THE MIDNIGHT WORRIER

Stefanie Preissner

IIt feels exactly like unrequited love. It’s brutally, perpetually one-sided. My love, adoration, efforts and attention are utterly unreciprocated. I love sleep, but sleep hates me. It seems to have hated me since I was a child. I go through periods where a great night’s sleep means that I manage around seven hours, but in order to have one of those nights, I need to be in bed before 8.30pm. If I leave it any later, I’m goosed. Then there are periods — weeks, usually — where every night I get three-to-five hours of interrupted, haunted shut-eye. Those are usually triggered by anxiety or stress, but I can’t identify that at the time. I have never had my head land on a pillow and slept through until morning, and certainly not now. This pandemic is affecting my sleep hugely. Without stimulus from the outside world, without new impressions to dissect, I am trapped inside my own house and my own mind. I see it rattling my subconscious through my insomnia and my terrible dreams, whenever I do manage to fall off.

Every night, it starts again; the hours do their terrible dance. Around 7pm, hope starts to rise. This is the night, I tell myself. Tonight, it’s going to be different. I rationalise and justify all the previous nights. I excuse sleep for not showing up. I bend and twist and tenderise myself to sleep’s cruel abandonment of me. If I am kind and understanding, I tell myself, I will make myself an irresistible conquest tonight.

I wind down. I drink teas spiked with valerian root and camomile. I douse myself, and my pillow, in lavender. I turn on a room diffuser to set the mood before I go to bed. The scent promises to attract ‘a restful night’. Six drops into the aerosolising machine. There are two drops of hope, one of desperation, two of exhaustion and one of blind faith. A tear escapes my eye and falls in, too.

The places my head goes to when I can’t sleep are dark. I think it goes back to early man when daytime was for hunting food, gathering resources and preparing shelter. Rest, recreation and relaxation came when daylight waned and productivity was impossible. My mind has definitely adapted along those lines. During the day, my thoughts are utilitarian. I think about what I want to eat, who I want to chat to, where I want to go, what work needs to be done. In the dark, when night falls, the stresses, ideas and fears travel with the darkness. My brain is free enough to process every little fear and nuanced anxiety I’ve ever had.

Just like unrequited love, if you haven’t experienced insomnia, then no evocative description is going to make you feel the frustration, the weariness, the isolation or the powerlessness.

People who sleep soundly don’t know how lucky they have it.

I fear the night.

I have a small bit of dread every night that this will be another period of lonely darkness from which I can’t escape. I imagine the Earth rotating, and feel every millimetre of its orbit ticking by as the sun’s light gets further away, and then closer again before dawn.

It’s miserable to lie awake as solitary as an oyster, knowing that you could connect with other insomniacs, but then any chance of sleep would vanish. By tackling the awful side effects — by getting up, watching TV, reading, going online — you’re throwing in the towel.

You are succumbing to a nocturnal wakefulness and the certainty of a miserable tomorrow. While you lie awake doing nothing but fretting, there is a glimmer of possibility that you might just fall asleep again.

But dawn breaks. Sleep has refused yet again and the day starts with demands that can only be fully met by the rested. Sleep, yet again, moves far away from me and that’s when I begin the 12-hour descent that will lead me back to my 7pm hopes that tonight will be different.

Since I was a child, sleep has been a source of worry for me. I could never go through a sleepless night and not wake my mother. I think I felt that she wouldn’t believe I hadn’t slept if I didn’t prove it to her in the moment. Maybe I just didn’t want to be awake by myself. I still hate being awake by myself, but now my adult guilt monitors are fully honed and I can’t bring myself to wake The Mayo Man or The Boy Housemate from their sacrosanct slumber just to keep me company.

There are days where I become so weary and helpless that all I can do is cry and pray for sleep to take pity on me. On those days, sleep arrives to tease me around 4pm. If I give in and get into bed with sleep, I am punished later. If I don’t, I am also punished for not giving in when it was offered. I understand why forced wakefulness is a form of torture. I find it supremely torturous because

I’ve read so many books on the subject that I know the vital importance of sleep. I won’t bore you with science, but basically, every single disease that kills people has links to lack of sleep. The results from one rodent study drove the simple fact home for me. Mice with tumours were tested, and when every other variable remained the same, those mice that had fragmented sleep had tumours that were twice as large as the tumours of well-rested mice.

It’s a hot topic right now. People have mad relationships with sleep.

Today’s society has a fetish for being busy, and lack of sleep gets wrapped up in that. People, particularly the ones who wear suits, love bragging about how little sleep they get. It’s a new narcissism of busy-ness. People are desperate to seem busy because we equate it with importance. Claiming they don’t have a chance at getting eight hours makes people feel accomplished. I want to punch these people in the bags under their eyes.

Why is there this new suggestion that people who get eight hours’ sleep are like sloths? At what age does it start? We don’t look at newborn babies and think they’re lazy and unambitious, but when I consider taking a nap myself, or hear adults talking about napping, I feel like it’s wrong. It’s the same feeling as when I eat, or consider eating, an entire large pizza. Or take up two seats on the train by putting my bag next to me.

I do everything recommended to me. I understand the difference between decaffeinated and uncaffeinated. I reduce my screen time, I have serums and routines and thermometers to create a perfect environment. But sleep escapes me and I turn ratty.