Chuck Palahiuk got it right – “with insomnia, you’re never really asleep, and you’re never really awake”. People who have never dealt with insomnia couldn’t possibly understand how debilitating it is for the roughly 15% of adult Canadians who suffer from it.
Let me clear some misconceptions – if once in a while, you don’t get a good night’s sleep, you don’t have insomnia. You’re likely a perfectly normal (at least in the context of sleep) person and in most cases it’s just some external factors that prevented you from sleeping well that night. Insomnia ranges from transient to chronic, with periods lasting from a few days to a few years. Imagine how crappy you feel when you don’t sleep well one night – now imagine feeling like that day after day after day. Thankfully for me, I’d hardly describe my symptoms as chronic, but for most of my adult life, I’ve dealt with periods lasting anywhere from a few days to a month at a time. I grown to envy people who can hit a pillow and be snoring in under five minutes. Five minutes would be a miracle for me most nights, fifteen minutes would be down right impressive, and half an hour would be an average “good” night for me. A bad night, I could go to bed around 11pm, and still be rolling around trying to sleep at 2 or 3 in the morning, then from 3 to 7 in the morning, I’ll alternate between being asleep and being awake but it feels more like a mushy blend of both rather than one extreme or the other. Its like a screen saver on a computer screen: the monitor is still on and awake, but it’s not really doing anything particularly useful. Its not really saving an appreciable amount of energy, and it’s not at all being productive. Sometimes, like on my flight back from my recent trip to Vegas, I just decide to accept that was going to be in a semi-conscious state the rest of the night, and make the most of it – in this case, I threw on my iPod with and M83 album, and closed my eyes, and just tried to relax… a nice soothing soundtrack to distract me from the neverending stream of thoughts in my mind.
Before I elaborate on that, lets take a look at my lifestyle: I don’t drink a lot of alcohol, I do enjoy a drink here and there, but never to to get drunk (and to anyone who believes that alcohol is good for putting you to sleep, you’re terribly mistaken. It’s good for making you sleepy, but it’ll be an interrupted, dehydrated sleep). I don’t drink coffee at all, and in general I try to avoid caffeine. I love green tea, but have decaf whenever there’s a choice. Nutrition is important to me – I try to eat well, and I don’t eat out that often, and I try to have a good macronutrient balance in my meals. I take multivitamins and a B50 complex. I exercise regularly, which means that 6 days a week I’ll be either at the gym, playing volleyball, or in case you haven’t guessed… rock climbing. If I’m feeling particularly sore, or have some free time, I’ll throw a yoga session in there as well. I don’t have a stressful job – there are times that are more stressful than others, but most of the time I’m able to separate my work and personal life, and I rarely work more than 40 hours a week. You would think that at the end of the day, I could go home, lay down, and pass out.
So why doens’t it happen?
Back from my tangent – my mind never seems to shut off, and I’m a firm believer that in order to sleep, your mind, body, and spirit (for lack of a better word) have to be at peace. The visual imagery, the semi-conscious thoughts, the spatial awareness that leads to distraction of light and noise – it all masses together in a chaotic stream of distractions that enter my head and never leave. Ever had a song stuck in your head? Its kind of like that – whatever the last song I hear is, it’ll get stuck in my head until it gets replaced with something else. And even in a complete void of sights and sounds, I’ll latch on to something, real or imaginary and analyze it to death. An active mind won’t let the body get any rest.
Sleeping is an art. To some people it’s just a natural gift (cherish it!). To others it’s something that needs to be carefully orchestrated. Sadly the orchestration itself has to be an subconscious process, because if you’re anything like me, and you’re completely aware that you’re trying to sleep, your mind will focus on trying to sleep, rather than voiding itself of thought in order to encourage sleep. It’s a vicious cycle (which reminds me of the saying, “In order to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion”). The good news however is that when things become routine, they become subconscious processes. Its the same reason you can be tired, but drive home perfectly safely, stop at every traffic light, signal at every turn, but upon arriving home, have absolutely no recollection of the drive itself. The act of driving somewhere is a very deliberate process, and similarly we (people who suffer from insomnia) need to train ourselves to become so good at tricking our minds into shutting down that we’re not even remotely aware that we’re doing it. People are creatures of habit, and for insomniacs, having a nightly decompression routine is vital to encouraging sleep.
Work backwards. Ideally we should all be getting about 7-8 hours of sleep. So if you need to be awake by 7am, don’t schedule your days to end at midnight, and then expect to fall asleep immediately. Give yourself 30-60 minutes to ease yourself into it – have some sort of regular and predictable routine to start. Read a book, watch some light hearted tv (nothing that’s going to make you think too hard), have a warm cup of some sleep-friendly herbal tea. Just make sure that you’re not in bed when you do so. In order for your routine to work, there needs to be a distinct progression from decompression time to sleeping time. The mind needs to interpret that when you go to bed, it’s because you’re going to sleep. I’ve been doing this for the past week and I have to say, I haven’t slept this well in months. The other important thing to remember is that once you start feeling sleepy, don’t try to stretch out that extra chapter, or watch another epside of whatever… you’ll lose your window of opportunity. Just as sleep occurs in cycles, I believe that opportunities to fall asleep come in cycles as well. If you feel sleepy, if you start to nod off early, embrace it. The biggest mistake that I regularly make is not calling it a night when I feel tired… maybe I’m just in denial that I’m getting old!
That’s all for me for now, but I’ll hopefully remember to revisit this post one day with some more thoughts.
