Battling Insomnia

It is frustrating when you can’t fall asleep. It is equally frustrating when you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back to sleep. By the end of September, it seemed like one or both of these things were happening to me on a nightly basis. Even though I would be tired (read: exhausted) at the end of the day, I would toss and turn to no avail. On the nights that I did fall asleep, very often I would wake up between 3:00 and 3:30am and not be able to fall back to sleep again. It was like my body got itself into a bad routine and could not shake itself out of it.

As much as I tried, I didn’t seem to be able to solve the problem on my own. So I was grateful when the PC Medical Officer agreed to give me some medication to assist in getting me back on track. I took only half a pill starting the day after our September training, as well as changed a few things about my nightly routine, and it made all the difference. For starters, I made myself go to bed at the same time every night: 9:00pm. There was a time that I would have said that was impossible; I couldn’t possibly stay awake past 8:00pm or even 7:30pm. Now, the goal was to keep myself completely awake until nine, in the hopes that I would then be tired enough to fall asleep. Reading and writing tended to put me to sleep quickly, so I started to watch a TV episode or two. I had resisted having any media on my computer for the first year of Peace Corps, for a variety of reasons. Not having electricity meant watching anything would drain the battery all the faster. And given my slightly obsessive nature, I thought it might be difficult for me to watch just one episode of anything. I wanted to avoid becoming one of those volunteers that hid in their room after school and on the weekends and watched episode after episode of whatever they had. But at our Mid-Service Training, I finally broke down and “borrowed” two television shows from other volunteers: Parks and Rec (which I loved in America) and The Newsroom (which I never saw until I arrived here, but find highly entertaining). So I had a few things to help keep me awake at night, and my lack of electricity kept me from being too obsessed.

The other major change to my routine was that I no longer kept my phone next to my bed at night. Too often when I would wake up in the middle of the night I would check my email or twitter or look up something on the internet, that sort of thing. It really did nothing to put me back to sleep, and usually made me feel even more awake. So before I went to bed, I would turn off the phone and put it on the other side of the room to keep me from reaching over half-consciously and using it.

The real key to my battle, though, was the Ambien. Within ten minutes of taking just half a pill I was out like a light. The couple of times that I was with other people when I took the medication, I was told I was quite hilarious to speak to. I would answer questions basically in gibberish and more or less fall asleep in the middle of a sentence. Neither of which, I remember. But by the end of the first week of October, I was back on track. I was sleeping through the night and not waking up until 5am or 5:30am. That first weekend of October, I was brave enough to go to sleep without taking anything to help. I woke up around 4:30am, which was not necessarily ideal, but certainly better than 3am. A few days later I was sleeping until 5am without a problem. If I did wake up in the middle of the night, I was also able to fall back to sleep. Battle won, and I am happy to say that there haven’t been any problems since. It’s funny how helpful our body clock can be when it is working but how frustrating it can be when it is not. Glad mine is back on track.