The first rule of Insomniac Club is you don’t talk about Insomniac Club. It’s as boring talking about how you can’t sleep as it is retelling your strangely uninteresting dreams. I know. I have been there many a long night, and actually once a week at a place where my doctor sent me to learn how to sleep. It wasn’t called a club but sleep training or therapy, or something. Forgive me if I am vague on the details, I was just so tired.
I had gone to the doctor four years earlier begging for sleeping pills. I am too old to lie. I announced that if he didn’t give them to me I would procure them anyway. Sense and legality may be an issue for some but not for the permanently knackered. Besides which, all I wanted was a good night’s sleep, and the more I wanted it the more elusive it had become. Trying too hard for oblivion is a thankless task.
My sleeplessness, the medics said, was probably peri-menopausal. Or menopausal. I never really got the difference. It is a common symptom and in a way I was lucky as I didn’t have hot flushes or hives or any dried up unmentionables. No, I was just unhinged by not being able to fall asleep. This has happened to me before.
All my life I have had sleep envy and slightly resent those who can just drop off, abandoning me to wakefulness. This covers just about everyone I have ever ‘slept’ with. But this midlife insomnia was worse than anything I have ever been through. Worse than the comedowns after days on speed, worse than the tiredness I felt when my babies were breastfeeding. This felt like the end of the world, an ongoing low-level panic.
When people ask you how you are, you don’t say, ‘I am so tired I could cry.’ That when the drawer in the kitchen got stuck, you thought you may just leave home and never come back. You don’t tell them that on the edge of your peripheral vision you can see black creatures that could be dogs but you know aren’t really there. You don’t say, ‘If I don’t get a proper sleep I can no longer cope.’
You are a middle-aged woman. Your job is to cope. Plus, you are already spending most of your energy trying not to appear mad and buying concealer. When I mentioned it to other people I found that as isolated as you feel when it’s 4am and you still have not dropped off, you are far from alone. A YouGov survey of more than 4,000 British adults published in January found that 46 per cent of women have trouble sleeping, compared to 36 per cent of men: this is an especially big issue for women.
Many suffer in silence. Feeling exhausted is apparently just how we think life is. Lack of sleep, though, may lead to or indicate serious conditions, from stroke to diabetes. One doctor prescribed me old-style antidepressants (tricyclics) just to take at night. They didn’t touch me even though I trebled the dose. She explained how insomnia often happens at this stage of life because of the overproduction of cortisol as the levels of oestrogen fall.
Certainly this sleeplessness did feel absolutely physical. It would descend on me, a soup of dullness. If this was depression it was a new beast to me because it could be cured by that elusive one night of rest. The drugs didn’t work. I dabbled with HRT but soon knew it was not for me. So I ended up at this sleep training course at a local hospital. Basically, this is cognitive behaviour therapy, the current NHS panacea for all kinds of problems.
I made my daft jokes about this club for insomniacs but the two shrinks who ran the joint did not laugh. Indeed, one of the things I was meant to learn was how to reframe my thinking and never to refer to myself as an insomniac. Off I trotted to this over-intimate group therapy. Now I was with a group of strangers ‘sharing’ my experience. Was this helping at all? Was I even one of them? Was my insomnia special and different to theirs?
There was one man who said he had not slept for more than two hours a night for 10 years. He believed this was connected to his pineal gland and would discourse about this at length in the tea breaks.
There was a silent goth who, as far as I could ascertain, slept fairly normally but was worried that in the future he could develop seasonal affective disorder.
There was a twitchy young woman who was always too hot or too cold and seemed to me to need some other kind of help, and a chilled unemployed guy who could not sleep at night because he slept all day.
I think I did use the phrase peri-menopausal at one point but it drew a blank. Our motley crew was made to keep sleep diaries and to learn ‘sleep hygiene’. There was a lot of blah about mindfulness. When isn’t there these days? Telling someone to be mindful combines sadism with sanctimony much of the time. It is absolutely unhelpful for certain conditions but it is as cheap as it is rigid.
The main component of sleep hygiene is to learn to associate your bed with nothing but sleep. (Also sex, but no one wanted to dwell on that.) You must not watch TV in bed, use your phone, eat, use your laptop or even read a book. If you can’t sleep, you get out of bed.
We were then told we must maximise our sleep windows – so, for instance, if you have been functioning on an average of three or four hours’ sleep a night and you have to get up at 7am, you go to bed at 3am.
There is something counter-intuitive about this, but what it does is stop you lying in bed beating yourself up because you are awake. So there were some takeaways from all of it, though I couldn’t get with the not reading in bed thing. And there is nothing I like more than nesting in my bed with my kids and watching a movie. Was this all to be sacrificed because I was making the wrong associations?
The menopause isn’t exactly glamorous at the best of times, though currently 1.9 million women in Britain will be in its throes. Not all of them will experience insomnia, but many will and such symptoms can last on average for four years. Some will use HRT, though more and more I see women being prescribed antidepressants and it makes me edgy. Being tired is not the same as being depressed, though it can feel that way.
All of this would be made more bearable if we could talk about it, but what middle-aged women wants to tell her boss she is simply deranged with lack of sleep? Things improve as menopause passes or one alters one’s habits or scores some sleeping pills online or from private doctors, but we all know they are highly addictive.
I have tried everything – from lavender sprays to hypnosis where whale music drove me mad. A few things I’ve also found that do work for me: not eating or drinking straight before bed. Massage, exercise – all the obvious stuff. The symptoms of the menopause passing. It still happens from time to time, but what helps most somehow is knowing all things will pass… And knowing rest and sleep are two different things but not to get too hung up on the difference.
We have developed a mythology about lack of sleep that says to do without makes us powerful and important. Donald Trump, Tom Ford, Martha Stewart, Margaret Thatcher… many high-achievers have claimed to need very few hours’ sleep a night. Let me tell you this is not so. One does not lie in bed having amazingly creative thoughts. Instead one’s mind dwells on rearranging the furniture, the inevitability of death and the dread that again the light is breaking and you ache with fatigue.
No one is too interesting to go to sleep. As Leonard Cohen once said, ‘The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.’ That refuge is not restful. To enter the sleeping world freely and easily is still what so many of us dream of.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/wellbeing/sleep/cant-sleep-welcome-to-the-insomniac-club/
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