1/12/2024 0 Comments Longest night insomniax lyrics![]() Only a third of Americans (and almost no one I know personally) get the standard recommended eight hours of sleep a night. The Centers for Disease Control has labeled insufficient sleep a “public health epidemic,” and estimates that 50-70 million adults in the US suffer from a sleep or wakefulness disorder. The disorder is diagnosed when: patients get less than 6.5 hours of sleep it takes 30 minutes or more to fall asleep, and symptoms persist for at least one month after six months the diagnosis is classified as chronic insomnia. Women are twice as likely as men to have trouble falling or staying asleep-the two sides of the insomnia coin. The percentages spike to 40-60% in people over 60. One physician even told me not to worry, I could take a little Xanax every night for the rest of my life, no harm in it.Īccording to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, as many as 30-35% of adults complain of insomnia. The prevailing wisdom was that it was better to take a pill and get some sleep than to spend the night tossing and turning. ![]() Within a night or two, I was again the victim of my own dark and doom-filled narrative, abetted by my doctors. But then I’d have a pressing deadline, an overseas trip, a big meeting and the story would return full-blown. There were even periods-weeks or even months at a time-when, miraculously, I slept unaided. I meditated, aerobicized, did tai chi, qigong, and yoga, consulted acupuncturists, shrinks, energy healers, and Reiki masters. When that didn’t work, the natural supplement and herbal sleep aid industry made a pile off of I’d try the latest, supposedly less harmful, wonder drug. Still, I worried constantly about the long-term effects of the drugs on my mind and body, and took frequent stabs at rewriting my story. But by then my story about not being able to sleep without pharmaceuticals had crystallized. It wasn’t until I was rushed to the coronary care unit of my local hospital with a dangerously low heart rate that the problem got sorted out and I was taken off Inderal. But instead of grasping the whole picture, my internist prescribed sleeping pills. That became an increasingly vicious cycle: sleep deprivation, exhaustion, insomnia, followed by even greater exhaustion-and mounting terror. Before long my usual vitality plummeted and I felt so weak and drained of energy that, without consciously deciding to, I began to keep myself awake at night, terrified that if I allowed myself to descend into sleep, I’d never wake up. The trouble was, beta blockers also lower heart rate and blood pressure-and my baseline for both was already low. That is, until I was 35 and a neurologist prescribed Inderal, a beta blocker, to treat my persistent migraines. Though in childhood I’d had some anxiety about falling asleep, as an adult I was a pretty solid snoozer. ![]() Like many stories of sleeplessness, mine began with a single incident. ![]() I’d try to calculate: How many Xanax-an anti-anxiety benzodiazepine, my drug of choice-would I need? One? One and a half? Or could I get by with just a half? The panic would build throughout the day and peak as bedtime neared. Soon after I awoke, I’d feel the rumblings of anxiety about the night ahead. In the morning I’d tell myself another story, depending on how many hours of sleep I’d had, usually ranging from three or four on a bad night to sixish on a good one. This was the story I told myself night after night under cover of darkness, believing it to be the absolute, immutable truth, not a made-up tale spinning in my mind. Sooner or later the lack of sleep will make me sick and die.” I’ll be a complete wreck and fall apart and not be able to live up to my responsibilities. I hate how groggy the pills make me, but I am helpless and powerless to stop taking them. The only way I can fall asleep is to take a pill, and sometimes the only way to stay asleep is to take another pill. There’s obviously something very wrong with me. Here’s a story that until very recently I told myself about the insomnia that has plagued me for 30 years: “My body doesn’t know how to sleep. Joan Didion wrote in The White Album, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” As she suggested, we search for the hidden kernel of meaning in the shifting phantasmagoria that is our life so we can make sense of what is so often senseless-random gunfire that takes the life of an innocent child, an earthquake that kills thousands, a medical diagnosis that rocks us to our core.īut sometimes our stories become fixed, frozen, unchanging-even when change is both possible and desirable-especially the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.
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