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insomnia

The Strange Benefits of Insomnia

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T’other day while chatting with fellow dog-walkers, I learned that Old Dudes enjoy the same wee-hours phenomenon that we Old Bats experience. Says Old Dude with hilarious rescued dog: “We started at 5:00 a.m. Every single morning I wake up at 4:00 and can’t go back to sleep!”

Chortle! Didn’t know there could be an echo in the open air.

At this time of year, 4 a.m. is wake-up time. It’s like an alarm clock goes off, right at four o’clock sharp. Doesn’t matter what time you go to bed. Diddle away the evening and go to bed at midnight, and you’ll still wake up at four ayem.

So I’ve taken to going to bed about 9 p.m. That way, when the internal alarm clock kicks in, I’ve had about seven hours of sleep. Which, we’re told, is ideal for old folks.

And over time, rolling out of the sack at four in the morning turns out to have its benefits.

By seven o’clock this morning…

  • the dogs were walked and fed;
  • the plants were watered;
  • the pool was cleaned and re-chlorinated;
  • the human was bathed and its hair washed;
  • the human’s paws were pedicured elegantly;
  • a magnificent breakfast was served and consumed;
  • news was read;
  • plans for the day were laid…

That’s actually quite a lot of stuff. More to the point: getting all those chores and pleasures out of the way clears the table to do other things. To wit, today I need to…

  • run several errands that grew like weeds after yesterday’s Tempe/Costco junket;
  • spray the weeds behind my house and the kids’ house that are sprouting in the rain;
  • draft the proposal for the Drugging of America book;
  • contact my librarian friend regarding the same project;
  • write the current chapter of Ella’s Story, or at least part of it’
  • pay the AMEX bills;
  • transfer money from PayPal to the S-corp (a major PITA, for arcane reasons);
  • write this post…

Not enough to fill the day to the rafters, but I expect I’ll find other things to do.

The PayPal thing has been a particular nuisance, for two reasons…

First, the account was founded by my business partner, so they think I’m her. In response to a phishing attempt, her husband (an IT dude with advanced degrees in that trade) insisted that she remove her bank account from PayPal, lest it be hacked. Neither of us trusts PayPal or likes doing business through PayPal, but in the absence of a strategy to accept credit-card payments (we’ve been too lazy to engage the hassle and expense entailed in signing up), it’s presently the path of least resistance.

Second, the phishing exploit occurred at the same time the lovely Maricopa County Community College District gave away all its employees’ and students’ private information to hackers. This august institution did nothing about said exploit until the FBI found our data on the Dark Web. When that news came down, my credit union responded to the problem by closing my two accounts (personal and corporate) and transferring the funds into two new accounts with new account numbers. While the Kid was removing the link to her account from PayPal, I was quietly NOT disabusing PayPal of the out-dated account number it had for me. So to withdraw funds for me, we’ve had to order a check from PP to be sent to the Kid, then have her deposit it and send me another check. This, as you can imagine, is a royal PITA.

This morning, though, I happened to notice that PayPal now does have my current corporate checking account number. How they got it, I do not know, unless the CU shared the new number with PayPal…without informing me to that effect. I know I never changed the number at PP — for a reason. So…that’s interesting.

Though the paper-check polka has been a damned nuisance, frankly, I’d rather jump through that hoop than have the funds in my bank account be vulnerable to hacking through PayPal, an organization whose security I do not trust for one hot minute. Naturally, I’d like to have a simpler way to move funds out of PayPal (which is capable of embargoing the balance in your PP account for any number of reasons, fair and wildly unfair). But not at any undue risk…which I believe is posed by doing business through PayPal.

Well, time’s a-wastin’…and time is money, eh? 😉 And so, away…

 

Melatonin: Does the Stuff Actually WORK???

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YoungDucksminimized
quack! quack! quack! quack! quack! quack! quack! quack! quack! quack!

A few months ago, I bought a bottle of melatonin — a supposed sleep aid — at a local Walgreen’s. But after hearing the pharmacist, who seemed to be a certifiable moron, natter on and absurdly on about how it’s…oooooo!!!! homeoPATHic!!!, I figured it was a quack nostrum and didn’t bother to try it.

But lately I’ve become pretty desperate for sleep. So decided to try it, on the theory that it couldn’t do any more harm than a steady routine of four-hour nights.

The main ingredient in it is vitamin B-6, not in enough quantity to do you any harm unless maybe if you swallowed a whole bottle of the stuff…or rather, not unless you take it every day for a significant period. B-6 is neurotoxic, and the effects of overdose are irreversible. Neuropathy develops at around 200 milligrams; the smallest reported toxic doses have been 24 to 40 mg. These things contain 10 mg, so obviously you wouldn’t want to be dropping it if you were taking a regular vitamin supplement. But I don’t. There’s no evidence that vitamin B-6 treats insomnia, or much else of whatever ails you. It isn’t well regulated, because it’s not a prescription drug — what you see on the bottle’s label may not be what you get. But probably it’s not harmful in short doses over a short period.

Nor is there any evidence that melatonin effectively treats sleep disorders. But apparently it can help reset your system to synchronize with a normal circadian rhythm — i.e., cause you to sleep between dusk and dawn, instead of waking up at 3 or 4 a.m. It also apparently helps your blood pressure.

Well. I can tell you: there’s nothing like the endless frustration of insomnia to jack up your blood pressure. So if it actually keeps you asleep until 5:00 a.m. or so, that alone would help bring the old-fart blood pressure numbers into the reasonable range.

Anyway, there’s some evidence that the stuff helps the elderly to stay asleep until dawn. So, in desperation, last night about 10 p.m. I dropped a pill containing 5 mg — two to five times the recommended dose.

And lo! This morning I slept till 5:30 or 5:45…was rolled out of the sack by the dogs right at 6:00 a.m.

Holy sh!t.

Normally by 6 o’clock, I’ve fed and walked the dogs, fixed coffee, had breakfast, read the news, answered the email, cleaned the pool, taken a swim, watered the outdoor plants, and at least started a blog post or a client’s project.

Not only that, but contrary to published warnings, I’m not at all sleepy this morning. Benadryl, the only other thing that has ever helped me to stay asleep more than four or five hours, leaves me in a haze until noon the following day. It’s really unsafe to drive in that state, and I feel awful until the damn stuff wears off.

There are different types of insomnia. Some people can’t get to sleep at bed-time. Some wake up  in the middle of the night for a short period and fall back to sleep. Some wake up two or three hours before dawn and can’t get back to sleep.

Mine falls into the last category, which would be OK if it were practical to go to bed at 8 p.m. However, a 14-hour work day tends to militate against that… Last night I sent a finished project back to a Chinese mathematician and forthwith he sent me three more papers! AUGGH!

At any rate, summer is beginning to slip away — it’s 8:30 in the morning and still livable out here on the back porch, for the first time in weeks. When winter comes in, it’ll stay dark longer, and then the dogs and I will sleep longer naturally.

But wouldn’t it be marvelous if this nostrum actually did reset your internal clock so you’d stay asleep until dawn? Have you had any experience with the stuff?

 

In which I embrace my inner White Trash

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Daddy passed for white. Mommy with her Huguenot ancestry and her DAR grandmother was as European as they come. So I reckon I can pass, too.

Last night my long-neglected White Trash roots sprouted a sucker: tinfoil window covering.

Beautiful! An exquisite decorator touch. Eat your heart out, Martha! And Sarah, y’all come on over for coffee now, hear?

How do you like it? Ain’t it purty?

Yep. Tinfoil and Scotch tape: Early Hillwilliam. Sooo…. What’s going on here?

What’s going on is I’m getting might’ tired of waking up at 4:30 in the morning after five hours (at best!) of sleep. Especially when I keep reading those studies that claim old bats who sleep less than seven hours each night are at elevated risk of heart attack. These four-hour nights have been going on way, way too long. They leave me sick with exhaustion, and even if I get a decent night’s sleep it takes two nights of rest to start to feel normal. Two full nights’ sleep in a row is a rarity scarce as hen’s teeth.

Meditating on this state of affairs, it occurred to me that the problem has to do with the light that seeps in through the curtains every morning. For years, I’ve awakened at dawn. The first pearly predawn light works just like an alarm clock. The curtains on the bedroom Arcadia door, at the outset pretty skimpy, are made of beige coarsely woven fabric. Even though they’re lined, they don’t block much light, and since they barely cover the window, plenty of light pours in around the edges.

What if I could block early-morning light from getting into the bedroom? Maybe I could build curtains of outdoor fabric and hang them on the outside of the doors, adding a light- and heat-blocking layer on the exterior side of the perennially overheated glass. Combined with darker drapes on the inside, that might do the trick.

Actually, the curtain-rod hangers in there accommodate two rods, so I could in theory hang two pairs of curtains on the interior. The proposed exterior drapes would then create not one, not two, but three layers of fabric. Hm.

Well, before I go to the trouble and expense of making three sets of drapery and drilling holes in the exterior masonry to hang tacky-looking curtain rods, I figure I’d better find out whether this theory works. Hence, a little experiment.

Research question: Would a dawn-sensitive subject sleep a full seven hours if no light could penetrate the sleeping chamber?

Research methodology: Plaster the windows with tinfoil and then try to sleep through the night.

Preliminary results: Well, the subject did sleep seven hours last night. Nodded off around quarter to eleven and woke up at quarter to six.

Discussion: This, of course, doesn’t prove a thing. Now and again, I do sleep seven hours, and last night in spite of an hour-long afternoon siesta, I was dead tired. But there’s nothing (other than aesthetic queasiness) to keep me from leaving the tinfoil décor up for a few more nights.

So, the plan now is to wait and see. If, over the next week or so, I find I can sleep all night long in a room plunged into inky darkness, then by all means I’ll put up fuller, darker drapes on the inside. And maybe even build some exterior drapes, though it escapes me how these would be secured in the gale-force winds of monsoon season.

In between times, pass the moonshine. And why don’t y’all join me and Sarah here at the manse for some grits and coffee?

Image: Hillbilly Hot Dogs, State Route 2, West Virginia. Youngamerican. GNU Free Documentation License.

What do you reckon they’re doing with them hanging plants? My daddy would never in a million years have put up with them things, pullin’ the eaves down. Not unless they’re plastic, so’s you don’t have to water ’em.

The Three A.M. Waltz

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God, how I hate waking up in the wee hours of the morning! Is anything, anything more annoying and frustrating?

I’m so tired I’m almost sick, and I can. not. sleep. Part of it is worrying about losing a chunk of cash in the mail just when I have to get a new crown…that money would have about paid for the dental work. Now I’ll have to raid savings to cover it. Part of it is worrying about how I’m going to get another raft of papers graded around the mass of choir rehearsals and performances that will occupy the rest of this week. Part of it is being pissed at having to get my teeth crowned as a result of all the bruxing I do out of stress and frustration. (LOL! “Why do the heathen grind their teeth?”) Part of it is worrying whether the IRS got my tax payment, since that went out in the same mail as the lost checks. Part of it is annoyance that Fidelity’s online statements are not current and that there’s no way to figure out which of the several accounts they’ve got up there corresponds to the money fund for which I have a book of checks, one of which I used to pay my taxes. Part of it is that it’s going to rain again, so the air is a little humid and vaguely uncomfortable. Part of it is disappointment that (I think) Funny lost the current March Madness round at Free Money Finance. Part of it is hunger. And part of it is just old-lady insomnia.

Yesh. At 9:30 this morning—now only five hours away—another mountain of muzzy student papers will come to light on my desk. The day will be occupied with classes through 1:45, at which point I have to drive to Costco for gasoline. Then it’s off to rehearsal.

This week the choir had rehearsals last night and has another rehearsal tonight, a performance tomorrow night, rehearsals and performance Friday, rehearsal and performance Saturday, rehearsal and two performances Sunday. When exactly I’m going to find time to read the mountain of student papers, to say nothing of my client’s first two draft chapters, I do. not. know!

Yesterday I didn’t get to his dissertation because I spent the most of the day writing the post that will come online in about two hours and arguing with the credit union and the post office. This morning at three o’clock I was in no condition to edit copy. And still am not: I’ve killed the last hour and forty-five minutes writing posts to cover the next two days.

Let’s see… 11:00 p.m. to 3:00 a.m., that’s four hours. It’s now  almost 5 o’clock. If by some miracle I can get back to sleep until seven, maybe I could eke a full six hours out of the night before I have to go to class.

And so, to bed…

Five ways to deal with stress

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Ever have one of those moments when the sky is collapsing on your head at the same time your cat, your dog, your boss, each of your friends, your family members, your banker, a lawyer or two, three doctors, and various functionaries of the police force would like your undivided attention? It’s been kind of like that around here. Every stupid little thing that needs to be tended to plus a number of irrational forces decided to come into play during the week Mrs. Micah and I chose to move my blog and all its bizarre code to a new server. Stress? Let me tell you about stress!

I’ve had all of two full nights’ sleep in something over ten days, and those have come about through liberal doses of Benadryl. Quit dropping a couple of antihistamines before bed-time, and the mental alarm clock goes off at 3:00 a.m. sharp. The internal stress alarm clock has taken to ringing so loud that often pills don’t shut it off. And I’ve now become so sensitized to stress that the most minor hassle has me vibrating like a gong.

Nevertheless, I cling to my theory that pills are not good for you, and that it’s gotta be possible to get a grip without drugging yourself. It worked before, and it’ll work again. So, today I made up my mind to pursue a few fairly simple strategies.

1. Focus on a single challenge or nagging job, deal with it, and get it out of your way.

Select one that’s large enough to make you feel you’ve accomplished something, but not so huge or impossible that you can’t deal with it in a week or so. 

Larger bugabears should be broken down into parts, so that you can address them (to the extent possible) one step at a time. But there’s usually something pestering you that you can get out of the way fairly promptly.

My choice for this weekend is a vast article on the arcane doings of some fourteenth-century French aristocrats, replete with Middle French and medieval Latin: 108 pages of narrative and something over 230 footnotes, many of them archival references. Because I was working on another large, ditzy, and annoying project, I passed it for first edits to our research associate, a young man with a Ph.D. in English who ought to be competent to handle the job. In the wee hours of Saturday morning, our assistant editor in charge of the journal in question sent it back to me, saying the guy had announced he wouldn’t do the job. 

No joke! Quoth he:

I had planned on editing it tonight, but I wasn’t expecting it to be a monograph. It is not even double-spaced. The author set some customized line spacing in this text that looks more like one-and-a-half spacing. Given all the tiny footnotes, this thing is as long as a book.

 

I have to admit that I dread editing this thing. Would you take a look at it and tell me if it’s normal. I don’t want to be a whiner or slacker, but this thing looks like the copyeditor’s equivalent of water-boarding.

If I wasn’t already enjoying the 4:00 a.m. ambience, that did the job. So we agreed that I would edit the first 50 pages and then she (assistant editor) would pass it back to Our Intrepid Hero to read the remaining 57 pages, much of which consists of Latin that he needn’t look at. 

A project like this entails a fair number of global search-&-replace operations, plus you have to pull out the graphics and tables, rewrite the tables so they’re not constructed with hard tabs and spaces, format them to accord with Chicago style, and prepare them for the compositor. Well, of course…since you do that at the start of the job, this will reduce our friend’s workload significantly. Assuming he survives the encounter he will have with me tomorrow morning. 

At any rate: this was a big job. It wasn’t what I wanted to spend the weekend doing, but getting it off my desk makes me feel somewhat better. One headache out of the way = (1 zillion headaches – 1).

2. Try to engineer a break.

Leave the kiddies and the pets with a babysitter and go somewhere else. Ideally, give yourself a weekend (or more) away from the stressful situation. Go to a local hotel or B&B (leave the cell phones at home), go camping, go visit friends in some other town or state. Flee!

Luckily for me, I rarely go on vacation, and so vast numbers of use-it-or-lose-it hours have accrued to my credit. All told, by the end of the year, when I’m to be laid off, I’ll have 32.85 days that must be used or forfeited.

So, this afternoon I decided to give myself a little vacation from the salt mine. I have to go out to the office tomorrow, partly to throttle a certain research associate but also to wrap up a few other tasks. My associate editor can take over the job of riding herd on our crew for a week or two. I have a furlough day next Friday, and so with eight of those vacation days, I can engineer thirteen consecutive days away from the place, during which I intend never to check the e-mail or answer the phone.

This is big. Just staying away from the campus and filtering out everything that has to do with the various hassles and annoyances associated with the job will help a great deal.

3. Spend some time with friends who have nothing to do with the source of your stress.

Don’t discuss your problems with them. Have a good time. 

Yesterday SDXB and I did exactly that, driving halfway—no, make that all the way across the Valley to their peaceful, lovely house beneath the White Tank Mountains, where we enjoyed good company, idle talk, and several restful hours. Good thing to do.

Go to church, volunteer, invite friends over, go to a movie with someone new: find ways to be around people who have something else to talk about but your troubles.

4. Exercise

Take the dog for a walk. If you don’t have a dog, go for a walk with a neighbor, a friend, or all by your self. Learn some basic yoga and do a half-hour yoga routine in the mornings and evenings. Join a gym, if you enjoy that sort of thing. Join a softball team. Play some tennis or golf. Run!

5. Get off the caffeine and the booze.

It’s amazing how much caffeine wires you up. We tend to be unaware of this until we shuck off the stuff and notice the difference in the way we feel. Review what you drink and eat (some chocolates contain caffeine), and change your habits to get rid of the sources of caffeine. This includes soft drinks and tea as well as coffee; decaf, BTW, is not completely free of caffeine. Substitute juices, uncaffeinated soft drinks (read the label!), water, herbal teas. 

Kicking a caffeine habit can give you a roaring headache. Try to ease your way around this by switching from coffee and colas to tea for a few days, and then from tea to uncaffeinated drinks.

I find I sleep better after I’ve quit drinking my favorite potable, French-press espresso-roast coffee.

Alcohol has a kick-back effect that can keep you awake. Don’t have a nightcap or a glass of wine thinking it will help you sleep through the night! Because it’s a depressant, alcohol may make you feel like dozing off at first. But a few hours later—along about one or two in the morning—it’s likely to set off that old internal alarm clock. So when you’re feeling too stressed to sleep, get yourself off that stuff, too.

Do indulge yourself in something else: good food. Fix your favorite comfort food; prepare a fine meal; if you can afford it, go out to eat. The better you eat, the better you’ll feel.

There are many other strategies, of course, such as meditation, prayer, and mindful relaxation during panic attacks. If things are really complicated, it helps to brainstorm a list of everything that could possibly be bugging you, assess the results to decide which are important and which really are nothing to worry about, and then write up a strategy for dealing with each of the real issues in a meaningful way. One at a time.

In the Night Kitchen

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Insomnia! How I hate it. The night closes in like a black, sticky, toxic cloud, bringing with it all manner of prickly little horrors.

Five things I regret having done

  • Leaving a perfectly fine husband
  • Leaving my son behind
  • Not being with my mother when she was dying
  • Having agreed to go to the University of Arizona, not insisting on Cal Berkeley
  • Majoring in French

Five things I wish other people hadn’t done

  • My mother: smoking herself into the grave
  • My father: bringing us to Arizona
  • My son: taking up smoking
  • My father: disinheriting me
  • My fellow Americans: voting for George Bush and his cronies

Five things I could have done better

  • Focused on a real career
  • Been a better mother
  • Been a better daughter
  • Been a better wife
  • Taken control of my life sooner

Five characteristics I would be better without

  • Preference for solitude
  • Habit of taking the path of least resistance
  • Laziness
  • Self-indulgence
  • Insecurity

Five characteristics that redound to my benefit (there must be somethinggood here)

  • Self-discipline
  • Writing skills
  • Literacy
  • Some degree of intelligence
  • Ability to be self-starting

Five small things that make life better

  • The company of dogs
  • The company of friends
  • My son in a positive mood
  • A lovely morning
  • Flowers

Five things that scare the sh*t out of me

  • Old age
  • The U.S. economy and the decline of America
  • The state of health care in America
  • The ascendancy of the right wing and the injection of religion into secular politics
  • Climate change

Five things we could have more of

  • Swimming in the pool
  • Walking in the desert
  • Friends
  • Wine
  • Good food

Five things I could do without

  • Greed
  • Morons
  • Ambient noise
  • Work
  • Insomnia!