Insomnia
I’ve been afraid of bedtime for as long as I can remember. As a kid, it manifested as fear of the dark or fear of being alone. There was a period of time where I refused to sleep in my bedroom and instead chose the top bunk in my brother’s room. My mom would lie down next to my brother and read or tell stories to that I would listen to. She left when he fell asleep, which was always many long moments before I did. I lay there and thought too much, way too much for a little kid, about where the edges of my body met the edges of the world around me or what would happen after death.
As I grew up, I learned to call it insomnia, this experience that I seemed to be so alone and unique in going through. I learned that I wasn’t unique, although the experience will always be one endured alone. I went through different levels of intensity at stages of my life — long neighborhood walks as a teenager and various attempts to thrash my brain into quieting in my 20s. There have been too many nights in my life of trying over and over to go to sleep until eventually I’m pressing my eyes shut against the early morning light and I get up, defeated, to go find some coffee.
Most sleep hygiene tips are are generally good life advice. Wake up at the same time every morning. Exercise during the day, find pauses for breathing or meditation, limit sugar, caffeine, and alcohol. Create a wind-down routine in the evening that means no work, no devices, no meals within 3 hours of bedtime. Take warm baths and use red-spectrum lighting. The problem is that our bodies are not input-output machines, and though these techniques help reduce the likeliness of a bad night, they don’t eradicate chronic insomnia. They’re not a key in a lock or a drug binding to a neuronal receptor. It can be frustrating to do everything “right” and still not sleep at night. Trying to ignore the vast corpus of information about how important sleep is for your physical and mental health, because all that information sits too heavily on your chest when you’re lying in bed at night with your eyes open.
I recognize that fear of insomnia can become its own pathology, and so its treatment may resemble cognitive behavioral therapy more than sleep hygiene. CBT generally aims at uncovering the harmful thought patterns and counterproductive stories we tell ourselves and learning to tell more useful ones. I know that thinking of sleep as either a burden or an accomplishment isn’t very good for me. It’s set up an unhealthy antagonism between me and this activity that’s supposed to be nourishing. I think of my body withholding what I need to function and I become angry. It doesn’t fit in with the healthy, stable person I want to believe I am. Lately I’ve been trying to engage with that antagonism more than with the problem of not sleeping enough.
What is it that I’m really afraid of? The never-ending thrum of my thoughts. Boredom. Time.
I heard somewhere that monks only need 4 hours of sleep to be healthy because they spend so much of their time with their minds at rest. I don’t know if it’s true but it’s a useful story for me. On some nights when I can’t sleep I leave my bed to go meditate, at 15 minute intervals with some stretching in between. Sometimes I do this for several hours. Another story I like telling myself is that I’m on the accelerated track to enlightenment with all this meditation, even though enlightenment absolutely does not work that way.
Some things you can’t change about yourself. It doesn’t help to wish to be different or get stuck in the unfairness of it all. There has to be another way of looking at it. I don’t believe in fate or that things happen for a reason, but I do believe that all the stuff of life is material for study. We can try to push it away or separate the palatable from the unpalatable in what we choose to accept. Or we can take in all of it and try to listen.
There’s beauty to the sunrises I’ve seen or the total quiet of my living room at night. Once on a long flight to Thailand when I was the only one awake in the cabin, I looked out the window and saw green and purple streaks in the black sky. We were over Alaska right then and amazingly, without seeking them, I got to see the Northern Lights.