War has left Eastern Europe sleepless

WARSAW, POLAND » For the past seven weeks, Dr. Simona Neliubsiene has struggled to focus on her patients’ charts, distracted by images of bombed cities flashing in her head.

At night, she lies awake in bed, her heart thumping, frantically doom- scrolling through the latest news about Russia’s war in Ukraine.

“I never had anxiety attacks before,” said Neliubsiene, a family physician in Kaunas, Lithuania. “But after the first week of the war, I started thinking that maybe I should take some of the pills that I am prescribing to my patients.”

Many Eastern Europeans feel intimately connected to the conflict in their region. Although the violence has not yet spilled outside Ukraine, some people in neighboring countries said they were making detailed war contingency plans — just in case. They complained that they were unable to escape the relentless news coverage.

Some even said they were afraid to fall asleep.

Because of the proximity of the war in Ukraine, some Eastern Europeans are afraid of getting pulled into the fight. Images of the bloodshed only hundreds of miles away are dredging up painful memories of atrocities committed by Russian soldiers during World War II and the Soviet occupation in this part of the world years ago.

And there are about 4 million Ukrainian refugees now in the region whose suffering is a constant reminder of how real — and how close — this war is.

According to interviews with more than a dozen mental health professionals and patients from Eastern Europe, there has been a surge in profound anxiety, as well as in requests for sleeping pills and calls to crisis hotlines.

“This is a raw existential crisis,” said Sara Koszeg, a psychologist from Budapest, Hungary, who started a project documenting people’s nightmares about the war. “And it has a biological effect: You are alert all the time, and this affects your sleep.”

Katarzyna Skorzynska, 34, a fashion designer from Warsaw, said she kept waking up at 4 a. m., hours before she normally starts her day. “I have been feeling overwhelmed and helpless,” she said. “Once I wake up, it is very difficult to fall back asleep. My thoughts are racing.”

And it does not help that she starts her day by looking at the news.

“Wake up, check on Zelenskyy, coffee: This has been my morning routine,” she said, referring to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine.

Staying updated on the latest war developments has become a bit of an obsession for some, who hope that doing so will make them feel like they are more in control. But the reality is that it has had the exact opposite effect.

Vytenis Deimantas, 29, a social scientist from Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, said he had trouble falling and staying asleep but that even when he takes sleeping pills he wakes up after only about five hours. Then he rolls over, grabs his phone and scrolls through news websites.

“There is a feeling of powerlessness,” he said. “And the more you think about it, the stronger it is.”

Psychologists say that the challenge of anxiety is that people worry about things that are out of their control. And one of the most frequent symptoms of anxiety is insomnia.

Neliubsiene has been swamped with requests from patients experiencing insomnia and anxiety. She has been prescribing them muscle relaxants for shortterm use and has been recommending physical activity, reduced screen time and fixed routines. One of her patients, a woman in her 50s, told her she was afraid to fall asleep.

“She said, ‘ What if Putin invades while I am sleeping?’” Neliubsiene recalled, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Mental health professionals say that one way to feel more in control and ease anxiety is to help someone else.

But it also brings people face to face with the refugees’ suffering — and exposes them to vicarious trauma.

Skorzynska described a feeling of profound sadness after assisting refugees.

“You genuinely realize that it could have been us,” she said. “That this is all happening just next door.”

That sort of realization has led many people to seriously consider the possibility that they might have to flee their homes. Families in Poland and Lithuania said they discussed which art pieces were valuable enough to take with them and which routes would quickly get them to safer countries.