This is a physical sensation.
On sleepless nights, anxiety, overthinking - and the thought that stopped them all.
I am a 33-year-old woman with a secret.
Every night, to the everlasting frustration of the man sharing my bed, I listen to audiobooks to fall asleep.
No, worse.
I listen to the same audiobook every night to fall asleep.
No.
Worse.
I listen to the same 5 chapters of the same audiobook every night to fall asleep.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone - chapters 6 (The Journey from Platform Nine and Three-Quarters) to 10 (Halloween) to be exact; the part where not a lot happens - because Stephen Fry’s soothing tones cannot be beaten in rocking me to sleep. I did try his reading of Mythos, The Greek Myths Retold, for a while, but it gave me very strange dreams, so back to the Wizarding World we returned.
Honestly, like the good millennial I am, I blame my parents.
I’m not sure if it was because I was a particularly bad sleeper as a child, or whether the novelty of technology helped to lighten the load of nighttime parenting for them, but I would listen to books on tape every night to send me to sleep. I remember Wind in the Willows or anything by Jacqueline Wilson being particular favourites, but no matter what it was, I would judge the quality of my sleep by how much of the story I’d heard. Before the invention of the tape player that could play both sides (I am assuming that most of my readers are over 30, if not you might have to google that one), I dreaded the nights that sleep would evade me long enough that I’d be forced to crawl to the shelf at the end of my loft bed to flip it over.
I still do the same now. I know the sentences Stephen Fry reads that mark my entry into the danger zone; the ‘you’ve been taking a really long time to get to sleep’ zone. I try to tell myself that it’s okay, that I can fall asleep any second, but often once I’m there, anxiety seizes hold of me fairly swiftly.
Because I know, of course, that’s what the whole thing is about anyway. Playing an audiobook is my running start to get away from the wild trains of thought that barrell through my mind as soon as the lights go off and the world gets quiet. It’s been that way as long as I can remember, but got exponentially worse after I lost my Mum when I was 21. I did the best I could during daylight hours, but grief and the deep, gripping fear of death would creep up on me at night. Now, the terror has dissipated, but it’s still the time I’m most likely to hear the niggles, the doubt, the judgement and the expectation slipping through the crack in the door. On a good day, I’ll be away before Harry leaves Kings Cross, and they don’t stand a chance of catching me. I won’t even notice they tried. On a bad day, it’s a constant game of cat and mouse.
This week I’ve lost every match.
This week, I’ve heard the end of my 90-minute sleep story every night, and had to turn the tape over. This week, my mind has thumbed through the classics, offering up the creative ideas I’ve never followed through on, the people I miss, the work tasks I’ve forgotten to complete, and the things I’ve failed at. This week, the lack of sleep has fed the anxiety, and the anxiety has fed the lack of sleep until both are happy and comfortable and settled.
It’s so easy to get swept away. When one subject loses its grip, another swoops right in to take its place, and before I know it, half an hour, then an hour, then two, have passed while I’ve been fighting an internal battle against those relentless thoughts.
But if you experience anxiety, you’ll know that it’s not just a thought process. Accompanying the cruel words, I also get the joy of uneven breathing (short, tight, shallow breaths interspersed with fast gulps of air) and a racing sensation beneath my skin, almost like my blood is pulsing quicker around my body, which makes it really difficult to stay still. I get jolts of shock too, like the feeling of waking up from a dream fall, or suddenly remembering you were meant to do something, followed by a pounding heart. It’s one joyful wave after another.
And yet, in the midst of all this, I had a thought that, with a splat and a splash atop the water, threw me a rope:
“This is just a physical sensation.”
It might be impossible to give you the similar relief and resonance I felt for that thought in that moment; things land for us when they land, and that’s just the way it is. You could hear the same sentence over and over for years and kinda get it - like it, even - but one day it slots into your cells in a way it never has done before. So I don’t offer you this sentence as a grand AH-HA, or as The Answer to the problem of sleep anxiety (although of course I will be thrilled if it helps at all).
But I offer you this sentence as a reminder, as it was for me in that moment, that states can, do and are meant to shift.
The grip of anxiety is in its elusiveness. It’s in its power to transport you out of yourself, and suspend you in a time and place that isn’t accurate to what’s happening right now. That doesn’t mean it isn’t REAL, because your body is creating a real-time response to that transportation. And in turn your brain frantically tries to keep up, throwing suggestion after suggestion from its memory banks about why the body might be feeling the way it does, in the hope that there is a solution in any of them. Like the least fun game of ‘Snap’ ever.
But when I needed it, “this is just a physical sensation” reminded me that I am in my body. It wasn’t a cure-all, and I didn’t immediately fall into a rainbow-filled deep sleep, but it brought me back in. Ironically, that thought allowed me to see that the endless cycle of anxious thoughts was in itself a physical sensation, because each one was a different group of neurons in my brain sparking up to create a picture, or video, or phrase. It was as though I realised that in the same way that its faster-than-normal beat allowed me to feel my heart when normally I couldn’t, my racing thoughts were how I was feeling the neurons in my brain firing in different patterns.
It was just a physical sensation, and so it went from abstract, to concrete.
Have I lost you, or are you still with me?
If you’re still with me, there’s one more step to the story.
Because although the break in the circuit was enough to provide me with some relief, it also offered the opportunity to introduce a different physical sensation. I was able to lightly stroke the skin on my tummy; I put on lip balm; I adjusted my sheets and my temperature; I breathed. All things that provided comfort to my nervous system and therefore helped it reach a state of rest.
I’m not sure what this means for my more long-term sleep anxiety. Honestly, I would love not to be a 33-year-old woman who listens to Harry Potter to go to sleep every night. I wonder whether the audiobook has actually become the crutch that encourages the limp, and I really just need to learn to walk properly again without it, or whether it would cause me even more pain to let it go. That’s a story for another day, perhaps.
For now, that one thought has helped lighten something, and that’s enough.