It\’s been clinically proved that sleep deprivation causes poor decision making, lack of judgment, erratic behavior, and severe cognitive problems. (Four spelling errors in that last sentence alone.) Despite the well documented problems associated with lack of sleep, people continue to aggravate the problem. Those reading this, for example, have all heard of sleep hygiene, but how many of us actually practice it well?
(As an aside, I\’m currently hallucinating the presence of a monster under the bed.)
As far as I can recall, I slept well before adolescence. Granted, I was always the type to sneak half a dozen books and a flashlight under the covers, lying awake late to illicitly read past my bedtime since at least the age of seven. I was also the type for whom getting out of bed at 5:30 am for six o\’clock swim practice was like pulling teeth, but then, what child likes to get up early once the enthrallment of morning cartoons has worn off?
Something about me changed, though, around the age of 12. Mornings became literal knock \’em down, haul \’em out fights with my parents about getting out of bed and going to school (or just getting out of bed in general). At least once a week a scream fest would ensue, but as the months passed and I grew more frustrated, I stopped complying even on occasion. By the age of 14 my parents would literally strip my bed of the pillows, blankets, and sheets while I was still in the bed, to no avail. I would not get up. I had learned that if I was a stubborn bitch for long enough, eventually they would give up on trying to get me up that day, and I would go back to sleep. By eighth grade there wasn\’t a single school week where I didn\’t miss at least one day of school. All those days were spent in bed, sleeping. I was tired seemingly all the time. When I was younger I had boundless energy with a schedule full of honors classes homework and extracurricular sports and band practices. I loved it. Somehow, I burned out on it really fast.
Maybe it should have been seen coming, I don\’t know. My mother has had insomnia since college and my father has had sleep apnea for years. I was a Type A kid, burning the candle at both ends from an early age — not because they wanted me to, but because I wanted to, mind you. I adored the stimulation. Around adolescence, though — bam! — I just couldn\’t take it any longer. I couldn\’t fall asleep at night and couldn\’t wake up in the morning. If I managed to fall asleep at all it would be around 5am, and left to my druthers I would then sleep straight through to three or four in the afternoon, at which point I would awake from hunger, thirst, or the need to piss. I seemingly functioned best when allowed, as I was in the summers after the age of 13, to go to bed around 6:30am and get out of bed between 2-3 in the afternoon. Any attempt to change this schedule generally resulted in me sleeping 14 hours through on the next night, only to awake exhausted and desiring to go back to sleep.
Sleep — I couldn\’t get enough of it. It was a commodity more precious than water and much harder to obtain. I recall being in a first period class in the 9th grade and being subjected to a film. It was winter and still barely light outside (7:30am), particularly due to the overcast skies. I hadn\’t managed to sleep at all the night before, and there I was in class with the lights out. My eyes started to droop and no matter how hard I dug my nails into my arms, I couldn\’t keep them open. My teacher yelled at me a few times, finally saying that I had to sleep on my own time and that if I couldn\’t keep my eyes open she would kick me out of class, which she finally ended up doing. I left class, left school, went home, and zonked out for about two days. I didn\’t go back for the rest of the year.
In later years, sleeping became more of a problem because being older meant having relationships. By 17 I was sharing beds with people who would climb in and immediately fall asleep. I would lie there for hours on end, begging my brain to shut off and give me some peace. It would do so, but only just before the other person was waking up and starting their day. So started the cycle of my bed partners bitching at me for being lazy and sleeping all morning. (A voice in my head has always replied, well, yeah, but you sleep all night and I don\’t!) The spite of bed partners was always worse than that of my parents, as my stubbornness was only ever matched until the point where it was no longer tolerated and I was given an ultimatum. At 19 I had a boyfriend who blamed his poor class attendance on me: \”Do you know how hard it is that I have to get up to go to a class at 10am and I come home at noon and you\’re still asleep?\” Yeah, it is hard. I know; I\’ve done it myself in my current relationship. But you know what\’s harder? Trying to sleep and not being able to while your bed partner snores and sleeps on, oblivious to your insomnia while you lie in bed, but should you attempt to get up and actually do something, being told that you\’re keeping them awake or causing them to not sleep well. I can\’t count the number of nights where I have been in bed, sleepless, body aching and growing worse with every hour because I couldn\’t sleep and couldn\’t move due to potentially pissing off the sleeping body next to me.
I dated a guy who said sleep was for the weak. He was also a drug addict and bi polar. The two of us made a great pair, binging on sleep in between brief periods of extremely agitated hypomania. At least he never faulted me for sleeping during the day — in fact it was often I who would try and get his ass out of bed at three in the afternoon. In that sense, it was the perfect relationship; dating someone as badly adjusted as you are can be greatly comforting. But the real world beckons, and so does the call of the illicit. He couldn\’t keep himself off the drugs and I couldn\’t keep myself on them. We didn\’t last, needless to say.
Granted, I have great memories of sleepless periods over the years. Going days without sleep when hypomanic can lead to a huge amount of work being done. The feeling of elation and invincibility is phenomenal. It\’s like being on cocaine but with the high lasting days without having to snort additional lines. Unfortunately, just like cocaine, the come down is harsh. Suddenly, the lack of sleep feels like it has fried your brain as well as your body. Then comes the desperate desire, no different from a junkie craving the next fix. Sleep: you need it. You must have it. Without it, you can\’t calm down, you can\’t relax, you can\’t survive. Everything starts to hurt, including the thought of not being able to sleep. It won\’t come. Sedatives, alcohol, depressants, huge amounts of exercise — nothing — until finally, unexpectedly, you crash and sleep for three days. You know that during that time you\’ve pissed and drank water because when you finally cometo the physical evidence is abundant. Then you find out that not only have you been sleep walking but you\’ve also been conversing in your sleep, writing in your sleep, driving in your sleep… you have little to no recollection of the past few days, but the dim memories you do have feel like long forgotten dreams. You start to learn of the weird shit you did in the past few weeks — those days of no sleep as well as the days of living unconsciously. And goddamn, it was bad shit, man. Bad karma.
The worst decisions in my life have pretty much all been made while sleep deprived or while in the middle of the follow up hibernation. Suicide attempts, orgies, giving away huge amounts of money, not eating for days on end, drinking binges, compulsively documenting every sordid move via voice recorder or the written word, publicly expounding upon what most people would keep private… it\’s all been done. I regret it, or I don\’t, depending on how much sleep I have had.
There were a few months in my adult life where this wasn\’t so, days directly after my 21st birthday. Having received The Diagnosis of Doom, I was prescribed with sleeping pills to take every night for the rest of my life. Wow. Harsh. So I started taking them, and my god, the difference was incredible. From July to September of that year (2003), I lived in a fairy land. That couldn\’t be my life — no way! I was sleeping 12pm to 6am every day and not needing naps. I wasn\’t in any pain for the first time in years. I lost huge amounts of weight until I leveled back out where I was before the mess started. I had mental clarity, energy, drive, motivation, and I was actually getting things done. I felt like a whole new person. And then, disaster. Immunity. The sleeping pills stopped working. I had built up a tolerance. 5Mg went up to 15mgs, and still no sleep. I crashed and burned, hard, harder than probably ever before. Not going to bother rehashing what I wrote then, what happened then. It wasn\’t pretty, though, and really hasn\’t been since.
Now it\’s 2005 and it\’s all about maintaining. I\’m now completely addicted to the sleeping pills, most of which are now completely ineffective on me as I have built up an incredible tolerance. Most people take 10mg of Ambien for a few days and then are able to start sleeping normally on their own. Not me. Whereas most people take 10mg of Ambien and are knocked out for the night, not me. Valium, for example, no longer has any effect on me whatsoever, even when I slept the night before. Ambien is all that is left for me. For various chemical reasons, it has proved itself to be the one drug that will at least usually work. Usually, because there are nights where the insomnia insists on setting in despite having taken the pill. Lying in bed, an hour into the Ambien not working, and I become one of the very small percentage of people in the world who will begin to hallucinate as a side effect of the medication. Visual, and occasionally auditory. The first time this happened I had no idea what was going and wigged my shit, called a friend at three in the morning and started babbling incoherently about the enormous spider that was gliding all over my walls, among other things.
A year and a half later, I can tell when the Ambien is not going to work on its own, and the self-hypnosis has to be employed. Making yourself black out due to necessity is not as wonderful a thing as it may seem, as occasionally not even that will help. If you can\’t rely on self-hypnosis in times of crises, what can you rely on, particularly when you know the terrifying hallucinations could kick in at any minute? Distraction. Distraction you can rely on. Hypnotizing yourself with a computer monitor can be done. A television doesn\’t work because the images are always changing. Concentrating on other objects in the room doesn\’t work because you can still see things other than that object. Closing your eyes is the most terrifying of all choices because you can still see the room with your eyes closed, but once closed it becomes an Alice in Wonderland type room with anything possible. But concentrating on a computer screen and focusing on getting the words to come out right in a giant white screen — that can be done with a huge amount of inner focus.
Usually after a few hours, the hallucinations going on in the corners of the mind (and room) fade, and utter exhaustion kicks in. Sleep comes, but it isn\’t restful, it isn\’t restorative. Sleep comes and comes and comes, the body trying to recover from the toll taken the night before. It wants to sleep the whole day through. Deny it and spend the day in huge amounts of physical pain and mental chaos, both of which will continue throughout the next week. Give into it and throw your sleeping cycle off for a week or maybe more, the Ambien being ineffective in returning to a somewhat 9am-12am schedule. The choice is yours, but choose wisely. Consider what is on your agenda for the week and decide if it can be scrapped completely, delayed until next week, or accomplished during the night time hours. And once operating on the night time hours for a few days, realize that the only way to return to a day time schedule is to go a few nights without taking the Ambien, and thereby not sleeping at all until one night you are exhausted enough to sleep without it for a few hours. After those few hours you have to have the mental dexterity while asleep to realize that you can now sleep, wake yourself up enough to pop the pill, and catch the six hours of restorative sleep.
Sleep? What is that? Sleep is for the weak.
I\’ve run out of Ambien. Something went wrong with the postal service and the package disappeared in the mail. It may arrive this week, it may not. They don\’t have the chemical compound that makes Ambien here in Australia. I can\’t just go to the doctor and get a script for another sedative, because the others don\’t work. Last night was a cocktail of Valium, Sonata, and codeine, but I only managed about four hours of very poor sleep, despite having spent about four hours at the beach yesterday.
Sleep. In the form of a little white pill. My favorite lover. Where are you? I\’m feeling the irrationality creeping in. The pain has set into my back, shoulders, ass, arms, hands and head once more. The happy camper of last week is now a miserable piece of breakthrough bleeding and dried out eyes. Postal service! After all the hundreds upon hundreds of dollars I have lavished upon you over the years, why are you forsaking me now, when I need your prompt and dependable delivery the most? Sod\’s law, my dear. Sod\’s law. And even Kraftwerk\’s soothing melodies cannot save you now.
There is no point in getting out of bed today, because if at some point the tiniest inkling of capacity for sleep should hit, I must be in a literal position to take advantage of it. \”Sleep hygiene\” be damned.
