Sticking two fingers up to insomnia
Can you make a positive out of a sleepless night?
What do you think about at 3am in the morning? Are you one of the 25–30 per cent of people who wake up with depressing regularity at 2am, 3am or 4am in the morning and resign yourself to hours of battling with tortuous thoughts that send you into deeper and deeper cycles of anxiety?
Just the other night, I woke up to the beautiful sound of a tawny owl hooting outside the window. It was melodic and peaceful and for a few seconds I lay awake listening to its call with a calm and soothed mind. And then it happened. I remembered a bill that has gone unpaid for a few weeks. It was a larger than usual credit card bill and to pay it would take some financial acrobatics on my part. In the cold light of day those acrobatics hadn’t look unfeasible. At 3am, the bill took on immense proportions and my head was swimming in a quagmire of threatened debt. Suddenly, my heart was racing, my throat was dry and my eyes felt as if someone had squeezed my eyeballs — stress had taken over every cell in my body. Sleeplessness had struck again.
The curse of insomnia
Stress and anxiety is one of the biggest reasons for insomnia. In turn, insomnia is the root cause of many minor and major health problems. We all know the feelings associated with a few days of interrupted sleep — irritability, inability to concentrate, impaired cognitive skills, increased stress levels, lowered immunity to ailments such as coughs and colds, lowered sex drive. But for people who have suffered sleep deprivation for years, then the risk is far more catastrophic. Heart disease, heart attack, heart failure, irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure, stroke and diabetes: the list is enough to give you sleepless nights.
It is also a very common problem. Figures from the National Health Service in the UK suggest that a third of the population will suffer from insomnia of various intensity levels. In the USA, the figure stands at 25 per cent. There is some comfort to be taken in the fact that, while you are lying awake, staring at the ceiling, there are countless other people just like you.
A range of victims
A straw poll of friends found that most of my peers had suffered sleepless nights in the past fortnight. These ranged from the occasional but regular sufferer: “I woke up last week worried that I had left the oven turned on,” to the chronic insomniac: “I wake every night and lie there worrying about everything,” to the temporary sufferer, who maybe experiencing unusually high stress levels: “I keep dreaming that my son has been involved in a dreadful accident.” Some of these fears are firmly in the imagination, some arelinked to low level but recurrent worries, others are sparked by life events. The friend with concerns about her son’s safety had received a call saying he had been beaten up by thugs on his way home one night. He recovered quickly while she had not slept an entire night for weeks.
Personal experience
My own occasional bouts of insomnia leave me feeling shot to pieces but recognising that I am very much at the light end of the scale. One person I spoke to, put this into perspective. She said she goes to bed every night wishing the morning would quickly arrive because it was lonely being awake when everyone else was sleeping. She had suffered insomnia for 20 years.
A trawl through the website looking for articles about tackling insomnia reveals that the people who wrote them generally do not suffer insomnia. Not really. Anyone who writes, “get all your worrying over before you go to bed”, clearly doesn’t realise that you don’t know you are worried until you are in bed. You usually don’t know you are worried until it is 2am.
An equally inane piece of advice is to make your sleeping environment comfortable. No-one I know goes to bed with the intention of making the experience anything less than comfortable. Rock hard, lumpy pillows? Bring it on! Too heavy duvet? Let’s add sweating to the nighttime terrors! No, I don’t think so.
A regular piece of advice for insomniacs from health websites and happy, healthy personal trainers is to go for a mind-calming run or cycle. As a tired, stressed colleague says: “Yes, I would love to do that, but around my job, my commute, my children and my arthritic knee, just how is that supposed to happen?”
There’s an app for that
Moving on from the thousands of health and well-being articles all offering slight variations on the same theme, you then come across the tech gadgets designed to ensure a good night’s sleep. Leading the way is an app that links to a strap around your waist provides a sleep sound system that guides breathing. A cap, the Sleep Shepherd, that tracks brain activity and transmits sleep-inducing waves is another popular device. A form of cranial electrotherapy gives a new take to electric shock treatment while a reinvention of electromagnetic therapy takes the centuries old practice of harnessing the natural healing powers of the magnetic fields and gives it a modern twist with a device that sends low level shocks to the brain.
The third remedy that is popular the world over is the chemical route to recovery. More than ninemillion Americans regularly use prescription sleeping pills and many millions more take over the counter tablets regularly. The evidence shows that, yes, you will get temporary relief in the short-term but long term use leads to all manner of side effects, ranging from drowsiness during the day and an inability to concentrate through to depression and suicidal tendencies.
So it is fair to say that the remedies offered up for people who suffer insomnia range in effectiveness from successful in the short-term through to blatant snake oil. All of which is making some people view sleepless nights differently. Instead of viewing the nightime with horror, how about seeing it as a time when you can really get things done, without the day-time buzz that often breaks into your concentration.
Reframing the narrative
“If I can’t sleep I use the time to get ahead of the day,” said one friend who is a hugely successful businesswoman. “I will catch up on house work or ironing. I have even been known to file my annual tax return at 3.30 in the morning.”
One budding author has written 70,000 words of her debut novel during the hours of 1am to 6am. She claims her creativity is far more heightened when the world outside is moonlit, with the clouds scurrying across a silvery-dark sky.
Social media platforms provide solace for the sleepless, particularly if you have friends on the other side of the world. I have used a very early start to my day to facilitate a precious hour-long chat with my best friend who moved to New Zealand seven years ago. When do you get the luxury of an hour long chat during the day? I might have been bleary eyed by the next afternoon but to have spent that quality time talking to a good friend was a perfect way to forget that everyone in your own time zone was sound asleep.
And that is how I have reframed my sleep experience.
The first thing to say is not for a moment am I downplaying the enormous impact that chronic insomnia can have upon someone. I am simply outlining my own experience and the way I cope with the situation.
I see those early waking hours as extra time to get things done. It is a time when I can take advantage of the quiet and peace that comes during the night-time. Like my author friend, this is the time I write — uninterrupted by emails pinging into my inbox. The satisfaction of ticking the next day’s to-do list is immeasurable and it frees up time to do activities that, while they might not replace your sleep, can rejuvenate you in other ways. Going for a bike ride when you would normally be working, having a coffee with a friend gives you a chance to unload those problems that are keeping you awake. Taking in a matinee film, stopping work early enough to collect the kids from school. By taking control and turning sleeplessness into a positive thing, you can stick two fingers up to insomnia.
