The manic side effects of insomnia
I am a bad sleeper. I regularly get insomnia – not the ‘I didn’t get much sleep last night’ kind, but the type where you’re still fully awake at 4am; watching infomercials and starting to agree that your life would be much better with a magic bullet blender.
Fortunately it only lasts for about 10 days at a time, which means I just have a constantly fluctuating sleep debt.
As a way of explaining why I am so rubbish with people in the morning I invariably truck out this excuse, which seems infinitely more polite than the real reason of “I just don’t like you.”
However, what I have learned in the 20 years I have been sleep deprived is that if you say “I get insomnia” suddenly everyone is a somnographer.
Much like how anyone with a word processing package on their desktop is a potential (nay, prospective) journalist and any one who has a digital camera is Max Dupain, anyone who has not fallen to sleep within minutes of their head hitting the pillow has “suffered” from insomnia and so is an expert on cures.
“Have you tried hot milk? Have you tried meditating? Have you tried valerian?” are all regular questions.
I have yet to actually articulate my inner monologue of “no, I have never tried these things. My god, if only I had known…”
By my reckoning, the first day after a night of no sleep is the worst. You need a lot of caffeine or ephedrine to get you through the working day and pretty much everything annoys you. A lot.
By the second day you’ve started to develop a bit of a routine and will fill in your day doing things like inane google searches of people you went to high school with or you’ll spend a lot of time staring into the middle distance blankly.
By the third day you actually get the pay off and enter what I can only describe as the manic phase of insomnia. While in the two days prior the effort required to boot up your laptop and open a new document is mentally equivalent to getting through Ulysses, by day three it all comes together.
Colours pop, shower thoughts are not just random epiphanies that dissipate as soon as you towel off, world peace is not only possible but a doddle and most importantly everything around you becomes hilarious. Admittedly this means that you run the risk of being seen as the crazy person on the Tube merrily chuckling to yourself, but I figure as long as you don’t accessorise that with questionable personal hygiene and an impressive display of carrier bags, it’s probably ok.
Point to all this being, having just come through another week of not sleeping, I found myself in an unnatural state of happiness and calm during the week, which resulted in me smiling at random people for no particular reason.
The reaction to this was mixed. I had a guy frotting against me in the Tube tell me I had a nice smile, although as he’d spent most of the journey staring down my top I’m not really all that sure he’d noticed my teeth.
Women on the Tube would always look unsettled and clutch their bags just a little tighter to them in response to someone smiling at them, and colleagues are always disturbed if anyone is smiling for no particular reason.
However, I can say (on the empirical evidence of only an A study so far) that if you smile your way through the Dickensian hell that forms the commuter hours on the Tube it makes the journey faster and more fun. You also get given a seat faster as people are deeply suspicious of you.
At 4am, after 3 days of no sleep, you're prepared to buy one.
Fortunately it only lasts for about 10 days at a time, which means I just have a constantly fluctuating sleep debt.
As a way of explaining why I am so rubbish with people in the morning I invariably truck out this excuse, which seems infinitely more polite than the real reason of “I just don’t like you.”
However, what I have learned in the 20 years I have been sleep deprived is that if you say “I get insomnia” suddenly everyone is a somnographer.
Much like how anyone with a word processing package on their desktop is a potential (nay, prospective) journalist and any one who has a digital camera is Max Dupain, anyone who has not fallen to sleep within minutes of their head hitting the pillow has “suffered” from insomnia and so is an expert on cures.
“Have you tried hot milk? Have you tried meditating? Have you tried valerian?” are all regular questions.
I have yet to actually articulate my inner monologue of “no, I have never tried these things. My god, if only I had known…”
By my reckoning, the first day after a night of no sleep is the worst. You need a lot of caffeine or ephedrine to get you through the working day and pretty much everything annoys you. A lot.
By the second day you’ve started to develop a bit of a routine and will fill in your day doing things like inane google searches of people you went to high school with or you’ll spend a lot of time staring into the middle distance blankly.
By the third day you actually get the pay off and enter what I can only describe as the manic phase of insomnia. While in the two days prior the effort required to boot up your laptop and open a new document is mentally equivalent to getting through Ulysses, by day three it all comes together.
Colours pop, shower thoughts are not just random epiphanies that dissipate as soon as you towel off, world peace is not only possible but a doddle and most importantly everything around you becomes hilarious. Admittedly this means that you run the risk of being seen as the crazy person on the Tube merrily chuckling to yourself, but I figure as long as you don’t accessorise that with questionable personal hygiene and an impressive display of carrier bags, it’s probably ok.
Point to all this being, having just come through another week of not sleeping, I found myself in an unnatural state of happiness and calm during the week, which resulted in me smiling at random people for no particular reason.
The reaction to this was mixed. I had a guy frotting against me in the Tube tell me I had a nice smile, although as he’d spent most of the journey staring down my top I’m not really all that sure he’d noticed my teeth.
Women on the Tube would always look unsettled and clutch their bags just a little tighter to them in response to someone smiling at them, and colleagues are always disturbed if anyone is smiling for no particular reason.
However, I can say (on the empirical evidence of only an A study so far) that if you smile your way through the Dickensian hell that forms the commuter hours on the Tube it makes the journey faster and more fun. You also get given a seat faster as people are deeply suspicious of you.
I do not encounter insomnia as much as you, but when I do - the next day is either hell or hilarious. It's always a toss up ...
And as for the informercials ... they sure do look tempting at 4am, don't they!?
Yellow Brick Road