Butterflies in my brain
I've spent a lot of my life not being able to sleep. Right now, for instance, it's almost 2 am on a Tuesday night. I have work in the morning. I can not stop thinking. It's been worse than usual the past few months as I look forward to some major, stress-inducing life changes. Also, maybe my medication has stopped working, so I should probably deal with that.
Sleep, or the lack of it, controls my life. I’ve never had a full time office job with strict hours—I don’t think I could do it. Working from home allows me to sneak in naps during the day, without which I often couldn’t function. A few months ago on one of my mandated office days I was so tired that at lunch time I wandered around Melbourne’s CBD, searching desperately for somewhere near my office to nap in public, eventually settling on shutting my eyes briefly on a couch in the State Library.
Not sleeping well sucks for a lot of reasons, but the actual experience of insomnia is excruciating. Lying awake for hours, my brain whirring relentlessly through the past, present and future, planning conversations I’m going to have or things I’m going to do, I start to feel truly detached from reality. I’ve broken down in tears many times. Before I had a partner, those times were painfully lonely. Now at least on a truly terrible night I can briefly wake up my husband to tell him I feel like I’m going insane.
I’ve managed my insomnia over the years in many ways, some effective, some probably not. For years I took medication every single night, which was as much due to anxiety about not being able to sleep as it was about actual need. In the last few years I made incredible progress and was able to go many nights at a time without prescription drugs, though I’d usually take a little melatonin. Unfortunately that began giving me nightmares, so I’ve had to remove it from my already limited toolbox.
Amazingly, sleep meditations actually worked, as did ambient music. But they can also have a limited time scale of effectiveness. Just like medication, I would find that a certain sleep meditations “wear off” the more I used them. I haven’t found a new one that works in years.
One of the worst aspects of struggling to sleep is the cultural messaging telling you that it’s all your fault. The number one recommendation given for those struggling with insomnia is “sleep hygiene”, a collection of behaviors like turning your phone off an hour before bed, “winding down”, exercise (but not too much or too close to bed), using the bed for sex and sleep only, not drinking, not ingesting caffeine after 3 pm, etc., etc. I can’t say whether sleep hygiene really works because I’ve never been able to get myself to follow this long list of behaviors.
What sleep hygiene has done is make me feel like shit about myself, particularly if I’m up all night ruminating. If only I hadn’t taken that 5 pm nap, or had that drink, watched TV in bed all day on my laptop or spent the 15 minutes before bed scrolling. If only my bedroom was a pristine, minimalist zen space free of clothes on the floor and old cups of tea. Then I wouldn’t be like this. Those girls on TikTok with the green smoothies sleep perfectly. You idiot.
Insomnia and depression go hand in hand—you can actually predict mood disorders based on sleep cycles alone. This is especially true of “early morning awakening”, which is exactly what it sounds like. There was a period in 2018, when I was living in a series of sublets in Brooklyn and half a world away from my partner, when this would happen to me almost every morning. It’s unclear what comes first, the bad sleep or the bad brain, but they are certainly intertwined.
The day after a bad night of sleep I often feel on the verge of mental collapse. Everything feels like it’s falling apart. I cry easily. These are some of the worst times, and the thing that makes me most fear living without decent sleep. Even if I have anxiety or get depressed, most of the time I’m very functional. Without sleep, I can’t do anything.
I started writing this to distract myself from the creeping panic that was starting to set in while I lay in bed for the second hour. Aggravatingly, I often feel most creative in the middle of the night, when I should be sleeping. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with any of this. There’s no satisfying conclusion. I just hope I get to sleep soon.