One-By-One

To sleep or not to sleep—you might just have a choice! Personally I’ve been dealing with insomnia for a couple of months now, and from all the articles I’ve read, they usually tell me what happens in my brain OR what can go wrong with my body while I am suffering from sleep deprivation.  We’re taught from a fairly young age how to take care of ourselves. We’re taught later on that when we choose wisely by exercising regularly, eating healthier, minimizing stress, and getting the proper rest each day or night, we CAN mitigate most of the negative responses we may have with regard to the stimulus in our lives. This is all good in theory, but something totally different in practice especially where sleep is concerned.

The problem I have is this:  All these so-called medical professionals, wellness therapists and even government officials forget to tell us that of these positive recommendations that we can do for ourselves, (and I know there are a lot more), they forget to tell us that sleep is the most important one of all!  Without sleep, performance of the other recommendations diminishes significantly over time for those experiencing certain types of sleep disorders (mine is insomnia; yours might be entirely different).  So if all of these recommendations are truly “choices” we consciously make, then it follows that sleep is also a choice.

Could making the choice to sleep be that simple? Really?? Perhaps it could be; this is definitely something I never considered before. In my experience, I either slept or I didn’t—that was it, but then I started to think about wellness. Without deciding to regularly exercise, you will become flabby and weak. Without choosing to eat healthier, you will most decidedly put weight on and many people know what that does to your energy level—Oh my, something just flew passed; I wonder what it was. Ah ha…I know. It was the last of my remaining energy for today! 🙂 And of course you already know that if you do not reduce your stress level, you are less likely to have the ability to think and focus. You’ll also be more prone to ‘catching the latest bug going around’ OR nature forbid it, something even more serious like heart attack, stroke or cancer.

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But how could I think about sleep the same way—as a “choice”, that is? Going the medical route to ultimately obtain some medication with who knows what is in it, (most likely unnatural substances), MIGHT be one way to handle sleeplessness (been there; done that; continue to do so for some unresolved reason). One certainly CAN kick the clutter out of their sleeping environment.  I know this is a possibility for all of us; unfortunately in my circumstance, this did little for my insomnia. Great for my bedroom though.  Yes, we could change out our 10 year old mattresses as the industry dictates (20 in my case, and something I’m perfectly willing to do but currently am not capable of doing financially). However, for those of us fortunate enough to have available laundry facilities in our homes or in the area where we live, we can and often do wash those bed linens thoroughly.

However, the notion of NOT letting thoughts, random or otherwise, interfere with sleep seems like utter nonsense to me! I am not some computer you can just turn ON and OFF with a flick of a button. Sometimes I have days at work that consume me, and I have to think about things in order to resolve them within myself.  I don’t have someone that lives with me in real life to bounce things off or to help keep me in balance.  Goodness, we rush around and push ourselves every single day—how can we not have these thoughts penetrating and permeating throughout our brains like coffee grounds through a filter or how blood does through our veins?  This all depends on how fast or slow your ‘thought throughput’ is, but I digress here. How can we prevent these ‘random thoughts’ from interfering with our “good night’s sleep” so that we reap the restorative benefits that sleep provides?  By the way, I refer to this ‘state of being’ as “my messy-mindedness”.

Some say to drinks lots of water throughout the day (I drink a minimum of 2 liters worth; insomnia continues).  Others say to do light stretching exercises to relax muscles (I have; insomnia continues) or yoga (I can’t; my knees won’t allow me to).  Still others say to relax your body completely (i.e. don’t do a thing) for at least an hour before your planned bedtime (I have tried; insomnia continues).  And yet others remind me just to breathe…(okay I know this one; I think I have this one down).

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Then I started thinking about the mind.  You know there’s so much to do and think about that it’s hard to shut it all out when we need to the most.  I’ve tried by listening to soothing music, audio books (about non-controversial subjects), or reading a romantic tryst on my Kindle an hour before bed (in reflection perhaps not always the best choice), but my insomnia continues.  Insomnia for me feels like someone has placed strings on all the still-moving joints on my body, and somehow this mysterious, baneful Puppet Master has me going all over the place mentally, emotionally and physically.

So before too many more sleepless nights and weeks pass, I finally seek medical assistance.  And yes, you guessed correctly if you said they gave me a pill (actually 2).  Therefore since late July, I have been pumping doses into my body every night, which are supposed to literally “knock me out”.  Well, why in nature’s valley would I take something that would knock me out?  This sounds extreme, but like some old proverb said, “Desperate times call for drastic measures” (or is that drastic times call for desperate measures…)

But the joke here is really on ME!  These doctors had me convinced that this treatment would help arrest my insomnia. Ha! I’ve got news for them! When or even if these pills work on a given night, I’m lucky to get 2 to 3 hours of ‘unconsciousness’, not sleep per se, but ‘unconsciousness’.  Having had insomnia this long, my mind has been tricked into skipping over sleep stages 3 and 4 (deep sleep), which provide the greatest release of HGH or human growth hormone associated with healing the body.  Therefore, I am not the benefactor of the restorative phases of the sleep. I am simply awake regardless of whether I re-do all the measures I listed above or not.  Now another doctor (a psychiatrist this time) told me to take yet another pill after the “I’m awake” phase occurs.  I know you can’t see me laughing, but I’m laughing all the same. 😀

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And then on the morning of Thursday, September 6, after sleeping a full 9 hours straight of dreamless sleep especially with having none over the previous 48, I had a ‘moment’—some might say an ‘epiphany moment’—but upon waking up that morning, I had a moment all the same.

It was a moment like no other. It was a single moment of sheer clarity that somehow changed the way I thought about sleep—even the lack of it! 

It came to me in a plethora of ideas in a single thought in that ‘moment’, and it left just as quickly as it came.

My heart was literally beating out of my chest at that point so I slowly took a deep breath in…. and then exhaled s-l-o-w-l-y  o-u-t while breathing the word “ahhhh…” and repeated this several more times. It was a rather extraordinary experience—a little more than mind-blowing too!

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“A choice. A choice? Sleeping as a choice? Sleeping IS a choice?”, I thought to myself.  Why would sleeping be a choice? Better still, why wouldn’t sleeping be a choice? As human beings we make thousands of decisions daily, we’re just not cognizant of them. We rise out of our beds. We take care of the necessary business. We start boiling water for tea or making coffee or for me it’s a full ½ liter of water. We take a shower or bath or not or aren’t able to. We have breakfast. We brush and floss our teeth. We gargle with a rinse aid or mouthwash or we don’t. We grab a little something (healthy hopefully) for sustenance as we rush out our doors only to face a hundred more decisions before we even arrive at work, to school or wherever we choose to go in our daily lives.

Please know this:  I am not a therapist, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, or any type of health care professional. 

I also am aware that researchers have “found gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), the most common inhibitory transmitter in the brain, is reduced by nearly 30 percent in individuals who have been suffering from primary insomnia for more than six months.”  The source of this information can be found here.

This post ONLY reveals my ‘moment’, my ‘epiphany’, my single ‘thought of clarity’ about my experience upon waking the other morning.

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I would not conclude this post without acknowledging the inspirations of two fellow human beings—one who I very recently became friends with, and another from high school who I recently reconnected with—but BOTH of these individuals are the reason why I’ve written this post.  They challenged me and encouraged me to think beyond my own boundaries, to expand my mind and to grow more deeply as a human being.  To this end, I am grateful.

In time I think I will recover from “my messy-mindedness” and eventually my insomnia may indeed subside by knowingly choosing to sleep.  I know this may sound strange, ‘knowingly choosing to sleep’, but for me sleep has been elusive for more than 2 months now.  If I can garner some insight from my own ‘epiphany’ from my waking thoughts, then why not?

I don’t know what will happen next, but I do know that I have absolutely nothing to lose by trying.  By my way of thinking, there’s a freedom in all of this that I’ve not known with thinking in terms of allowing myself the choice “to sleep or not to sleep.”  That is the question for you to answer for yourself.

From ‘onestillbreathing’ thank you for reading…and hey, let’s get some sleep!  😀