You all know how much I love 80s movies, and the one rule of 80s movies is that there is always a sequel. So consider this a sequel column. It might not be up there with The Empire Strikes Back, but I reckon it equals the emotional drama of Ghostbusters II.
Back in March, I wrote about my lack of sleep, due to my sleep-resistant baby. Well, funny how that story turned out! The baby is now sleep-trained, but I have managed to un-sleep-train myself. “Is there greater hell than this?” I’d wonder, soothing a bawling baby at 4.13am, but if there’s one thing 2020 has taught us, it’s that the answer to that question is always yes. What’s worse than being kept awake by your baby? Being kept awake by your own fritzed-out brain, while that treacherous little baby sleeps peacefully. I’ve considered demanding she now soothe me – a bit of quid pro quo here, baby – but I’m not sure she can sling me over her shoulder.
Insomnia, I know. That feeling of your mind insistently working against your body: I’ve had it since I was a kid, when I’d get so anxious about being tired at school the next day, I hardly slept at all. (Prophecy: fulfilled.) If there’s a reason not to sleep – a coffee I drank seven hours ago, a faux pas I made 14 years ago – my mind will seize on it as soon as I turn out the light. But this recent spell has been different.
Figuring out how things got to this state is like an addict retracing their descent from the occasional spliff to rock bottom – and right now I am Tony Montana in Scarface, nose-deep in a mountain of cocaine. Usually I have trouble falling asleep, but suddenly I couldn’t stay asleep, waking up at 4.30. This became 3.30, then 2.30, now 1.30. Soon I’ll be waking before I get into bed. Sometimes I go back to sleep, but often not, and so I lie in the dark, my brain clanging like a washing machine filled with marbles, synapses frazzled like burnt-out candle wicks, thinking about how tired I’ll be the next day. As an experience, I would give this a 2/10: would not recommend.
When you tell people – the annoying people who can sleep – that you have insomnia, they’ll respond with solutions: have you tried exercise? Meditation? Valerian? Valium? This drives me bananas because, yes, I’ve tried everything and nothing works. (Seriously, when will humans learn that when someone tells you how tired/lonely/sad they are, they don’t want solutions, they want sympathy?) But this time, the responses were even better than solace: it turns out we’re all wide awake at 2.47am these days, destroying our collective sanity. Is this anxiety about Covid? Mild depression brought on by the many horrors of 2020? Too little exercise due to lockdown? Too much time following the news on our phones? I’m too tired to decide, so let’s say yes to all of the above.
My extremely longsuffering partner finally broke my well-established ban on solutions and suggested one. Once I stopped raging at him, I tried it and – extremely Chandler Bing voice here – OH. MY. GOD. I always sneered at sleep apps because staring at your phone is so clearly self-defeating if you want to sleep. But out of deranged desperation, I downloaded Calm. If you’ve heard of Calm, it’s probably because there are a lot of celebrities on it. But if the weirdness of modern life is stopping me from sleeping, it seems unlikely that Harry Styles reading me a story is going to help. So, in a very un-me way, I swiped past the celebs and listened to someone called Tamara Levitt.
Oh Tamara! I can’t remember the last time I was so happy to be in bed with a stranger. The first time it didn’t really work (first times are often like that). But the next night, after only 20 minutes of listening to Tamara’s slow, soothing, smiling words telling me that everything is fine, to tune out the external and just breathe, I was out – and the next night, and the next. Forget Tony Montana: I’m now Renton sinking into the floor in Trainspotting (near-death experience aside).
I feel slightly weird talking about Tamara, partly because it makes me feel like Joaquin Phoenix’s character in the film Her, who has an intimate relationship with his tech . But also I don’t want to overplay Tamara’s abilities. I still wake up every night, and sometimes she puts me back to sleep again, but last night she did not, and I was up from 1.30 to 4.30ish. But because I spent those three hours listening to Tamara telling me she was – as she often says – “right here with you”, which is nice to hear when you’re on your own at 3.17am, so instead of the usual frantic panic I eventually fell asleep. And this morning I feel OK.
The past four years have been so anxious, so full of rage and noise, with everyone now isolated in their homes. Some of the reasons for that are on their way out (President Trump, maybe the virus), some are not (Brexit, the climate crisis). So, sometimes you can’t shake off the insomnia. Maybe if, instead of focusing on all the external doom and division, we reassure ourselves and others that we’ll get through it, we can make it feel less gruelling. Dawn will come. It always does. And if one day it doesn’t, well, there will probably be an app for that.
