Insomnia

Abstract Illustration of the Human Eye, At Night (detail) - David Gifford

I worked as a sleep lab technician for a few years when I was younger.   The lab where I worked was both a medical clinic and a research facility.  I was the one who attached electrodes to patients and research subjects and then monitored the EEG equipment while they slept, marking notable events on the printouts and sharing impressions with the doctor in the morning.  I had always been a creature of the night, so the position seemed like a perfect opportunity for me when it came my way.  I slept during the day and worked all night, ten hours a night, 4 days a week.

To my surprise, I did not take to the reverse schedule automatically when I first started.  Perhaps being paid to be awake raised the stakes to the point at which sleep was the reward I could not get out of my head while on the job.  I adapted.  Always a bit of an insomniac I sometimes suffered with it in the reverse in my sleep lab days, lying awake for hours in the stillness of the afternoon when my wife had left for her real job.

My sleep lab training taught me a few tricks and tips about how to get to sleep:

• Don't drink yourself to sleep; alcohol disrupts the architecture of sleep-- the progression through stages of deeper and deeper sleep until the all important, restorative Stage 5 (REM or dream sleep) is reached.
• Don't use exercise too close to bedtime to wear yourself out. It will actually get your heart pumping and keep you awake.
• Stick to a routine 7 days a week.
• Beds should only be for sleeping and sex.  Don't read in bed or lie awake, stewing things over, tossing and turning.  If you start to panic, that is your cue to get up and read elsewhere until you're tired.   Condition yourself to associate proneness under the covers with sleep.
• My own advice to hardcore insomniacs who want to make a change: focus on getting up.  If you're compulsive about rising, sleep will assert itself.

I could advise the sleepless, but I could not heal myself. Being awake when you want to be asleep is painful, especially when you're young.  As a very small child it was less interest in being awake than fear of what would happen when I was asleep that drove things.  On more than one occasion, I would defy the natural order and see if I could endure a night without sleep.  The night to me was as the Antarctic was to Byrd.  I celebrated my first successful all-nighter at 10 with dry heaves in the morning.

As I got older, it was a combination of antipathy to bedtime and an inability to turn off worry about tomorrow.  For years I had trouble with it.  It was always worst when you needed sleep most, usually on those nights when rising early was called for.   I was very familiar with the agony of sleeplessness: the helplessness of knowing that while time seemed endless while I lay awake in the dark, it was not limitless; that I was in fact using it up in infinitesimal increments; that it would be gone by the time I needed it in order to sleep.

Tellingly, the terms that describe the 2 types of individuals when it comes to the sleep wake cycle concentrate on the wakeful state.  Morning people are people who are active in the earliest moments of the normal human day.  Night owls are active at the remote edges of the clock dial and they are forest predators.  Society looks more kindly on morning people.

The difference between a night owl and a morning person is the adverb modifying the transition between wakefulness and sleep, which is to say between being in or out of bed.  A morning person goes to bed eagerly and rises eagerly.  A night owl transitions between activity and rest only reluctantly on both ends of the cycle.  The difference between the types is the difference between eagerness and reluctance-- to turn in, to get up, to yield, to behave, to comply.

Sometime after my daughter was born, years after the sleep lab, I realized I was getting less sleep than ever, but also that I seemed to need it less.  I used the extra time to advantage, but I also noticed that while there was much more time lying awake and conscious in bed in the middle of the night, there was also far less anxiety about it.  I was finding myself both a night owl and a morning person, relishing both the hours in the middle of the night and those early in the morning.  At some point the period between night and day became smudged.  Sleep managed to happen somehow but there was a continuity between day and night, sleep and wakefulness that was not burdened by dependence on there being any distinction between them.

That was the state of affairs for many years until a doctor prescribed a medication that had a side effect of enforcing 8 hours of sleep. It was a period of my life marked by dissatisfaction in many ways, except for my attitude about sleep, so I started the medication only very reluctantly.  From a pharmaceutical standpoint, it had the desired effect.  Sleep became a balm.

Once again satisfied with my life, I came off the meds about a year ago and suddenly started seeing parts of the night I had forgotten about.  Once again I found myself awake for long stretches.  I had not lost the calmness about it.  Now the doctor who prescribed the sleep enforcing drug was fine with my quotidian rhythms if I was.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows in the middle of the night.  Much as in my 20s, there are thoughts that keep me from closing my eyes.  Then the thoughts were existential and solipsistic.  Now they are global.  Many a night, I find myself awake only to become conscious of the flashing of my phone disrupting the dark on the nightstand with some horrible new headline about the latest whimsical unilateral, unprovoked, elective cataclysm or tweet.

In this age it's clear that my childhood self, trembling alone in the dark, was right all along.  There are reasons to be awake.  That goes for all of us.  We want to sleep but we mustn't.

We must stay restless.  We must rise up.