I got together with my ex-Mandarin teacher yesterday, the only person with whom I'm still in contact in Taipei, and the idea came up that I should keep track of my insomnia, at least for the data.
There are different types of insomnia. There is spontaneous one-off sleeplessness which isn't insomnia at all. It gives some people a taste of what it's like to lose sleep, but comes nowhere near the debilitating experience of a chronic insomniac. There's also causal insomnia which is treatable by something termed "cognitive behavioral therapy". What the fuck ever. Then there's my kind of chronic insomnia, which is detailed and covered in Gayle Green's book Insomniac.
The suspicion suggested in the book is that there may be a physiological basis for chronic insomnia, and not just a psychological basis which most doctors just assume for ALL insomnia, just because that's what it is for MOST recorded insomnia cases. And no research is going into looking into a physiological basis.
Ironically, after talking about it with my ex-Mandarin teacher and telling her my sleep has gotten better with workouts at the gym, I had what I call a total insomnia episode.
When you have this kind of an ailment, you start creating descriptions of it for yourself. This type of insomnia is like an illness and not something simply treated by something like "cognitive behavioral therapy", which I scoff at.
Front-end insomnia is when I can't get to sleep when I try to, but eventually fall into levels of sleep that render me functional when I get up. I'm not 100%, but I'm functional.
Back-end insomnia is when I can get to sleep when I try to, but then wake up a few hours in and can't get back to sleep. It's still more-or-less functional, but has its effects.
Total insomnia is not being able to get to sleep at all.
Other notes about my sleeping habits are:
- I generally try to get to sleep around the same time, around 2am.
- I need music on when I try to sleep with the sleep timer set for 30 minutes. If I'm not asleep by the time the music shuts off, that's a likely indication of front-end insomnia, although not always.
- I set my alarm for 9am and whether back-end or front-end insomnia, I try to get up around then and continue with morning sitting.
- No self-medicating with alcohol to try to force or extend sleep in either front-end or back-end insomnia.
- Total insomnia means bets are all off and likely no morning sitting and possible alcohol self-medication. I say "possible" because sometimes I'm no longer trying to get to sleep, and I'm just drinking. But sometimes I just start on drinking and then end up sleeping for several hours. Quality of rest is questionable.
- Recovery "dead sleep" is arguably the worst part of it. Sometimes I can deal with the sleeplessness, but when it catches up, it ends up in dead sleeps when it takes a long, long time to drag myself out of bed, and even then my function levels are low for hours. Morning sittings are almost always out of the question.
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