A Really Good Day(30)

The problem is that the “correct” way to use Ambien isn’t how most of us use it. Supposedly, Ambien is intended for occasional insomnia. A night here or there, once in a rare while. But when I was taking the drug, it was my every-night companion. My regular midnight snack. I only rarely took more than the recommended dose, but I was less apt to skip a pill than I ever was when I was taking birth control. Though my evidence is only anecdotal, most Ambien devotees I know are like I was, using Ambien regularly, not occasionally, because their insomnia is regular, not occasional.

My campaign to kick the drug was two-pronged. First I substituted medical marijuana as a nighttime medication (though only briefly); then I turned my bedroom into as close an approximation of a sensory deprivation tank as I could achieve without passing my nights in a soundproof pod full of salt water.

I took the concept of “sleep hygiene” to a level of neurosis that only others who spend their nights frantically calculating the mounting hours of their sleep deficits can appreciate. I turned off the heat in our bedroom, chose a fan for its cooling and white-noise properties, and eliminated all sources of light. Tiny squares of black vinyl electrical tape cover every single LED light. All of this has left our bedroom darker and quieter than a womb, and a hell of a lot colder.

In that black, freezing, white-noise-filled room, I generally sleep almost as soon as my head touches my (three) pillows. But what about on the all-too-many nights when I’m out on the road? This is not a neurosis that travels easily. I do my best, turning the heat down and the air conditioning up. I travel with a pack of black Post-its that I stick over all LED and other indicator lights, including the insanely bright strobes that are a feature of hotel smoke detectors. I put a rolled-up towel in front of the door to block the light from the hallway. I wear earplugs. Actually, now that I’m taking stock, everything I do to try to get some sleep in a hotel is also an exact recipe for how to die successfully and obliviously in my room should the hotel I’m staying in catch fire. That’s a thought to help me drift off next time I hit the hay in a Radisson.

I know that the precautions that I have taken against insomnia have only served to acclimate me to an absurd ideal. I’ve made myself soft. If I really wanted to cure my sleeplessness, I would take away all these crutches and teach myself to fall asleep in a hot room, on a hard, lumpy mattress covered in prickly sheets, beneath an unshaded skylight—the exact state, in fact, of my childhood bedroom. Surely, the fact that I’m no longer a discontented preadolescent wearing a padded bra and a huge chip on her shoulder would militate against the discomfort. But, honestly, who really wants to find out?

Moreover, even before I began the microdose protocol, though I would generally fall asleep with little difficulty, I often popped awake at 4:00 a.m. Sometimes I think I should make regular 4:00 a.m. plans with my other perimenopausal friends. We could do something productive with our wakefulness, like play mah-jongg or renovate derelict apartments for homeless families, instead of tossing and turning on our sweat-soaked sheets, Googling the side effects of hormone patches and bio-identical hormone creams, and “accidentally” kicking our blissfully sleeping spouses.

Still, though I am staying up late and waking up early, I’m not feeling the effects of the resulting sleep deprivation as much as I would have expected. But even this concerns me. Needing less sleep can be a warning of the onset of hypomania. I should be tired, and if I’m not, that might itself be a problem. The prospect of the protocol’s causing either hypomania or a return to insomnia is really starting to worry me. And, of course, that worry is keeping me up at night.





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*1 ?Erik J. Kaestner, John T. Wixted, and Sara C. Mednick, “Pharmacologically Increasing Sleep Spindles Enhances Recognition for Negative and High-Arousal Memories.”

*2 ?From World Health Organization Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (Twenty-eighth Report, 1993) definition of drug addiction. WHO Technical Report Series 836.





Day 12


Normal Day

Physical Sensations: None.

Mood: Fine.

Conflict: None.

Sleep: Perfectly fine.

Work: Productive.

Pain: Minor.





Today I decided to risk repetitive stress injury and work at a café. The café had free Wi-Fi, but I was halfway through my morning before I realized that I had not once bothered to go online. How strange. Who am I?

I am usually so addicted to the Internet that I can’t be productive unless I turn off my laptop’s Wi-Fi, and even then I keep my phone at the ready just in case of emergency. If, for example, the barista swirls the face of Jesus into the foam of my cappuccino, I need to able to get the photo up on Instagram right away, so pilgrims can attend before the bubbles dissolve.

But today hours passed before I even remembered that I had close at hand a means of escaping the responsibilities of work. Can this be the microdose? If so, it’s an unanticipated outcome. I experienced a similar phenomenon when my psychopharmacologist prescribed Ritalin, but that class of drugs made me anxious and irritable. (By “irritable” I mean that they made me scream obscenities at my husband, blare my horn at cars that I felt were lingering at stop signs, and fling various objects across the room.) But though today I was focused, I was not at all irritable. I felt calm and composed. Almost unnervingly so.