Sleepless in Manhattan

According to the Mayo Clinic website, insomnia is the inability to fall asleep or stay asleep or the propensity to wake up too early. Insomnia that lasts days or weeks is acute. Insomnia that lasts more than a month is chronic. 

Hmm, I’ve struggled with all three types of insomnia, sometimes simultaneously, my entire life. The only time I’ve slept well is when I had pneumonia my senior year of college. I was so sleepy, and it was so blissful to be so sleepy, that I delayed going to the infirmary until it was “almost too late,” according to the doctor who saw me.

What do I do during those long wakeful hours? I go over all the mean and horrible things I did that day, all the things I said that I shouldn’t have, all the things I didn’t say but wished I had. (There’s never a lack of material—each day brings new misbehaviors and missed behaviors.) 

I do 4-7-8 breathing. (Inhale through the nose for 4 counts, hold for 7, exhale forcefully through pursed lips for 8; repeat 4 times. You’re welcome.) 

I try to remember names and words that are on the tip of my tongue, and keep trying all night. Most recently, it was the name of a famous Chinatown emporium: Was it Silver River? Or White River? Or …? (The answer: Pearl River—useless knowledge, since I learned today it’s shutting down at the end of the year.)

In the COVID era, I’ve developed intractable farmers’ insomnia. I can’t stay awake past 9 p.m. or sleep past 5 a.m. I call it farmers’ insomnia, but farmers probably don’t think of it as a sleep disorder; it’s just life. For an urbanite, though, it means being out of sync with everyone outside the heartland.

So, what’s an early bird to do at 5 a.m. in the city? Hot coffee, news, crosswords, doomscrolling, and … that’s about it. I’ve tried using the hours of dark and quiet for correspondence. But I’ve gotten a scolding for texting before 8 a.m. by a friend who sleeps with her phone on. And there’s not much I can do about the friend who texted me at 9:15 the previous night to set up a spontaneous FaceTime. On the bright side, there’s the odd soul who wakes up unexpectedly early and, knowing my habits, retweets me a vid or a pic or a morbidly interesting tidbit, then goes back to sleep. Raccoons, kittens, puppies, babies, unflattering images of Trump—by the time the people with normal sleep patterns begin to stir, I’m sated. 


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