The zen of Zzzzzz
May 1, 2010
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Antonia Zerbisias
FEATURE WRITER
Sometime in my early 20s, in the early morning, something — a short circuit maybe — tripped Montreal’s Cold War-era, the-Russians-are-coming air raid sirens.
While the entire city was ducking and covering under their beds, I remained blissfully unawake and unaware under the covers.
I am not joking when I say I could sleep through a nuclear war.
This is not to say I’ve haven’t had my share of tossing and turning. An unfortunate encounter with bedbugs. Jet lag. The Sunday night blues. Noisy old hotels on busy European city streets. The now-gone monthly wakefulness that nature must have endowed women with so that we could be aware of predators following the scent of blood.
So I know what it is to stare at the clock, pound the pillows, kick out the sheets … But I have never experienced that yawning “hole in the night’’ that has plagued Patricia Morrisroe for just about every one of her 59 years.
She is not alone in the dark. Sleeplessness haunts one in seven Canadians over the age of 15, Statistics Canada reports, and some 40 million Americans.
Which is why the self-described “fourth generation insomniac’’ and former New York magazine contributor went on a quest to examine and understand sleep, one that resulted in her new book Wide Awake: A Memoir of Insomnia.
Part autobiography and part magical mattress tour, Wide Awake begins with her childhood in the “House of Punk Sleep’’ where her family tiptoed around her mother and, via drugstores, sleep labs, yoga, dream therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, brain music therapy, and even an ice bed in Iceland, ends with illumination just two blocks away from her Manhattan home.
“Sleep seems to be a very, very hot topic these days; it’s replaced depression,’’ she says on the phone. “It’s like people said, ‘What more could be said about depression?’ So we kind of needed to move on to sleep.’’
The New York Times recently introduced All-Nighters, a blog about insomnia, with musings from artists, scientists and opinionators.
Earlier this year, Arianna Huffington and Glamour magazine launched their joint “Feminist Sleep Challenge’’ because, although sleep deprivation is epidemic across the gender divide, working women are most affected.
“A nation of sleepy women is even less capable of greatness,’’ wrote Huffington and Glamour editor-in-chief Cindi Leive in January.
Sleep, says Morrisroe, is a $24 billion business, if you factor in the herbal remedies, the hypnotherapy, the white noise machines, the ear plugs, the blackout drapes, the cushy new beds built so high a girl needs a step stool to get climb in and all the desperate measures the sleep-disordered take in order to get some Zzzz.
How did we get to this?
“There are some people who just don’t know when to turn off the computer and they just think that they can get by. Those are certain lifestyle choices. There are other people who just may not be able to sleep because they can’t fall asleep, they have sleep onset insomnia, sleep maintenance insomnia when they wake up in the middle of the night, they may just have very fractured sleep, they may not be getting enough deep sleep.
“I really knew nothing about sleep when I went into this. I just knew that I wasn’t a great sleeper. And it was astounding to me the number of sleep disorders there are out there.
“There are people who will take their car, who will be sleep driving and not aware that they are doing that. There was somebody who went on ABC News and talked about trying to strangle and stab his wife repeatedly over a 30-year marriage, which is REM behaviour disorder. Another reason is sleep apnea which affects more men than women.”
Except, of course, when affected men snore so loudly they keep their partners awake.
Morrisroe believes two factors in particular have made sleep ‘’The New Depression’’ – aging Baby Boomers and Big Pharma.
“Sleep does fall off as you age. It’s not as robust as it used to be,’’ she says. “People need to accept that. But the Baby Boomer generation expect to be perfect in all things, that if they have problems with their knees, they’ll just go get knee replacement surgery, hip replacement surgery.’’
Meanwhile, drug companies looking for conditions to medicalize and new markets to target have roused a dormant monster.
“Sleep used to be the backwaters of medicine,’’ she explains, referring to when insomnia was seen as a symptom of something else: anxiety, depression, chronic pain, any one of a number of different problems. “I went back and looked at a lot of the articles and I could pinpoint exactly when we suddenly realized that we weren’t sleeping.”
“It was in the early 1990s, when Searle introduced Ambien,’’ Morrisroe continues. “They got together with the National Sleep Foundation which is a non-profit organization — they do get a lot of money from drug companies — and started this ‘Sleep in America’ poll and, all of a sudden, it was how are we sleeping, how much are we sleeping. “ Not that pills, which include the much-advertised Lunesta, help much, insists Morrisroe: “When I started to look at the clinical trials, and when I really started to look at the amount of time of sleep you get on things like Lunesta and Ambien, it’s really only 11.4 minutes over a placebo. It’s very very small.
“And they can cause you to have a form of amnesia so that you don’t remember how badly you have been sleeping. They can also leave you with some cognitive impairment the next day which can make you feel like you haven’t slept.’’
It’s no secret that staring at a computer or TV screen late into the night is not exactly restful. Teens texting late into the night stumble into class where teachers think they suffer from attention deficit disorders. The economy has been keeping millions awake. Some of the most sleep-deprived people anywhere are those with the longest commutes — and, as a study of 19 major cities published last month revealed, Torontonians have the worst commutes in North America.
Which might explain road rage.
And, if that doesn’t keep you awake at night, how about this? Sleep deprivation messes with hormones — and could lead to overeating and obesity.
To counteract the effects of sleepiness, a whole new industry has spring up.
“The new area is wake,’’ notes Morrisroe. “A lot of students are taking modofinil and that’s being used as a smart drug, to stay up.
“And then you have all those energy drinks, packed with caffeine. There’s now caffeine-infused food, like caffeine-infused oatmeal. The idea that you have caffeine-infused food and even caffeine-infused drinks for children, that’s not helping people sleep at all.”
In fact, it’s the stuff of nightmares.
But is insomnia a modern problem? Are we sleeping less than we used to? Did people in prehistoric and ancient times really crash with the sunset and sleep til the cocks crowed? Is the prescribed eight hours a construct to suit industrial times?
In his 2005 ground-breaking book At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past, American historian Roger Ekirch documented how humans slept through the ages — but not necessarily through the night.
“He said that people slept in segmented sleep,’’ says Morrisroe. “They’d fall asleep for a couple of hours. They’d get up. They might talk. They might have sex with their bedfellows as there were often multiple people in beds because they often had communal beds. They’d pray. They would analyze their dreams. Maybe some would go out and steal livestock. Then they would go back to sleep.
“So this concept of segmented sleep may be very natural to us.’’
And how is she sleeping since she completed her quest?
“I sleep much better — but right now I am sleeping much less right now because of all the press and this book coming out.’’