February Newsletter: Insomnia

 This newsletter is not actually late because of the coronavirus. Our minister of health called for all schools in the country to be closed because of an epidemic of normal flu. Then I had some potentially good news about The Sultan’s Enchanter, which needed all the time I wasn’t using on Interchange. Then the coronavirus hit, but that’s a story for next month.

The month of February was more about insomnia. Ahem.

So there I was, lying in bed at 2am, trying not to move, not to wake up Pavlina, not to think about anything terrible. Every time I managed to slip down toward sleep, my body would jerk, like I’d been shocked. I was wide awake again, heart racing. Now it was 2:30am! I had to wake up at six the next morning, so I only had…three and a half hours left! But I couldn’t give up. I’d grit my teeth and try again.

This pattern started two years ago, but it got much worse in January, when, Pavlina’s grandpa had stomach trouble and threw late at night. Night-time sickness, especially gastrointestinal distress, reminds me of when I was sick. My older daughter also had a lot of medical intervention when she was a baby, and I have many memories of going to bed, thinking everything was fine, only to get woken up because of a medical emergency. Now, I started expecting medical emergencies every night. It would get dark and I’d start having knots in my stomach, which of course also kept me up. Forcing myself to sleep was like drowning someone in a bath.

It finally got so bad that I turned to the internet for help. I know it’s a crazy thing to do, but I remembered that Pavlina had found help for our older daughter on a forum linked with a specific medical problem. I tried to do the same thing, googling “forum insomnia anxiety” or something like that and I actually got some useful information. I found out that my habit of checking the time and calculating how much time I had left to sleep…was bad. And perhaps I was spending too much time in bed during the day, reading. I could avoid coffee after lunchtime and avoid screens around bedtime. Maybe I could train myself with some good associations with sleeping. I should stop forcing myself to lie still, and get up and move around if I felt like I needed to. That sounded reasonable.

The best part came, though, was that it gave me something concrete to talk about with Pavlina. We progressed beyond “I can’t sleep.” “Why not?” “I don’t know” to “I can’t sleep because I’m worried I’m not sleeping enough.” “Why are you so worried your not sleeping enough?” “Because I need eight hours of sleep every night or I’ll get sick again.” And Pavlina was like “Why do you believe that?”

And I remembered an old student of mine.

The western sky is

Mediterranean and

The east is polar.

I’ll call him the Witchdoctor. He was a surgeon-turned-alternative-medicine-guru whose practice was based on the theory that bad emotions manifested as physical illness. I didn’t buy it, but I taught him English.

Then, I developed cancer, and had the surgery and the other surgery, I went to this guy for advice in his capacity as a surgeon. He told me that my cancer was a sign that I was living my life wrong. I was letting my anger build up inside me, I wasn’t sleeping enough, and if I didn’t shape up, my cancer would come back. If I paid him, he’d show me…

Well, I dropped that guy as a student and never spoke to him again. I knew he was trying to manipulate me into giving him money, the same way he had duped his other clients. Yet still, he got into my head. I allowed him to convince me that I needed to sleep eight hours a night or else I’d get cancer again. It sounds silly when I say it, but I hadn’t said it. I hadn’t verbalized any of this, out-loud or to myself. Now, when I told the whole story to Pavlina, she said, “well, that isn’t true.” WHOOSH! It was like a curse had been lifted.

I still had a couple of bouts of insomnia, but they weren’t as terrifying. They were more of a mechanical problem, and the mechanical solutions I had for insomnia started working better. Sleep hygiene, no screens, exercise early in the day, etc. The first that night I went to sleep normally, I rewarded myself the next day with an audiobook. I’ve bought three books for myself now. At some point I should probably stop rewarding myself…ah, it’s okay.

I used to not believe that words had power. I still don’t in the way most people seem to, but these past few months have showed me that words teach us. When words teach us untrue things about ourselves, we become cursed. More on that next month, or whenever the library allows me to check out The Four Agreements again and read the second half