Perspective

Pillow talk: Confessions of an eye-mask addict

Tasia Kuznichenko on the struggles of sleep. Insomnia, to me, tastes like a deep-fried March and April, 2020. Mars Bar. Sickly sweet and coating During my discussions with a slew my tongue with an impenetrable fat of sleep experts, I began to recognise that numbs my taste buds. I tried how such a sudden shift in the sleep this gluttonous treat for the first time paradigm had come about (caused by following a sleep-devoid night. It had COVID-19 related disruptions). been at a sleepover with my friends, one Throughout it all, I couldn’t help that was pretty high stakes as I had just thinking to myself, ‘join the club.’ moved to a new school. I have often attempted to explain Bleary eyed, I watched as the what I experienced growing up, but I morning light leaked into the room and didn’t possess the vocabulary to describe I realised that I wouldn’t be getting any it. Associate Professor Bartlett defines sleep. It was a familiar feeling of failure; insomnia as being “a difficulty going to sleeping was never something that came sleep, staying asleep, waking too early.” easy to me. Importantly, to qualify as insomnia During isolation, after reading these dysfunctional behaviours “occur article upon article about ‘wild dreams’ repeatedly at least three times a week, and ‘sleep disruptions’, I came to the and it’s been present for at least three realisation that there was never much months.” discussion about sleep illnesses before For me, it was the associated COVID-19 . social impacts that highlighted that

I asked Dr Sarah Blunden, who is the my sleeping was abnormal. Camps, founder and director of the Australian sleepovers and any overnight activities Centre for Education in Sleep, why would fill me with irrational dread. insomnia was not as widely talked I often did try my best to stay put about as other health issues. She told the whole night. Usually, it would end me that overall many GPs and other up with me small and self-conscious, health practitioners weren’t attuned knocking on my friend’s parents’ to the fact that sleep loss has such a bedroom door, often crying and asking significant effect on physiological and to go home. Sometimes the parents were psychological outcomes. sympathetic, other times they would tell Dr Blunden remarked, “sleep was me to go back to bed and try again, but something that we could always give that made me long to be at home even up doing for something that we deemed more. [more] important...now, the importance I resorted to assembling a sleeping of sleep has started to creep into [the] toolkit. Armed with my yellow bear conversation a lot more.” Wattle, and my extra soft pillow As I struggled with my own sleep drenched with lavender oil (so difficulties around ten years ago, the enthusiastically done by my mother lack of social conversations surrounding that one time she accidentally poured insomnia led me to feel isolated. Unable some in my eye!) I felt ‘prepared’, or so to fall asleep, I would feel like the only I thought. person at night awake in the world. Rosie, my best friend since childhood, These feelings are something many laughs when lavender oil is mentioned. of us are currently experiencing in 2020. When I smelled lavender, I would think Validated by a noteworthy trend in of you struggling to sleep and that was Australia, there has been a spike in the kind of hard… just because you were popularity of the search term ‘insomnia’ usually [di]stressed…” on Google from 50% to 92% between The more things I sniffed, sprayed

and clutched in an attempt to alleviate my over whirling mind, the worse it became. Rosemary Clancy terms what I experienced as ‘performance anxiety’. It sounds lewd but she had nailed in two words what had tormented me for so long. Clancy believes that sleep hygiene rules have good science behind them; things like getting up at the same time every morning, getting sunlight and going to bed when you feel sleepy, are all sleep conducive. Yet, she highlights that “if you try to follow the sleep rules perfectly you will actually create insomnia… you start to distrust your brain’s capacity to sleep. And that’s when you start waking up during the night getting frustrated or scared, especially about next-day functioning.” Paradoxically, the culmination of tools I tried scared off my sleep even more. By age thirteen, my sleeping was so disruptive to my health and wellbeing that my mother took me to see a sleep counsellor. I recall being very openminded, trusting that maybe this would be the solution. But it didn’t go quite as planned. The counsellor ended up hardly talking about sleep, and instead psychoanalysed the relationship I had with my parents. At the end of the session, as an afterthought, she pushed a rainbow covered tape in my hands. I was meant to listen to it before bed and envision that I was a dolphin. When I discussed it with my mother, she raised her eyebrows and conceded that maybe it was not one of her best ideas.

On our recent walk with my dog, I asked her if she could pin down why my sleeping issues began. She described how her and my dad struggled at settling me as a baby. “As parents of an only child, we were perhaps more anxious and more cautious, making sure to keep quiet, keeping the room dark and things like that,” my mother reflects. I became so used to an environment of quiet and calm that even today I cannot sleep without an eye mask and earplugs. I questioned Dr Blunden almost sheepishly, but she reassured me, “we have triggers that make us sleep, we go into a bedroom, we brush our teeth… that’s fine.” Nonetheless, she flagged the issue of becoming dependent on sleep aids (which to be plainly honest, I definitely am). Dr Blunden expresses that if you go to sleep and are “worried that you need a mask, a mask in itself is not the worry. It’s the importance you’ve placed on it that’s the worry.”

I view this sequence of little actions that I do before slumber almost like a placebo for me to rest. Regrettably, Professor Bartlett states that anything ritualistic surrounding sleep can be dangerous, “if you get into a pattern where [you think] if I don’t do this, I can’t sleep… you create pressure again.” On the whole, my sleeping issues have now dissolved. It came with the awareness that I will eventually fall asleep – even if it takes a while longer. Professor Bartlett tells me it’s normal to have intermittent nights of bad sleep. It makes sense as it’s “ a direct response to something that’s happened in terms of work-related, family related… [or] mental health.” Whilst talking to the differing sleep professionals, I was presented with an opportunity to reflect on my own sleep behaviours. However, over the days that I conducted the interviews, my mood dropped, I was tearing up throughout the day and was second guessing my ability to sleep. Ultimately, it was clear that my suffering was not buried as deep as I thought. I even felt guilty conducting my interview with Rosemary Clancy on my bed as she talked me through the effects of using our laptops and devices in our bedrooms; creating “sinful associations, especially of bed with wakefulness.” It gave me a bit of a jolt to change my practices, with Professor Bartlett stressing to me that “the person who sleeps well doesn’t know what they do… they’re able to put thoughts to the side.”

For some, like me, this may not be a realistic possibility. Thinking before falling asleep can also be a positive thing. Often, we need time to process everything that is going on around us, whether that’s what has happened in our day, or what would have been a better argument in a ‘heated discussion’ we were having with someone. I have learnt not to hate those nights where my mind can’t seem to slow down, as they have given me some of my best ideas. Sleep is a more complex thing for some, and that’s okay, because it’s important to remember that sometimes our bodies have a mind of their own.