I’m really bad at falling asleep. This has been the case ever since I could read. When I was 6 or 7 I’d go under my covers with a flashlight and read after my parents tucked me in. I thought my parents couldn’t see it but of course they could. They didn’t mind though since they knew I was reading.
In high school I had to wake up at 4:15am 3 days a week for swim practice, but I wasn’t very good at getting myself to go to bed early enough and often fell asleep at school. In college I did a bit better, but would still stay up till 2 on Saturday nights, even when I had just stayed in for the evening to watch tv.
It didn’t get really bad until I was doing my PhD in Oxford though. Starting about a year after I got there, I started going to bed with the tv on. Technically it was BBC streaming on my laptop but you get the point. I couldn’t go to sleep without white noise. And when I woke up at night, I couldn’t go back to sleep without the white noise. This understandably drove my girlfriend nuts. Fortunately, she was pretty patient with me.
The white noise became a crutch and without it, I couldn’t fall asleep. This has been going on for 5 or 6 years now. And I know exactly why. The time between lying down for the night and falling asleep is the scariest time of the day for me. When I go to bed, all the distractions are gone. All that’s left is what’s in my own mind; my thoughts and my feelings.
When you have depression, these can be terrifying. During my PhD, all the stress from my degree was mixed in with my (unacknowledged) depression. Trouble with my family and friends and uneasiness with my present and future were also mixed in. And all the thoughts and feelings I had avoided all day would swarm into my mind, as soon as I closed my eyes and tried to fall asleep.
The only way to quiet them and continue avoiding them was to have the tv on, so that’s what I did.
But then it didn’t stop after my PhD. In fact, it just continued to get worse. For a while I used medicine to help, but I didn’t like relying on it and stopped taking it a year ago. So during the last year, it got to the point where I had to be too exhausted to keep my eyes open and have something playing in the background in order to fall asleep. Often, even though I always felt tired, I wasn’t tired enough to overcome my tendency to force myself to stay awake until 2 or 3 am.
This sleeping issue has been one of my biggest challenges for the past few years (and also one that I’ve conveniently been able to hide from the people that usually help hold me accountable with my depression). But I had successfully avoided it the entire time, each night telling myself that the next day was too important and that I’d try again the next night, rather than risk not having the white noise, being up all night, and being groggy the next day. Which was silly, because I was always groggy the next day anyway.
For the last month, though, I’ve finally started to tackle it. With the help of meditation and mindfulness practices, I’ve finally been able to calm my mind enough to fall asleep without a distraction. Not every day, but most days.
My old routine consisted of surfing the web till my eyelids started to force themselves shut, then turn on some documentary, then fall asleep. Now, my routine consists of closing my computer, meditation, reading a book or drawing something, turning off the light, and letting myself feel those feelings and think those thoughts that I used to be so scared of.
In general, I’ve been waking up more refreshed. But I’m still always exhausted. I don’t know if that will ever change, unfortunately. But at least now I know that I’m getting deep, uninterrupted sleep. That’s a step forward at least 🙂
Share this Post