Today, I stumbled upon my "Watch Later" playlist on YouTube, which I hadn't touched in over a year. One of the videos on it jumped out at me – a Qi gong routine for better sleep by Lee Holden – and I recoiled mentally in distaste. Now I have nothing against Lee Holden and his Qi gong videos, but having insomnia traumatized me. And apparently so did the videos I used to try and escape its thrall.
Well, today, I deleted that video, and all six of the other videos on the list, every one of which was somehow related to insomnia or getting better sleep. That part of my life is over. But the video was a reminder to look back and consider how far I've come.
On this day last year, I wrote a blog post about insomnia, claiming that my sleep had improved a lot, but sometimes it regressed. On this day this year, I can say the very same thing. After all this time, I still can't trust myself to sleep reliably.
But fortunately, over the course of the year, the bad nights of sleep have become fewer and farther between, and I have noticed more and more patterns that contribute to them—making them less of a terrifying mystery and more of a minor inconvenience I can work around. I'm still an annoyingly sensitive sleeper who is inordinately affected by changes in bedtime routine, stimulants, ambient light, ambient temperature, bodily sensations, and her emotions. But not (and this is an exciting development!) by ambient narration.
Oddly enough, having a voice yammering in my ear has become one of the more useful tools in my sleep arsenal. My boyfriend suggested the idea to me, as he routinely plays YouTube videos on aeronautical engineering and other dense topics to help him get to sleep. I pooh-poohed the idea instantly, thinking about my failed experiments in sleeping to audiobooks—wherein I could occasionally fall asleep but
would always wake up again, with the added frustration of having missed
half the story. But then it slowly dawned on me, that if the problem was missing the plot, then all I had to do was pick subject matter that I wouldn't mind sleeping through.
It had to be something interesting enough to distract me from thinking about sleep while I remained awake, but unimportant enough that I could drift off to sleep with impunity when I was ready. I had a few false starts, but eventually discovered the perfect bedtime audio content: single-narrator history podcasts. They have simple stories that make them easy to follow without getting too bored or too mentally engaged, and the relative short duration of a podcast means I don't usually miss out on too much when I lose consciousness.
There was still the matter of waking up again, but that actually turned out to be a boon rather than a liability. I would suddenly snap to alertness at 1am, for example, with the conviction that I
hadn't slept a wink, but then I could look back at the
playlist and see how many episodes had played but I simply hadn't heard. I'd maybe been conscious for half an episode, and then the rest of the time, I was asleep. Sleep state misperception is real, and I was living it! The podcasts gave me a pretty clear metric of how much I was sleeping (a lot more than I had thought!) and with that, a much stronger confidence in my ability to sleep.
I had objective evidence that I was sleeping most of the time when I'd previously thought I was awake, and that felt good!
Another thing that felt good was giving myself permission to let go of my rigid sleep rules. Part of the insomnia recovery process involved setting a very strict wake-up time every day, and for months, I clung to that like a lifeline. But more recently, I've started letting myself sleep in after late nights out—and not just letting myself, but encouraging myself. On most days, no matter how late I've been up, I'll wake up between 7 and 8 AM. But then, I'll often go back to bed and stay asleep until crazy late. One day recently, I didn't wake up until noon! I was never able to do that when I had insomnia! I was never able to do that even before I had insomnia! So the fact that I'm able to do that now, far from making me feel like a lazy sack of waste as it once would have, makes me feel great!
It's because of lazy mornings like that (and of course, the podcasts) that I've recently been able to start telling myself things like "You're really good at sleeping"—and believing it!
I titled my last insomnia post, "Miles to go before I sleep (like I used to)" but the truth is, I'm probably never going to sleep like I used to. I'm probably always going to suffer from occasional spells of bad sleep and psych myself out with periodic sleep anxiety. I'm probably always going to sleep less than all my companions. I'm probably always going to have my nights disrupted by stupid little impediments like a particularly happy mood or a can of soda with lunch. But I'm also probably always going to be a high-energy person who can handle sleep deprivation better than most.
While I have spent a lot of time learning all my many sleep weaknesses, it's only in this year of being a former insomniac that I think I've finally learned to have faith in my sleep strengths. I may not always be able to sleep well, but at least I can rest easy.
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