This week I’ve been going through what is known in the insomnia biz as a “blip.”
A blip is when a comparatively long run of decent sleep is interrupted by a comparatively and hopefully short run of not-so-decent sleep, and these days, as a reformed and mostly recovered insomniac, blips are few and far between and a lot less trying than they used to be.
This one has manifested itself in the form of me going to sleep straight away as usual, but waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep for a frustratingly long time. Last night and the night before I then woke up again and found it difficult to get back to sleep again, which is very unusual and meant that the night before, my total dipped below six hours, which probably only happens a handful of times in a year these days.
As I was lying there, either with my eyes closed or half-focusing on the shadows and lines of light slanting through gaps in the curtains, I wondered what the cause might be. Work? Well, I am busy and have taken on rather too much translating over the past couple of weeks, but not in the sense that it’s much more than the usual amount. Kids? Well, M Jr. has just started at her new junior high school and I have some minor anxieties – or rather, disappointments – about the fact that we now need to drive her there and back every day, something that my idealistic, eco-friendly self would rather have avoided. On the whole, though, I’m sure she’ll be much happier and more fulfilled in a new environment and with new classmates, so not really blip-worthy enough. Light? Well, with spring now sprung and the cherry blossom at its zenith, it is getting lighter earlier in the morning, which adds an extra dimension of pressure, in the sense that if I can’t get back to sleep while it’s still dark, I might as well give up and get up. Heat? Well, I’ve finally stopped using my electric blanket, but we’re still a long way from the kind of temperatures (30°C+ at 9 p.m.!) that I happily sleep through in mid-summer. Food? Perhaps, as I’ve actually been on a kind of semi-diet, having tipped the scales at over 59 kg about a week ago. My no-carbs-at-dinnertime gambit, which worked wonders for my sleep when I started it as an experiment a few years ago, is still set in stone, but I have heard stories of people on low-to-no-carb diets suffering from insomnia, and while I certainly wouldn’t give up my beloved porridge, toast, rice, and so on completely, I have cut back on them for breakfast and lunch, too.
But you know what? Despite the annoyance of having to go through my now abbreviated progressive relaxation routine several times over the past few nights, the earworm of Mrs. GREEN APPLE on repeat play in my internal music app (M Jr. II has been watching them on YouTube every night before we go to bed), and the usual OMG catastrophising that one tends to indulge in in the dead of night, I came to the conclusion that this particular blip is nothing more than a coincidence. And the more time that passes between blips, the less likely you are to be anxious or annoyed about them and the more optimistic you’re likely to be that they will, like the hay fever season or a scudding cloud, naturally pass you by and be gone again.
So tonight, I will go to bed in the knowledge that another small-hours awakening is a distinct possibility – and this despite the fact that I have somehow, through sheer will power, recently and almost completely managed to kick my old-geezer habit of going for a wee during the night – but it isn’t something that fills me with dread that I’m going to be thrown back into insomnia hell.
Oh, and I’m already down to below 57.5 kg, so even if it is giving me insomnia, the diet seems to be working.
