Insomnia is not the same as a 'bad night'
Try as I might, the anxiety it sparks in me can at times feel insurmountable.
Just a heads up, I’ve removed the paywall from my archived posts for the next two weeks. My hope is that in doing so, it will give you a broader feel for my work—and allow you the opportunity to decide if it resonates. Thank you for all your support x
Last night I had insomnia. An insignificant detail for many, I’m sure, but my sleep trauma runs deep.
You see, during my first postpartum period, insomnia came like a wave into our lives and robbed me—and my family—of so much. Not only sleep, obviously, but confidence, joy, identity and in many ways, my sanity. I became a shell of a human and as the months of sleeplessness began to compound—it wasn’t unusual for me to go without a single minute of sleep 3–4 nights each week, sometimes consecutively—an underlying anxiety began to bubble.
In the beginning, the anxiety was understandably directly linked to sleep. As daylight turned to dusk, I could feel it weigh heavy in my bones. My eyelids would be drooping from exhaustion, I’d tuck my baby son into his bassinet and yet as I lay in my bed, I would find my heart racing, a thick layer of fear enveloping me from the darkness. This feeling, I would come to know intimately, was anxiety. But it took a long time for me to distinguish—and also advocate for myself in front of doctors—that this was not a sleep disorder triggered by anxiety, but an anxiety that had been triggered by a sleep disorder. A chronic, all-consuming sleep disorder that nobody in my orbit had either experienced or could really understand. Aside from my husband who witnessed the devastation first-hand—and one could argue slept as little as I did during that first year given he was often up all night trying to calm or soothe me—it felt like nobody else was equipped to ‘deal with me’.
Like many women and first time mothers in particular, I felt very much dismissed by the medical support I sought out. Nobody knew much about postpartum insomnia, let alone how to deal with a quickly unravelling mental health issue that for all intents and purposes, appeared to be ‘curable’ if only I could get some goddamn sleep.
Thankfully, the insomnia and its physiological hold on my body slowly began to ease as I entered my second year of motherhood. My instincts had been entirely correct in the sense that the ‘chronic and persistent insomnia disorder’ that I’d been diagnosed with was linked in some way to postpartum hormones and the biological transformation that was taking place somewhere deep within my body. But while I was slowly able to begin cobbling together a few hours of sleep here and there, the anxiety that’s been left in insomnia’s wake has been a bitter pill to swallow.
Prior to this period, I can honestly say I’d never experienced ongoing anxiety. I knew many people in my life for whom it was a daily battle. And many who were medicated because of it. But until I’d experienced the weight of its terror first-hand, I had no idea how all-consuming it could be.
Over the last few years, anxiety has begun to pepper my everyday life in ways I’d never thought possible. I will wake up instantly knowing whether or not I’m ‘going to be anxious’ today—as if it’s the same as deciding to pull on my favourite coat. Which it’s not. And like insomnia, the cruelty of anxiety lies in how it feels so beyond my remit of control, as if I become nothing more than a bystander in my own life.
Thankfully, I have some incredible support around me and have managed to develop a bit of a toolkit for how to better cope when anxiety strikes. I know that while I may have zero control over the physiological symptoms bubbling in my body (anxiety at its core remains very much a mystery to me), I can try to take control of my mental state by doing things that help to nurture my mind. Walking, cold plunging, reading, talking, being outdoors and writing always help to at least distract and direct my thoughts to other things.
But the one time when many of these tools remain ineffective is when insomnia strikes. I’m grateful that my bouts of sleeplessness are honestly very few and far between these days. I may experience one chronic ‘attack’ of insomnia every couple of months—if I’m lucky. And unlike the ‘good old days’ when I would often have more nights awake than asleep during a single week, thankfully I don’t seem to have recurring nights when I’m wiped out—or should I say, wiped awake by insomnia. But still, the feeling that blooms in my body when it comes is akin to those television advertisements that show how crash test dummies respond in a car accident. I feel like I’m being flung at speed at a concrete wall, with no protection and no escape route. It’s terrifying.
I’ve had a couple of truly amazing psychologists in the last few years, both of whom have validated that my instincts have been correct all along: that yes, my anxiety has been triggered by a very serious sleep disorder—and not the other way around. But more importantly what its left in its path of destruction is a form of PTSD which means that whenever insomnia does rear its ugly head, I’m thrust right back into those dark nights of the soul. My freeze response takes over and I lie paralysed, unable to escape the terror taking place in my own mind.
The moral of this story is not to incite fear, but to instead share a vulnerability that I don’t offer talk about out loud. Those closest to me have heard snippets of this narrative over the years, but I’m not sure how many know that it’s something I still battle with daily.
And last night, it was bad. Undoubtedly compounded by the fact that I had to get up at 4:30am to catch a flight (whyyyy does our body always rob us of sleep when we most need it?!)—it felt like a gut punch and one that will take a fair few cups of coffee to overcome.
But that’s the other thing. Insomnia is more than ‘just a bad night’—and the impact it can have reaches far beyond the dead of night. Limited mental space, patience, physical energy, ability to find joy in the everyday and an intrinsic lack of motivation often follow, which can be so damaging especially when during the daylight hours of your life, you well and truly feel like you’ve ‘done the work’.
While I’m not sure whether insomnia and its close companion anxiety, will be relationships that I have to continue to confront and conquer long-term, I guess what I’ve learned is that the work is never really done. My husband reminded me this morning that despite last night being an absolute shocker, I have come so far already. It wasn’t very long ago that a night like that would render me almost incapable of functioning the next day. And yet here I am, coffee in hand, and very much awake. Certainly not highly-functioning, but functioning at least.
Crikey Ashley… Thank you so much for your deep and honest share. Although I’ve existed on less sleep than most for many years (so I can resonate a little…) I can’t say I’ve experienced anything quite like that, and I’m grateful to hear more about what you’ve been through. It’s heartbreaking how often we’re gaslighted by the medical profession when we know our own bodies so well . It’s no wonder we lose our connection to intuition I love how you advocated so strongly for yourself 💚