Is time real?
This question may offend your punctual sensibilities, evoking the delusional wokeness of your trust fund college roommate whose only temporal concerns involved his dealer. But some of us making this existential inquiry are woke by force… literally. Wedged between dusk and dawn, writhing in private anguish. I check the clock on my phone and immediately berate myself for consuming blue light when I need to avoid it most. 3 AM, we meet again, and I’m tired of it… but I’m not tired. God, I wish I was tired. I shut my eyes and wonder if eating seaweed or goose liver can improve eyelid opacity, because clearly I’m lacking some obscure nutrient.
The bright (and likely sleep-deprived) scholars at Harvard Medical School describe Maintenance Insomnia as:
“…difficulty staying asleep, or waking too early and struggling to get back to sleep. Difficulty staying asleep often gives rise to worry over not getting enough sleep, which further interferes with sleep, creating a vicious cycle”
For nine straight days this month, I was awake an average of 21 of 24 hours per day. Of that 21, I’d reckon a good 18 were spent at least peripherally thinking about sleep, sustaining the aforementioned “vicious cycle.” But this wasn’t my first rodeo. I’ve been intimately familiar with the pin-drop silence of forbidden hours since childhood, battling episodic sleeplessness and symptomatic delirium that make me question matters far darker and more personal than the realness of time.
This particular stretch was unexpected and humbling. I’d been quarantined with my boyfriend for about five weeks, riding a slumber high horse for the consistent 8 hours I’d been logging in cohabitation. We’d even just listened to the 2-hour episode of The Joe Rogan Experience with Sleep Expert and Neuroscientist Dr. Matthew Walker, feeling shared gratitude for our restful arrangement. But like my millions of sleep disordered comrades, sleep is mechanical for me: each part must be independently functional for the whole to operate. Diet. Exercise. Screen time. A sense of routine. And the most elusive: hormones, which I suspect were responsible for this month’s spell. I’d go to bed around 11 or 12 and wake up around 3 to “start my day” (read: wander upstairs, chug wine from the bottle, and count the minutes until sunrise). Each day I’d alternate between sitting in front of my laptop reading the same emails 100 times, or laying on the couch unsuccessfully trying to nap while Planet Earth buzzes in the background. Failing at activity is one thing, but failing at inactivity is especially discouraging. Once my brain detected my eyes had been open too long, a shock of acute pain would rise to the surface, manifesting in a disconcerting twitch. I just kept reminding myself how lucky I was to be dealing with this at home rather than the office—a kind of silver lining that turns your finger green.
For such a common struggle, insomnia is uniquely isolating. My poor boyfriend tried staying up with me “in solidarity.” My caring, selfless friends check in on me constantly, which one would think would make me feel supported, less alone. And it does to a point. But I’m quickly overcome with embarrassment and shame that I can’t give them the answer they want; my simple “no” to “did you sleep last night?” implies yet another day that I cannot show up for their lives the way they show up for mine, because I can’t even show up for my own life on this little cognitive power. This disturbs my hard-earned position as a rock for my people. How can I drop what I’m doing and drive to a crying friend when I’m safer operating a vehicle after a bottle of Merlot?
Well-adjusted folks love to speak with unfounded authority on disorders like anxiety and insomnia because of that one time two months ago that they got five hours of sleep versus their usual nine. Bad sleep gets minimized to some incidental ailment like catching a cold, and no one wants to hear you vent because we all get it sometimes! Think about breastfeeding mothers who wake up every two hours to nourish another human, right? And don’t even get me started on burn-out culture; there’s always a medical resident pulling an 18-hour shift, forgoing shuteye to save lives. The American dream is not the product of a good night’s sleep, but rather, a hard night’s toil. In so many ways, society has made me feel like I need to suck it up… pop a pill at night, drink a coffee in the morning, and put some concealer under my eyes. But let me give you a few sleep facts from Dr. Matthew Walker to explain why I’m done participating in this narrative:
- Poor sleep predicts all-cause mortality. Wakefulness is low-level brain damage, and sleep literally cleanses the brain of the metabolic toxins that have accumulated throughout the day—one being beta amyloid plaque, which is largely considered the cause of Alzheimer’s. After just one night of four to five hours of sleep, there is a 70% reduction in cancer-fighting immune cells. Bowel, prostate, and breast are the main cancers linked to insufficient sleep. Sleep also refreshes your cardiovascular system. Without it, your blood pressure rises, which is a catalyst for disease, heart attack, stroke, etc.
- Sleep deprivation ages you. Reproductively speaking, men sleeping five to six hours a night exhibit testosterone levels of someone ten years their senior.
- Contrary to popular belief, sleep is not a bank. One cannot “catch up” on sleep and reverse the neurological and immune damage of previous deprivation. Therefore, you can imagine the irrevocable health catastrophe insomniacs find themselves weathering.
Truth be told, I’m a woman of more vice than virtue. That third glass of wine and hunk of dark chocolate on any given Tuesday at 10 PM don’t exactly support my REM ambitions. But I’m learning to be kinder to myself when I slip up, to manage my triggers, and to balance living my life with this draining susceptibility. To anyone reading this who suffers from a sleep disorder: I don’t need to tell you you’re not alone. You’ve already heard it a million times, perhaps in ways that made you wish you didn’t share your story. But I wish you the rest you pray for with glazed eyes and stiff limbs, days with clear division, and time that feels real (even if it isn’t).