I dont want to sleep9/22/2023 ![]() ![]() Their heads are swivelled backwards and buried in their plumage. The seagulls outside St Mary’s Cathedral are sleeping with their red legs up. ‘The Coca-Cola sign at Kings Cross flashes for no one but a few cabbies.’ Photograph: Brendon Thorne/Bloomberg/Getty Images But during the first Covid-19 outbreak, my insomnia returned – and now even meds did nothing. She encourages behavioural strategies that address underlying anxiety and worry. “Sleeping pills occasionally can get you a good night’s sleep,” says Stedman, but notes these can be “habit-forming” and difficult to stop taking. “But the question should always be, ‘Do the pros outweigh the cons?’” “There’s no doubt medications can help some people,” says Sharp. I was prescribed antidepressants and mood stabilisers, and slept well. He listened and – finger by finger – typed notes, his calming demeanour assuring me there was no emergency here. A single white hair sprouted between his eyebrows like a sunflower. He had patients’ paintings on the walls and golf trophies on his windowsill. ![]() I saw a psychiatrist after a second sleepless night, locked in a spell of fear. I learnt that insomnia is like a bad bedtime story. Anxiety that I would never sleep again, and die delirious, drowned out all of Kevin’s charming British voice. Trying to will a good night’s sleep for it, I got zero sleep instead. My partner and I had tickets to see Kevin McCloud of Grand Designs fame. ‘With no people around, the Sydney Opera House looks like a spaceship on a launchpad.’ Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images I watch them swirl and swirl, and never once crash into each other. Hundreds of seagulls circle above its brightly lit sails, thinking it is daytime. With no people around, the Sydney Opera House looks like a spaceship on a launchpad. The cartoon leprechaun printed on the box smiles widely – I wonder how many cavities are in his grin. On the other side of the world children would be eating this right now. But in the window I see US breakfast cereals, coloured and hopeful, lit by white fluorescent tubes. Perhaps the hardest thing about insomnia is how isolating it is, how quiet you have to be. As my eyes popped reliably open at 2am, I felt painfully awake – heart and mind racing, feet writhing against the bedsheets, wishing and wishing to sleep. “The worry about not being able to sleep keeps you from sleeping, which reinforces the worry.” “People with long-term sleeping difficulties often fall into a cycle of anxiety and worry,” says Lisa Stedman, the principal psychologist at Mind Journey Psychology, whom I started seeing for my issues. “But in turn, insomnia can cause or exacerbate mental ill-health.” “Insomnia is one of the core symptoms of many psychological disorders, including the two most common ones, depression and anxiety,” says Dr Tim Sharp, the founder of the Happiness Institute in Sydney. The causes of insomnia are various – irregular sleep patterns, substances, certain medications. Would he get more out of my bed than me? Probably. I wonder which of us is having the better sleep tonight. I pass a homeless man in a blue sleeping bag on a bus stop bench. Flags advertising festivals flap in the wind corridor as though blown by an ancient hairdryer. The council’s flowerbeds shake beneath the streetlights. There are nitrous oxide bulbs in the gutters of Martin Place. Imagine being a crook and being caught by a Yaris. Photograph: Steven Saphore/AFP/Getty ImagesĪ 24/7 security car crosses the tram-tracks ahead. ![]()
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