On sleep, and other unknowable things
I’ve had chronic insomnia since I was 21 years old. Before then my sleep was effortless, unbothered, flawless, and then something switched and for the last 19 years I’ve been trying to re-learn how to become unconscious at night. I remember the week the switch happened- I was working on the slime line in a cannery in Kenai, Alaska for the summer, and I’d developed this terrible full-body itch that kept me up at night. It was awful because I’d never had a problem sleeping before, not once, but now I was awake for hours in the dark, scratching until my legs were covered in bruises. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had scabies- a month later, permethrin cream killed the scabies but my sleep was never the same. Sleep science is fascinating, and for a few years after the scabies incident, struggling with my newfound sleep issues, I read every book I could find on it. I think it’s truly beautiful how unknowable so many things in this world are, and the human relationship with sleep is one them. In the last 19 years I’ve tried every home remedy and sleep hygiene technique in existence, and while my insomnia hasn’t gone away, over the years it’s shifted from something ruinous to a low-grade annoyance that I’ve more or less figured out how to manage. As far as I can tell, none of us gets through this life without at least a few nagging health issues that we’re never quite able to shrug off, and this is one of mine. After 19 years of observing my own body’s relationship to this weird and mystifying thing we call “sleep” I don’t have any definite answers, just two facts:
-I sleep best outside
-I sleep best when the air is cold (the colder the better) and I make myself warm under blankets
I think this is one of the reasons I got so into long-distance hiking after I first hiked the PCT in 2013- sleeping on the ground for five months a year gave me an extended break from my insomnia. I was in my tent by 9pm (“hiker midnight”), cozy and warm in my sleeping bag, the outside world properly cold, and I just- fell asleep- as if it was the easiest and simplest thing in the world. This magic sleep kept happening, on all of the trails that I hiked. And it happened again just now, in Arizona- during the hiking part of the trip we were all in our sleeping bags by 6:30 pm, since that’s when it got dark and cold, and I slept incredibly, sometimes for ten hours at a stretch. My sleep in December and January was pretty fucked, and it felt so, so good to be able to recover from that. I got back to Alaska a few days ago, and I was worried that my circadian rhythm would go off the rails again (it usually does when I’m in a house in a nice comfortable bed) but then I decided to try an experiment- since I’d fallen asleep so early in Arizona, I was getting hella drowsy around 8pm. I thought- what if I run with this? So for the past few nights I’ve been putting myself to bed at 9pm- something I never do unless I’m sleeping outside- and I’ve been falling asleep right away, and sleeping great. Then I started thinking about this thing I heard once, that our bodies prefer to be asleep by 10pm, and if we push through that bedtime we can get a “second wind”, and lose that feeling of sleepiness. This has definitely been true for me, when I’m sleeping in a bed in a house I basically never go to bed before 10pm, because who does that? And then my feeling of sleepiness just… goes away, and then I’m battling my own brain after that to try and get myself to sleep. So now I’m curious what would happen if I continued this early-to-bed experiment. Would my insomnia disappear completely? Probably not. Some aspects of my social life certainly would, which would be an interesting sacrifice to make- I could still ski with friends, make dinner with friends, dog walk with friends; but I couldn’t go to parties. Historically I’ve often felt FOMO about large social gatherings- I want to be invited, I want to be included, and it feels like some reflection of my own value as a person if I’m not. I think I’m at a place in my life where this is starting to shift, though- I no longer feel like I’m missing out if I don’t go to every social thing that I hear about. I’m a bit embarrassed that it took me this long to separate my own sense of self-worth from how many large group social things I get invited to, but here we are. And anyway, I don’t drink, and so parties without other activities are never as fun for me anyways, and meaningful connections, one of my favorite parts of hanging with humans, are difficult to make in a crowd. If I stuck to this 9pm sleep schedule experiment for a time and lost the ability to go to any parties, and could only hang with my friends during the day, that could be ok. And I love having so much of the morning- those dark hours before the sun comes up here, how clear and focused my brain is. I’ve always felt most productive in the mornings. So I think I’ll stick to this 9pm bedtime for a while, and see what happens. A circadian experiment!
And if my insomnia comes back in like a week in spite of my early bedtime? That’s ok too. The biggest lesson I’ve learned about insomnia in the last 19 years is that the more you stress about it, the worse it gets. So whatever my sleep wants to do is fine. It’s FINE.
That’s all for today. I’m gonna go skate ski in the new snow. Bye!