I Was Diagnosed with Insomnia. Here’s How I Get More Sleep.
Adults need at least seven to nine hours of sleep to function properly, but few of us are hitting those numbers.
Job and life advice for young professionals. See more from Ascend here.
In my quest for beauty sleep, I’ve tried everything from aromatherapy and melatonin to acupressure and chamomile tea. But alas. Each temporary fix has been exactly that: a passing relief.
Seven years ago, I was diagnosed with insomnia. After multiple trips to the doctor, they confirmed the source of my body aches, back pains, irritation, and mood swings was sleepless nights.
My job at the time required heavy travel. Back-to-back flight schedules wreaked havoc on my already disturbed sleep patterns, along with a cocktail of stress, multitasking, and hormones. Of course, travel isn’t much of an issue anymore. With lockdowns, restrictions, health concerns, and an economic slowdown, there is a new slew of things to keep me up at night.
What makes matters worse, though, is the dread I often feel come sundown. You know the feeling: tossing and turning, desperately wanting to catch some shuteye, and obsessing over why it is you can’t.
In the beginning, this feeling lasted until 6 am. Seven years later, I’ve learned to cope a bit better. On the worst days, mornings still arrive without cheer no matter how beautiful the weather.
If you are tired most days, have trouble retaining information, concentrating, or feel like you got off on the wrong side of the bed, you might be fighting a similar battle. Adults need at least seven to nine hours of sleep to function properly, and today, very few of us are hitting those numbers.
Professor Matthew Walker, director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at UC Berkeley, has coined this time in history as a “catastrophic sleep loss epidemic.” To make matters worse, recent studies show that there has been a rise in sleep disorders like insomnia and hypersomnia associated with the pandemic. Across the United States alone, the number of prescriptions filled for sleep disorders increased by 14.8% between February 16 and March 15 2020 compared with the same period in 2019.
Sleep deprivation not only affects our moods, but also our health and work-life balance. That’s why, for the past seven years, I’ve been trying to figure out how to battle this epidemic. I’ve read various studies and reports, gathered anecdotal evidence, and talked to allopathic and homeopathic medical professionals.
Today, my sleep still isn’t perfect, but it has gotten much better.
Here are some tips I picked up along the way. See if they work for you.
My friend, a homeopathic doctor, gave me some sound advice: Look at your full day to identify the causes of insomnia — not only the few hours before you go to bed. Pre-pandemic, it was more difficult to do this. I had limited time to slow down and monitor my schedule. But a benefit of our current situation is that it’s forced many of us to take a pause and reflect on which areas of our lives are working and which are not.
This year, I began looking for patterns into what could be triggering my sleepless nights. Was it something I was eating? Was it related to stress or physical activity?
I realized when I had too many meetings or when I was not giving myself the permission to take a break and relax in the afternoon, I was often too wound up to fall asleep later that night. Scheduling my most intense work in the mornings, slowing down post lunch, and doing mundane tasks, like clearing my mailbox, in the evening has worked wonders. Look for these ebbs and flows in your own day. You may be able to make small adjustments that result in a big difference.
Locking down what works for you will be a game of trial and error. On top of all my sleep experiments, I tried smart mattresses (the ones that claim to track your movements and adjust throughout the night), apps like Headspace (featuring Andy Puddicombe’s soothing British accent), and even remedies like tying fenugreek seeds in a cheesecloth and applying them to specific pressure points before bed (as advised by an acupressure specialist). None of these worked for long.
It wasn’t until my neighbor recommended another home remedy — drinking a glass of nutmeg, cinnamon, and fennel boiled in water — that I started to make a little more progress. It turns out that the kitchen spices used in this concoction contain flavonoids and antioxidants that help calm the body.
I combined this strategy with my new work schedule and some mindfulness meditation, a suggestion from my yoga teacher. For anyone new to it, mindfulness meditation is a mental training practice that teaches you how to slow down your thoughts and be more aware of your mind and body by using breathing techniques. The goal is to shift your attention. Instead of reflecting on the past or daydreaming about the future, aim to focus on moment-by-moment experiences, thoughts, and emotions.
People who, like me, are triggered by stress may find this practice useful. According to Dr. Herbert Benson of the Harvard-affiliated Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine, mindfulness meditation evokes something known as the relaxation response — a deep physiological shift in the body, opposite of the stress response.
A daily session of 20-odd minutes helps me slow down. When that doesn’t work, I have tried knitting. The repetition calms me. You will need to experiment to figure out what works best for you, too.
Since the pandemic began, even more of us are working from home, which means we could be working, eating, lazing, and sleeping all in the same place: our beds. Research shows that if you bring your work to your bed, you’re likely to continue thinking about it even after you’ve “switched off.” I made this mistake in the initial days of WFH and have several nights of no sleep to thank for it.
Make an effort to carve out a separate work area — it may be your kitchen table or a small nook in your living room. Reserve the bed for sleep, and only sleep.
It can be hard to know what advice to follow with so much out there. But two methods that I’ve found quite effective and that come highly recommended are cutting out caffeine after noon and limiting blue light at bedtime. The sudden silence I’ve experienced during lockdown has made me more aware of the relentless stimuli we face daily. We are constantly talking, texting, absorbing a cacophony of voices (inside and outside of our heads), traveling, and multitasking.
I’ve learned to disengage from all electronic devices, especially those with screens after 9 pm because, as I’m sure you know, the blue light messes with our melatonin and makes it hard to sleep.
I want to acknowledge that I still have a long, long way to go. If I slept for four hours a night before, now I sleep for six (a big improvement if you ask me) and I can see a remarkable difference in my energy levels throughout the day.
Take it from an insomniac: You can get there too. It will require patience and hard work, but your sleep can improve with some trial and error, and an effort on your part to understand your body and its rhythms.
I Was Diagnosed with Insomnia. Here’s How I Get More Sleep.
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