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I thought insomnia was my lot in life. I hadn't had a good night's sleep in — well, I honestly couldn't remember when. And neither, it seemed, had most of my friends. We made jokes about starting a book club that would meet in the dead of night. We looked forward to the day when sleepless women all over New York City, where I live, would pass the time of day — I mean, night — by lifting their windows and calling out to one another.
"What did you have for dinner?"
"Shrimp with linguine, and I added sautéed fresh mint, and it was delish!"
We were funny about our insomnia, but it was cramping our styles. By 9 at night, I craved sleep, but I have a teenager I like saying good night to, which meant I had to force my cranky self to stay up until 10 or later. I'd fall asleep reasonably quickly, but I'd wake up two or three times in the night and sometimes be up for an hour or two. Or I'd wake up at 3 or 4 a.m. and lie there, miserably watching the black night sky outside my bedroom window lighten to gray until it was time to drag myself out of bed and start the day.
I've learned that there are two types of insomnia: difficulty falling asleep and wakefulness during the night. I suffered from the second type, and so did most of my friends, but some had both. We all assumed that our problem had something to do with menopausal hormone changes, and that there was nothing much to be done about it. The jury is still out on that question, but apparently women are twice as likely as men to complain about sleeping difficulties, and most begin having problems in their late 40s or early 50s.
A lot of my friends used sleeping pills — I have, too, off and on — but none of us liked them much. They were a great help for falling asleep, but then we'd all be wide-awake about four hours later. And we worried about becoming habituated to them.
Then I heard about an online course to combat sleeplessness. The Conquering Insomnia Program is a $25, five-week interactive course developed and overseen by Gregg Jacobs, Ph.D., a psychologist and insomnia expert at a University of Massachusetts sleep-disorders clinic in Worcester. I read on his Website (cbtforinsomnia.com) that Dr. Jacobs based his program on 20 years of research at Harvard Medical School, where he'd been a professor and worked at Massachusetts General Hospital's Mind Body Institute. His in-office therapy with patients, as well as the Internet version, relies on cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), a technique pioneered in the 1950s. The idea is that by applying self-help techniques to a problem (sleeplessness), you can get out of a rut, change a bad habit, or, in my case, hopefully find a "cure."
The statistics are impressive: Ninety percent of the several hundred patients who took part in one Harvard study reported improved sleep, and the same number reduced or eliminated their sleep medication.
Dr. Jacobs's Website also offered his observation that most chronic insomnia develops from occasional insomnia. We take that short-term insomnia and run with it, as it were. We adopt attitudes about not sleeping that make us not sleep, like worrying about it or fretting about how badly we'll function the next day if we don't get enough rest. We then start associating our beds with anxious nights spent thrashing about.
Likewise, we develop habits that we hope will make up for our sleep-deprived nights but which actually keep us from regular sound slumber: napping, sleeping in on weekends (which throws off our sleep clock), going to bed before we're really tired.
By changing various habits and attitudes, Dr. Jacobs's program promised, chronic insomnia sufferers like me could learn to snooze serenely.
I was impressed.
And I thought: This is not going to work for me.
I've got a terrible track record for changing my bad habits. I still pick at my cuticles after trying everything — including sitting on my hands — to stop, and I never turn down chocolate, even when I need to lose 10 pounds.
I also admit I was skeptical. I suspected that the program, despite Dr. Jacobs's Harvard bona fides, might be like those Make a Million Dollars by Buying Foreclosed Houses or Get Rock-Hard Abs in a Month programs advertised on middle-of-the-night television (as you might imagine, I've seen them all). Five weeks and $25 didn't seem like nearly enough time, or money, to qualify as a serious program.
But I decided to take the course. Maybe I'd learn a couple of tricks to reduce the time I spend feeling around with my legs for a cool place under the sheets from two hours to one. Maybe Dr. Jacobs had a fun version of counting sheep.
Maybe, just maybe, I would conquer my insomnia.
Next: The program begins.
