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| Photo by Cameron Fillery on Unsplash |
His Take:
I would rather have my lips glued together with a hot glue gun than have insomnia. It is truly one of the worst experiences ever. You’re dead tired, but you just can’t fall asleep. Spoiler for the end of this article: I don’t know how to cure it. Besides taking a sleeping pill, which is fine, but it’s not a permanent solution. I know that scientist around the world are pretty busy working on things that are a little more urgent than insomnia. But I can’t imagine how much money the world loses because of it. Let’s say your up all night, finally the times comes when, even if you COULD, you can’t go to sleep because it’s time to get ready for work. If you think you’re going to give your best performance at work that day, you’re sadly mistaken. Let’s say you work an 8 hour shift. I’m gonna say that you’re actually going to work about half that day.
There’s a million “sleep hacks” that you can find online, but the bottom line is that sometimes nothing works. There are plenty of nights that I can’t fall asleep. For me personally, when it gets to be like 3-4am. I just own it. I get up, and start doing stuff. Dishes, laundry, anything. Usually after about 30 minutes of doing that, I start to get tired. Again, this is something that works for me, I hope that it might work for you.
I have had the opportunity to speak one on one with Shawn Stevenson, a man that wrote a book on how to go to sleep, how to get good sleep and the benefits of a good nights sleep. In his book, Shawn details the perfect sleep sanctuary. Black-out curtains, 65 degree temp in the room, no electronics, the list goes on and on. While admirable, the average person doesn’t really have the time or money to set up one of these. So, what in the hell is the point of this article? I told you before that I didn’t have the cure .I believe that insomnia is strongly connected to a persons mind. You can be as tired as humanly possible, but if you’re mind is racing thinking about five hundred different things, chances of you going to sleep are pretty slim. It’s hard to describe, but try and let thoughts pass through your mind, don’t let them sit there and cause you to needlessly worry about them. Shit happens to all of us, but, as a wise friend once told me, it’s all going to be okay. Something’s wrong with your car and you don’t have the money to get it fixed? Trust me, you’re going to either find a way to get it repaired or you’re going to learn how to do it yourself.
So, for real, try and put your brain on hold at night when you go to bed. My only other suggestion is to put on some Fleetwood Mac or Steely Dan. When all else fails, that’ll put you right out.
Her Take:
I have a strange relationship with sleep.
To say it can be elusive is not quite right. (Not that I don’t use that exact phrase at 2am when I’m overdramatically writing my autobiography in my head, but still...) It’s not a slippery and infrequent visitor, like that would imply.
Sleep, for me, is more like a friend that you love, but can’t trust. When they hang around, things are good, and you get lulled into a sense of permanence so complete that you can almost forget the bad times. Then, with no warning at all, they stop being on time for things, or they start leaving early without an explanation, or you won’t see much of them for weeks and then they’ll show up at the wrong time entirely, like in the middle of a meeting with the CEO.
Oh sleep, you got me there. I didn’t think you were coming back but here you are, wrapping your loving arms around me at 10am in this conference room right as I’m supposed to form a coherent thought.
You scamp. How can I stay mad at you?
Will I see you later?
It’d be a lot cooler if we could hang out around 2 or 3am tomorrow?
No?
Ok, cool-cool-cool. You know, do your thing. I’m here for you when you’re ready.
As long as I can remember, sleep has been this kind of inconsistent force in my life, and I haven’t really gotten a handle on it. Maybe because I’m always too tired to research sleep deprivation. That’s irony.
In a really general way, my sleeping pattern looks like this: sometimes I sleep from about 9pm to 5am. Well, I spend most of that time sleeping, it’s unusual for me to close my eyes at 9 and not open them again until 5. I know that we all move back and forth between deep sleep and wakefulness as just a natural part of the sleep pattern, but I’m saying that I will be fully awake, eyes open, asking Alexa what time it is a couple of times or more on the best nights of sleep.
Full disclosure, I don’t know if that’s normal. It might be.
Be that as it may, those are my good nights.
On the other hand, this morning, the last time I asked Alexa for the time, it was 3:16am and I was not just awake, I was awake-awake, ya know?
The pattern goes like this: I’ll either wake up after midnight sometime, be awake for an hour or two, and then sleep until my alarm at 5 or I’ll wake up after 3am and not get back to sleep. There will be a series of nights like that, sometimes more than a couple of weeks, and I’ll either sleep through the night suddenly or I’ll resort to a little something to help me sleep one full night.
You know, just before I lose my mind?
Actually, I’ve adapted to the sleepless nights and function pretty well in the daylight despite it all. Maybe it’s because I have so much extra time to THINK ABOUT WORK in the dead of night? I’m just used to sleep being an inconsistent part of my life and I’ve learned that I don’t need to rely on that kind of friend. Ok, that’s not true, I still need sleep, I just wanted to feel empowered for a second.
One of my favorite theories - actually a thing rooted in fact that I’m going to call a theory because neither I nor anyone else I’ve ever talked to knew it - is that we’re not actually designed to sleep in one long stretch. It’s a modern invention that only dates back to the 1800s and we’ve all bought into it because all you have to do is tell us something loudly and often enough and we just believe it. The fact is, according to this article I found on the internet, before the industrial revolution, Western societies at least slept in two shifts, just like I sometimes do. The only thing I’m missing is the part where I’m productive, maybe actually write that autobiography down, in the middle part where I’m awake. Baby steps, ok?
Also, according to this article, the times I (and you) most frequently wake up might mean something. It’s an interesting thought experiment, but I lost a little confidence when it came to examining the ties between waking up between 5 and 7am and an intestinal blockage. Waking between 5 and 7am means you have a job. It might also mean that you need to poop before you go to your job but that’s just good life advice.
No matter the source you use as balm for your exhausted soul, I think it’s important that we’re all honest here. Not enough of us are getting the rest we need to be awesome. We wake up in the middle of the night and think about the time we tried to impress Wayne Haeffner in third grade by showing how high we could kick and he made fun of us then we kicked him in the nuts, and that’s embarrassing.
Wait, is that just me? Fine, but you have your thing too, admit it.
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