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!