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.