Dr. Ira’s Insomnia Cure (in 2 parts!)

Unknown-3I have suffered from insomnia off and on nearly all my adult life, as do a huge number of folks.  If you read what’s going around the internet and other fonts of wisdom on the topic of sleep it could scare you to death, or at least keep you up at night.  Insomnia has been linked to diabetes, weakened immunity, weight gain and heart disease, not to mention accidents in which people fall asleep at the helm of whatever sort of chariot they are driving.   I do like to remind myself though that aside from falling asleep at the wheel, if lack of sleep is going to kill you, it’s going to be a slow death, kind of like life itself.

The first thing a good insomniac should do is get a medical workup.   That turns out to be a productive path in only a very small percentage of cases, but in case you are one of those who suffers from treatable sleep apnea it may be a good idea.

Many books and articles tout the benefits of exercise, timed to occur well before bedtime.   Interval training may be a better way to go than pushing through a single strenuous workout.   This seems to work really well with my dogs, who will sleep through the night if they get a lot of exercise during the day, but frankly it has never helped me much.

Losing weight is almost always a good thing.  That seems to help nearly everything under the sun, and research tells us that people who are thinner also tend to sleep better.   I can tell you, though, I had just as much trouble sleeping when my BMI was 20 than I do now with a BMI of 26.

My first-resort insomnia treatment is making lists.   Transferring annoying things to do from brain to paper tends to ease my mind, allowing me to temporarily put the intrusive thoughts aside and trusting that the paper, if not my mind, will still be there in the morning.  The second thing to do is reading something particularly boring, which, when I am half awake, is practically anything.   The third thing I do is something writers, psychologists and hypnotists call “automatic writing,” which is simply letting your hand write whatever it seems to want to without giving the process any conscious thought.  Sometimes surprising things appear, although I find that most of what I write in this state is indecipherable in the morning.   But when those fail, I go to the surest thing of all, the ultimate, guaranteed insomnia cure: staying awake.

True insomniacs will tell you that staying awake can be just as challenging as falling asleep.  That is because insomnia in its truest form is not really a state of being awake; it is a state of not being asleep.    This, it turns out, warrants its own post.  More on this next week!