriotic pedicure needed a wider audience than just one dog!