Insomnia

I am normally a pretty good sleeper. Most nights I get in bed, I read until my eyes will no longer stay open and then get a decent rest. If I do wake up, it is just for a few moments and then I shift my body and fall back asleep. But sometimes I go through cycles where I wake up around 2 or 3 a.m. and can’t get back to sleep easily. This wakefulness can last an hour or more and I usually end up pretty exhausted by the next morning. This can happen everyday for a week or so and then suddenly stop.

Recently I saw a video where a sleep specialist was discussing the hormone cortisol. Cortisol is produced by the body in reaction to stress. The very common 3 a.m. sleep disturbance is often caused by a high level of cortisol at a time when it should be at its lowest point in the day. The result: a person under stress awakens and becomes mentally active when they should be in deep sleep. Stress is a major factor in this cloud of cortisol but there are many other factors too…like lack of exercise. I won’t go into them all here. I will only say that, of all these influences, stress levels are probably the most difficult to control.

The photos…

I am going to insert a few pictures into this post. They may or may not be related to what you are about to read but I like them and want to share them here anyways. Think of them as images from dreams.

These days…

…I am past the end of a kind of planned sabbatical period. Sometime ago, I decided to take a year off and pursue a new path. I had saved enough money to make this possible so I didn’t have to stress too much about it. It was simply a decision I had made and one I was following through with. But, as the end came around, the money started to run out and I am now forced to figure out a way to make some more. I either have to get a new job or create my own stream of income. Without going into details, I will just say that this is very stressful and it occupies most of my thoughts.

About last night

Not surprisingly, this stress is affecting my sleep in exactly the way I described above. Yesterday was a day that, for all my hard work and good intentions, was completely unproductive and exhausting. I got in bed early just to escape the day. I wrote a little bit and then read a book until I fell into a sound sleep.

At 2 a.m., I woke up suddenly and I knew that I was at the start of a cycle of stress induced awakenings. Sometimes I fight this by just laying awake and trying to calm my racing thoughts…this is least effective solution. Other times, I flick on the light and read until I fall asleep. This is like a “start over from the beginning”. The success of this method really depends on just how wound up I am. The third method (which I used last night) is to try to get whatever thoughts are swirling around in my skull OUT. I do this by writing them down on paper or, like last night, typing them into the notes app on my phone.

Usually, these writings read like a kind of garbage dump of thoughts and feelings. But this morning, when I read over what I had typed half-consciously in the middle of the night, I thought it might be worth preserving. At least for myself. Below is the unedited late night mind-emptying transcript:

2 a.m. Cortisol Cloud

“I just woke up at 2 am and these are my mostly unfiltered thoughts about starting a business and/or getting a job….the thoughts that woke me up in the first place:

The main thing is…the thing that has kept me from getting started…is that I don’t think that I am worth investing in. At least not right now.

People around me tell me that I am smart. They tell me that I have talent. That I am creative. That I am organized. That I can do anything. But I don’t or I can’t believe them. And when I try to avoid “negative self-talk” and prop myself up, I don’t believe myself either. It all just feels like a lie. 

I like this life that I am living right now. Cooking for myself, exercising, reading, studying, playing with my cat, taking pictures, going for long walks, meeting friends, playing music, writing my stupid blog. I am taking good care of my body and my mind. And I don’t waste time. It’s enough for me, really. I wish it didn’t cost so much.

I don’t want to be rich. I don’t need anything more than what I have. I don’t want to own anything. I just want to be able to choose how I spend my time. This is freedom and peace to me. But I know that this dream that I am living at the moment is impossible to sustain. And that is hard to swallow.

This feeling will subside…. In the depths of my heart, I am an optimistic person and I am happy to be alive. 

These February mornings, sunlight, diffused by the icy glass of my tall window, casts soft shadows of houseplants on the chipped and crooked old walls of my room…and that is enough to raise an honest smile…that sun penetrates my heart and happiness warms me from the inside out.  I try my hardest to capture the light in a photograph (almost impossible!) But, if I get it just right, I can trap that warm feeling in an image and return to it whenever i want to. It works. 

If you read this, please don’t worry about me too much. I am not depressed…I just don’t like myself that much right now. It is not the same thing.

In the meantime, I will look at my hands and move my fingers one by one like Kim Sae-Byuk in “House of Hummingbird”.  I know that it is ok to hate myself for a time, and I will try to focus on the small things that I can control.

When is someone going to invent a cigarette that doesn’t kill you?”

Afterward

After I finished writing that in bed last night, after I had emptied my mind, I slept pretty well. What I wrote is accurate. It is all true. Although, awake during the day, I would have a hard time expressing thoughts like that. In the twilight between sleep and wakefulness, I think that we enter a kind of drunk state. We think and say what we mean without filtering, without inhibition. I think there is truth and value in recording dark thoughts in dark hours.

When someone gets drunk and tells you something like “I have always really been attracted to you” and the next day apologizes and says “I was really drunk. I didn’t really mean it”…the truth is more like: “What I said was true, I just shouldn’t have said it”. To me, your nighttime thoughts are kind of like the drunk’s confession. You can learn something about yourself here. Something true and honest.

How to get to sleep

Probably very few people know this, but when I was in University, I studied and wrote my thesis on sleep. The University I attended had one of the most famous sleep labs in the world and I wrote a paper on a tiny electrical impulse that can be stimulated during sleep: “the P1 evoked potential”. If you are not studying neuro-psychology, this paper would bore you to death. In fact, reading my paper itself would probably be a pretty good sleep inducer for anyone!

I am not a sleep expert in any way but over the years I have learned a few tricks that work for me, your average occasional insomniac without any serious mental conditions. Here are my two favourites:

1- Controlled deep breathing. This might be a 4/8 breathing method, “square breathing” or any number of other breathe-to-relax methods . It is basically learning to control your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems through intentional slow breathing. It is incredibly effective in controlling stress anytime day or night but it takes practice and focus. It is not easy. Kind of like meditation…you need to apply it consistently and practice it often. It takes patience but it is worthwhile. There are hundreds of videos online about this and some good books too. I recommend “Breath” by James Nestor. This is a simply written and well researched book on the way we breathe and how it effects everything in our lives.

2- Psychotherapist Viktor Frankl’s Logotherapy uses “paradoxical intention”, where a patient consciously intends to do exactly that which he fears in order to overcome the fear itself. In terms of sleep….someone who lays in bed worried about falling asleep will probably not fall asleep very easily. Hyper-intention to fall asleep keeps the person awake. Frankl recommends trying the opposite. Get in bed and forget about falling asleep. Instead, make it your intention to stay awake as long as you can. Decide now that you will NOT sleep and fight the urge as hard as you can. If you do this, you will most likely find yourself in deep sleep pretty quickly…just by removing the intention. It sounds kind of childish…but it does work. Try it. Grab a book or start a movie and think to yourself: “There is no bloody way I am falling asleep until I finish this”. ZZZZzzzzzzz…

p.s. If you haven’t seen the film “House of Hummingbird”, I highly recommend checking it out. It is one of my favourites. I think you can stream it almost anywhere.

If you want to learn more about Viktor Frankl, pick up his book “Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy”. It documents his experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz and how the experience shaped his approach to psychotherapy. It is a very short and fantastic read, not nearly as heavy as the title would make you think.

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them below. I always look forward to hearing from you. If you enjoy the content and would like to contribute towards website maintenance and development, you can make a donation here. Thanks for reading TigerSalad!

Post Post-Script

A day after posting this I got a few private messages from friends doing a subtle mental-health check-in. To those who got in touch: a sincere thank you. I am actually doing ok but I truly appreciate the contact. It is always a warm feeling when you realize that people care about and think about you. I wish more people would check in with friends who might need some support…sometimes lives hang in the balance.

When I wrote this, I didn’t mean for it to come across as something too heavy. All I meant to get across is that sometimes your subconscious is sending you messages that are worth listening to. They may come in dreams (hard to interpret usually) or they may come more directly in that twilight between wakefulness and sleep (still hard to interpret sometimes). For me in this case, here is what I understand as the message from me to myself:

“Although during the day you seem to enjoy the quiet contemplative time that you have no shortage of…in reality you are unsatisfied with your life and you don’t like (or maybe you are bored with) the person you have become. Find the courage to take a step forward.”

In other words…time to wake the fuck up and do something : )

That’s my best one line summary.

I think it is quite normal be be unsatisfied with yourself, even to hate yourself on some level sometimes. It can be motivating. It can be a catalyst for positive change and, in my case, erase a false sense of well being. You just have to recognize it for what it is, accept it, accept that it is not permanent, and keep passing the open windows.

Pay attention to messages from your subconscious…even if they are dark. They are a part of you and you can learn something from them.