This is not one of those articles that will tell you what to do about this problem, share a successful story of how the problem can be addressed. No, sometimes these kind of stories are exhausting for those suffering, because what works for one does not necessarily for the next. They sometimes also struck too much the optimisation cord which I loathe. When we think about our “problems” only in the mindset of optimisation and functioning then we might end up perpetuating them. I definitely felt that thinking about sleep as “functioning” did not help.
What is it that I want to share? I would like to ask many questions, share multiple experiences which sometimes were successful and then infuriatingly no longer. I want to share one big question amidst all of them: Are we a multitude?
I have been in this loop of insomnia for almost a year now. It happened before in my life, 10 years ago. I was always a someone who would take 20 minutes to fall asleep and it could happen to me easily to find it difficult to sleep in unfamiliar environments or to ruminate so much that I could not sleep. I passed through a difficult life phase and although there were other evenly difficult phases within the 10 years, it broke out now one year ago. My insomnia manifests like this: It started indeed by ruminating and actual fears and then it switches quickly to no thoughts, but just as I hit the pillow my heart starts pounding driving bouts of adrenaline through my whole body, maybe also cortisol. It feels like my heart prepares to run away from a tiger. I might be very tired, sleepy when I go to bed, it just takes 2–3 minutes and I am fully awake. Then the thoughts would start: What is going on? Why are you feeling this way? Inquisitive, baffled. And I made the experience many, many times over that there was no way to “control”, calm my heart down. It would rage and rage. I tried breathing — it would only work if I started breathing consciously before the heart could rage. Once the rage started, no way — during the breathing out, my heart would pound even more furiously. I would also experience jolts — heart beats normally, normal thoughts drifting through my head, getting ready for sleep. Jolt like a lightning bolt. Of the kind you feel when all of a sudden you remember something that you have forgot doing, something that was important. Wide awake again from that lovely sleepy, cosy feeling state.
I tried the shakti mat. It is such an impressive experience — would calm me down wonderfully, blood running to my hands, warming them. I could fall asleep on it within 20 minutes, but then wake up, had to get off it and the heart would start its usual spiel. I tried the over the counter sleeping helpers like calms, CBD oil etc. Maybe the placebo worked a few times, then a particularly difficult day emotionally and the heart was back. I took antidepressants (mirtazapine) at some point — they would make me more sleepy than usual and sometimes it helped, but if my heart wanted, it could knock them out. My inner system was stronger than them.
I learned that it is important to get out of bed when you cannot sleep. I had not done this for a long period of suffering, because it is such a terrible state. You are not tired, fully awake, but so exhausted. You do not want light, movement, anything. You just want someone to switch you off. You want to have a break from yourself, from your thoughts. However, I learned you need to get out of bed, so I dragged myself out of it. I started reading at night in the living room. At first it was plain torture, at some point I could endure it, then more and more accept it and good books helped. Thank you, literature!
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Sometimes I had fits of real hatred for myself and an urge so powerful to hit myself, to hurt myself. I stayed reasonable in those — I wanted to hit my head, but I knew that this would be really bad and I hit my legs. I felt I was not functioning and I was inflicting this on myself, so I was beating up this “defect body”. [Everyone you has these feelings and can relate, please look for help from outside yourself as I did, because it can be dangerous!]
Through all this I was wondering, sleep is surrender — me, my body and I we were holding on to control. I just did not know of what. What did I, we want to control by not surrendering to sleep? At some point, my body was also very much used to the sleep deprivation that it was constantly running on the reserves, overstimulated and excited. I could get fits of heart pounding during the day and I would never be tired, except if I had literally barely slept for 2–3 nights in a row. I found it horrible and fascinating at the same time that my rational system and my bodily system could be so out of touch it seemed, they could not talk to each other. I felt I could not reach my body, no matter what I did. Complete powerlessness.
I did coaching, emotional coaching and it helped in stretches, but never for long. I started working on all my issues, from an emotional and a rational-cognitive angle. I felt this was the only thing, in the long haul, that I could do. Try to figure out how I could accept and love myself more, every day a little bit. An excruciatingly slow and thorny process. I realised that I rejected my insomnia as a defect in myself, I judged myself for it and the judgement made everything worse. I felt a tightness in my throat around the topic. Some evenings I could feel the tightness invading before even going to bed and I knew that night would not going to be pretty. I could most often not resolve the tightness, I could only feel that it was there and it stood in the way of me falling asleep.
The thought of not being able to sleep and spending the night with myself — exquisite torture. And I wondered sometimes if this was like an intrusive thought, like people with OCD would describe their thoughts and the phenomenon.
There were nights, I don’t know why I managed to sleep. There were stressful things happening, but I slept. Other nights, nothing special, nothing stressful, sometimes even especially pleasureful, but no way to find sleep. I tried over and over again to accept it. I have no control. Maybe this was what I was supposed to learn? For me, in life generally — I do not control my environment, my life, my son. Surrender, there it is again. Surrender the illusion of control we all have. And was I supposed to go through all of this to finally make progress in loving myself, accepting all parts, even the ones that I reject actually? Becoming able to sit with all my ambiguous emotions and thoughts, let them move through me and accept that I am a multitude?
I have now read into IFS — the internal family system (Richard Schwartz) — and it has corroborated my thought that we are many, a multitude of different personality parts which, if we do not constructively engage with them and work with them, can cause us enormous pain. All our experiences, suppressed emotions from the past and formed believes around those can form personality parts that direct us in our life. I found comfort in the thought that I am not one single psyche, do not have one single personality and that this is ok instead of sick or abnormal. Everyone has these parts, some are more some are less aware of them, but we all have them and very often we find ambiguity and contrasts in us and our behaviour. I can be a very rational and logical person who “functions” while having seemingly irrational sleeping issues, also irrational fears.
My sleep is the barometer for how I am doing and I accept this. It is a constant training in surrender and faith. I found a very good mental picture for my insomnia — Dune, the movie when they are in the massive dust storm and Paul Atreides switches off all control systems of the helicopter and leaves it to the storm to move them through it.
