Anxiety and Insomnia

My bedfellows that hog the covers and snore loudly

Like Daylight Saving Time, I have been losing an hour a night.

Saturday night, I slept about five hours. Sunday, four. Last night, three.

I was going to write about sleep anyway, but from a bird’s eye perspective. A well-rested bird. I have been swishing it around, getting the flavor of what I was about to put into words, for about a week now.

I was going to champion my Oura ring, which I purchased (not inexpensively) when I began this withdrawal process, and which helps keeps me honest. Because I have always lied to myself about how little sleep I am getting. It’s my lifelong narrative, the story I’ve always told: “I don’t sleep.”

It’s been refreshing to see, on my Oura app, that even when I think I’m tossing and turning, I’m actually slumbering between five to seven hours a night. A few times a month, incredibly, I get almost eight hours. And a few times a month, I have a shitty sleep like last night.

This is a shitty night.

This is a fab night — all bow to the queen of sleep!

I’ve never been a great sleeper. As a child, I was a chronic glass-of-water requester, and when that no longer worked I would stand at my bedroom threshold, hurling countless innocent and startled stuffed animals at my mother’s door across the dark and forbidding hallway until she awakened.

I had it in my mind, as I grew up, that eight is enough….hours, that is. It wasn't until I was in my late 30s that a sleep specialist in New Hampshire convinced me that not everyone actually needs to sleep a third of each day. “You seem to be fine with less,” he said, and I actually heard him. He was correct. I was just holding myself up to some ideal, which I tended to do in other areas of my life as well.

Since then, I’ve accepted that I simply don’t sleep a lot. I don’t beat myself up about it. That’s the thing, isn’t it? The expectation. Because, inevitably, if I expect a “perfect” night, I will consistently fail, and then I will lie there anxiously, which only compounds the problem. I know because I did it for years.

So, when I wake up and it’s still dark, and I just can’t sleep, the first thing to do is compartmentalize my thoughts before they spiral out of control (witness my horrifying night demons in The Terror Begins). My mind is not a safe neighborhood at 2 a.m., I’ll get mugged and molested in its squalid, inky alleyways. I need to take a Bridget break — a break from myself.

My darling, beloved Kindle is my best friend when I can’t sleep. I can quietly reach for it and my reading glasses without waking the snoring giant next to me.

Rather than diving into a mystery or thriller — which would only compound the problem — I turn to a “macaroni-and-cheese” book. Something comforting and familiar, an old favorite.

Probably my favorite “macaroni-and-cheese” book of the last decade.

So that’s my formula. To be gentle with myself. To accept the situation. To not root through my shoebox full of old fears in the middle of the night. To distract with something pleasant.

It doesn’t always work. But neither does fueling my anxiety and insomnia with worry. The choice, as I am learning, is mine to make.