On Insomnia

Commonplace Newsletter #41

Writing an essay or an article about sleep is one of the primary signs, I think, that you have officially run out of ideas. Listicles and advice pieces on ‘7 ways to improve your sleep’ or whatever are signs that the harried and deadline-driven content creator needs to heed their own advice and start taking it easy. It’s hard to sleep well after a day spent scrapping the barrel.

But sleep and its enemy insomnia are worthwhile topics of discussion. It’s just the advice aspect that gets to me, the focus on the purely physical as the solution to all ills (you do not spend anxious nights staring at the ceiling through some tacit existential dread, no, it’s simply a lack of vegetables or a deficiency which can be fixed with homely remedies or melatonin supplementation. Coincidently enough here’s an affiliate link, nudge, nudge).

So, as is my want, I am going to ramble in a quasi-philosophical manner now about not being able to sleep, all the while resisting the urge to prescribe valerian root or vigorous exercise or the like.

Shall we?

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The Still Of The Night

For the most part I sleep pretty well nowadays, touch wood. This could just be dumb luck or coincidence or a multi-year phase that will end soon, so I won’t bother to enlighten you on my pre-bedtime rituals, I promise. If I ever get asked about it (I work a job where I sleep away from home, so the question of ‘did you sleep alright?’ pops up with some regularity) I just say that my secret for good sleep is a clean conscience. It usually gets a smile, if not a full chuckle, which is all you can ask for. Lord knows my blissful slumber doesn’t come about as a result of running around to the point of exhaustion all day.

But anyway. The point is I never used to sleep well. There was a four year phase in my late teens especially (from ages 14 to 18, give or take) where my sleep was consistently terrible. Chin-cradled-in-palm nodding off by day and then wide awake TV-watching by night. Virtually every night. For years.

I remember how I and a small group of similarly afflicted school friends would discuss the previous nights episode of Oz which screened on Channel 4 at maybe half past midnight. It was like a testosterone and ultraviolence fuelled little secret society for us boys who were especially physiologically Ill-suited for the ludicrous proto-factory worker timetable that school forces you to conform to.

Now, you don’t need a quiver of pubmed citations, you simply need working eyes to see that making a teenager wake up at 7am or sooner, and to ostensibly go out and use their brain at that, is a poorly thought out folly that borders on cruelty. Teens aren’t lazy and feckless, it’s simply that the whole school day as it stands goes against their biology. And don’t get me started on the evil of homework and having to make career decisions before you, by definition, have any life experience. It’s no wonder I was an insomniac.

Part of me suspects that my young brain- in a piece of twisted but understandable logic- realised that the middle of the night was the only time where I was left alone in peace and so manufactured the necessary hormones and chemicals to maximise this time. That and the fact that school was such a waste of time for me that it made a kind of sense to endure the weekday daylight hours in a somnambulant fugue state most of the time.

That’s my theory anyway.

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Questions That Keep You Up At Night

I mention this, besides the fact that reminiscence is in and of itself quite a pleasant thing to indulge in, because I think sleeplessness and awful sleep habits have an existential component. Mere biology, as discussed above, is not satisfying enough, even though teen hormones do seemingly account for lack of pep and enthusiasm in the morning hours.

No, I think that when we face those nights of looking at the ceiling and tossing and turning and constantly searching for the cool side of the pillow, it is because we have something that we need to address and resolve philosophically. Even good sleeplessness- where you struggle to get off to sleep because you are in the middle of a great creative spell and are buzzing with ideas to explore and create art around- has this dynamic to it.

The mind is trying to puzzle something out and it won’t let the body or even itself rest until there is some resolution. And teenhood is nothing but a puzzle, beyond the swirl of hormones there is a maelstrom of questions- Who am I? What is the purpose of my life? Is God dead? Is this all there is? What am I going to do?- all pressing upon you and all existentially terrifying if you really start to pull at those threads.

All of the magnesium citrate and chamomile tea in the world won’t quiet those questions if they creep upon you as you are pulling on the bedsheets. It is beyond biology.

And if I had the solution to such questions I would be a world renowned philosopher. Or a charlatan. Or a public intellectual, which is to say a person who occupies the perfect midpoint between those two previous professions. But I don’t and so I am not. I talk around topics that are in the public lecturers purview but I don’t have a mass prescription. Prescriptions are lucrative, of course, but they are also addictive. It all depends on which side of the pharmacy counter you are on.

So yeah, sleeplessness comes from the seemingly unavoidable wrestling with the questions of the nature and meaning of human existence that have plagued frilly-shirted philosophers like Kierkegaard for centuries. But then again, old Soren K did also drink incomprehensibly vast quantities of coffee laced with enough sugar to make the spoon stand up straight. So maybe the Quantified Self biohackers are right after all. Maybe it’s all just a question of easing off the stimulants and precisely calibrating your supplements. Better living through chemistry, as it were.

It reminds me of a scene in the 2013 Jason Statham vehicle Parker (precisely the kind of thing you may find yourself staring at on Netflix during a bout of insomnia) where Jennifer Lopez’ character incredulously asks our jewel thief protagonist how he sleeps at night given his occupation, to which Stath growls, in some kind of an accent, ‘I don’t drink coffee after seven pm.’

Maybe that’s all there is to it, then. Or maybe not. Either way I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.

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Concluding Unscientific Postcript

I said I don’t have a prescription for all of this, and Lord knows everything above is almost certainly singularly unhelpful if you are currently suffering through a sleep disorder. I mean, in a way I hope that this piece has proven to be so tediously meandering and unfocused as to induce that longed for sleep in the sufferer but I fear I have failed in this regard too. Because these things do tend to be halfway entertaining and mildly diverting, if the general consensus in the comment section is anything to go by.

So I said I don’t have a prescription, that I don’t deal in advice, and I stand by this. All’s I can tell you in regard to insomnia is how my own bout and how subsequent milder bouts have ended. The standard caveats about correlation, causation, coincidence and casuistry all apply.

I began to sleep again when I let go. When I shrugged my shoulders. When I embraced thought-quietening questions such as ‘Who knows?’ ‘Who cares?’ ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ And my favourite, ‘What can they actually do to me?’ This last one being good at quelling hierarchy-based neuroticism that school and work foster and instead encouraging the kind of positive risk-taking that a good life often necessitates.

Yes, It’s easier said than done this letting go lark. But there is real freedom in it. Many a nagging question disappears when you admit that you don’t know the answer, and further that you will never know the answer. It’s a relief.

They say that Socrates was the wisest man who ever lived because he understood just how little he knew. This may well be so. But I’ll tell you one thing. I bet he slept like a baby.

But what do I know?

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