My relationship with sleep has always been pretty uncomplicated. I get in bed, I go to sleep. I get up to pee in the middle of the night, I fall asleep again a few minutes later. A cat wakes me up while trying to lie down on my head, I shove her in the direction of my feet and go back to sleep. I doze for an hour on the couch before mustering the energy to get off my ass and brush my teeth, then get in bed and go right to sleep again. I get tired in the middle of a room full of people having fun, I fall asleep.
I can sleep. It's one of my skills.
Like anyone else, I've occasionally tossed and turned or had trouble clearing my head of my daytime worries, but those nights have always been the outliers. Lately, though, I've been flirting with insomnia more often and more intensely than I like. (Back off, insomnia. I'm happily married.) The new trend is that if I'm awake for more than about a minute anytime after 4 A.M. or so, I'm probably going to be awake for at least half an hour. One morning last week, I had to visit the bathroom at 6:00, and I probably should have just gotten up then for the day instead of lying in bed until 7:30, wishing I could collect on the final hour and a half of sleep I felt the universe owed me that night. I've started locking my cats out of the bedroom at the first hint of restlessness from either of them because I can handle being awakened once, but if I get pawed in the face half a dozen times in a ten-minute period, the rest of my night will be pretty much ruined.
I've been having trouble on the front end of my sleep cycle, too. My standard trick is to bring a book to bed with me and read until I start to drift off, usually between two and ten minutes in. But lately I've been getting through books a lot more quickly because I can read for half an hour, 45 minutes, or much longer without so much as a heavy eyelid, even well after midnight. Eventually, when the number of hours between the time it is and the time my alarm is set to go off gets aggravatingly small, I give up, turn off the light, and just lie there with my eyes closed, taking deep meditative breaths into my belly. This tactic is loosely based on the suggestion my grandparents gave me when I was seven years old and lost them in the grocery store: instead of running around in a panic looking for them, I should go stand by the door. Eventually they'd have to leave, and then they would find me. So when I can't find sleep, I lie quietly in the dark, waiting for it to stumble on me. I can't stay awake forever.
So far, this hypothesis has been borne out in fact. Ultimately, I always fall asleep, although the intervening hours can be deeply frustrating. Last night, I'd been easing into a relatively successful light doze for a whole hour when out of nowhere, my heart started to race. I spent the next hour and a half wrestling a panic attack: belly breaths, belly breaths, belly breaths. And it worked. My heart slowed, sleep spotted me from across the room, and my obviously overburdened brain got about four hours of rest. It wasn't ideal, but at least it was something.
How do you deal with insomnia?
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