It didn’t last. There doesn’t have to be a reason for insomnia – the French film director Marguerite Dumas has described it as ‘metaphysical’ – but mine began, aged thirty, with a baby. It wasn’t only because he woke every two hours, that, despite consuming fatigue, I’d lie rigid in a state of nervous anticipation. Postpartum insomnia is a result of havoc-inducing hormonal shifts, and some never sleep properly again. Happily, it passed, for me. I had another baby, and trained for a marathon, which helped re-regulation.
But stress, too, can cause insomnia. Trauma and challenge interrupt the best planned lives, and it was when, a few years later, my first child developed a critical illness that the problems resurfaced. On the nights I spent in a pull-out bed in hospital, the worry came coupled with an unrhythmic beeping of alarms that found an echo in my broken dreams. With slow-to-no internet, I turned to the only other diversion tactic available to someone sharing a room with a six-year-old and found salvation in that year’s Booker Prize shortlist that, memorably, included Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1 – from which I inferred this blip would work out – and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, which told me I wouldn’t be alone if it didn’t. Very soon, the hours between 2 and 5 evolved into a near-sacred time of literary therapy. But ten years on, while my son has long recovered, my sleep hasn’t.
In fact, despite eventual release from the klaxon sounds, it only deteriorated further – which is typical on passing forty (and experiencing more hormonal shifts). Being older, minimal hours now leave me feeling not powerfully accomplished à la Thatcher, but highly anxious, and sluggish when it comes to arranging words on a page in a fashion sufficiently poetic to publish. (Barack Obama, incidentally, guarded his six hours a night.) My issue is less going to sleep than staying asleep – but, exploring remedies, I discovered that the guidance is the same. Some is obvious and longstanding: Plato advocated for temperance and keeping the mind free from chaos – which I’ve translated, for the 21st century, into ‘no real news or stressful tele before bed.’ I am also well versed in warm baths, and the necessity of allowing time for digestion.
‘It’s a mistake to resign yourself to insomnia,’ said Marcel Proust – but he developed a severe, long-term addiction to barbiturates and other sedatives. So I looked into over-the-counter cures. ‘Sleepy-time tea’ came with self-evident consequences. I switched it for gummies, and brought in breathing exercises. When that didn’t work, I doubled down, via recommendations pertaining to ‘sleep hygiene’: good books, I discovered, can be so gripping as to cause us to miss the ‘sleep window’. I designed myself a theoretically distraction-free bedroom – without bookshelves – but with black-out curtains, a superior mattress, and Hungarian goose down pillows bought after a freakishly good night’s sleep in one of Jenna Burlingham’s gallery flats that, despite the pillows, has yet to be repeated. I painted the walls a serene blue, planted lavender beneath my bedroom windows, and instigated my own version of a weighted blanket, by way of a Welsh blanket topped with two vintage fur coats. Non-sleepers obsessively grill each other, and I can tell you that many swear by magnesium, and others, variously, by acupuncture, cranial osteopathy, and cognitive behaviour therapy. But I continued to spend the dark hours feeling keyed up, and increasingly desperate. Until, at some point, the desperation abated.
Comments are closed.