Diabetes

I wish more people understood the complexities of living with insomnia and sleep anxiety. It is so much more than what people see on the surface like staying up late, sleeping in, daytime tiredness, and the struggle to be on time for things.

According to Cleveland Clinic, “Roughly, 1 in 3 adults worldwide have insomnia symptoms, and about 10% of adults meet the criteria for insomnia disorder,” and “About half the people with chronic insomnia also have at least one other mental health condition, like anxiety or depression”(Cleveland Clinic, Insomnia: What it is, causes, symptoms & treatment 2023). That is a LOT of people struggling to sleep at night. People are quick to judge and blame it on technology use before bed but for some of us, we’ve been struggling with sleep long before ever owning a cell phone. At least, that’s been the case for me.

Insomnia for me is crippling. It’s intense dread each time the sun begins to set. It’s an anxiety response each night when bedtime rolls around. It’s a constant battle in my mind of knowing I should go to sleep at a certain time but anxiety runs through my body as I watch the minutes and sometimes hours passing by as I lay in bed. It’s a struggle to wake up in the morning because you finally fell asleep in the wee hours of the morning with the help of a sedative which leaves you groggy and still exhausted.

Insomnia is daytime anxiety, emotional sensitivity, and irritability because of the fatigue that radiates through every cell in your body. It’s the desire to lay down and take a nap but knowing that if you do, it will just make it even harder to sleep that night. It’s snapping at those you love because the exhaustion is just too overwhelming to your nervous system. It’s anxiety and dread for events or appointments planned in the morning, not because it’s something you don’t want to do but because you know that having to get up early will wreak havoc on your body and mind.

You see when I have something in the morning and I lay down in bed the night before, my mind races. It calculates how much sleep I’ll get, how that will affect my body, mind, and mood when I’ll be able to take a nap if I can, and how I’ll be able to put on a mask for the thing I’m supposed to do. While I would love to wake up early, see the sunrise, and be productive every day, that’s not my reality or the reality for many suffering from insomnia.

I would love to be able to wake up early on Sunday mornings to go to church but instead, I’m having to weigh the costs between going or staying home to sleep.  It’s a constant fight internally between going to church but dozing off through the entire sermon, getting incredibly irritated, and needing to come home and nap anyway or just staying home to sleep in but missing out on seeing important people in my life and hearing bits and pieces of the sermon. It’s a constant battle each week trying to decide. Something that many people with insomnia have to deal with daily. Getting up early for me isn’t an issue of laziness. It’s an issue of anxiety and depression.

Not only is insomnia associated with anxiety but it can also be a result of depression too. For instance, while I have been in this long fight with Treatment-Resistant Depression, my nights are often filled with hopelessness, overwhelming sadness, and dread for the next day of waking up and facing it all again. This dread turns into anxiety which keeps me up in fear of having to face another day of the same fight.

Insomnia can also cause serious damage to one’s body too. For instance, according to Hopkins Medicine, Insomnia and poor sleep quality can lead to complications like “increased risk for heart disease, increased risk for stroke, increased risk for diabetes, excessive weight gain or obesity, depression, and increased of injury to self or others, such as a car accident caused by driving while drowsy” (John Hopkins Medicine, Insomnia). It is so much more than what one sees on the surface.

Insomnia affects so many people worldwide and is multifaceted. It’s complicated. It is crippling. And it’s incredibly infuriating for the one suffering. I just wish more people could understand or have empathy for people like me who struggle with it.

Part 1 of 2 Almost exactly a year ago, I tore my rotator cuff in my right shoulder. I was playing in the ocean in Phuket, Thailand, and got knocked down by a rogue wave. It was a rough landing, just in the exactly wrong position.

After the initial stunning pain, I just assumed that it was a bad sprain. But by the time we were visiting Chiang Mei a week later, I was in such intense pain that we went to a Thai hospital emergency room. We were there a mere hour and a half, which included a consultation with an English doctor, x-rays and a visit to the pharmacy. There I was prescribed hospital-strength Tylenol that I swear had an extra Thai kick to them. “You’re going to need a doctor in the states,” my doctor said as we left. “You definitely tore something.”

Well, four months and two orthopedic surgeons later (the first one said, “just deal with it, we see this all the time in women your age,” and prescribed medication to which I was allergic), I had surgery. It was a three-to-four-month recovery period, but I felt good enough – and bored enough – that I was eager to get back to work, so I returned in November after two-and-a-half months and a heavy regimen of physical therapy and yoga.

I was greeted with open arms, concern and support. I’ll always be grateful for that.

Here’s my question: what if I had told my employer in August that I was suffering from anxiety and depression, and I was having panic attacks on the drive home from the office? Or that my stomach was cramping up so bad from stress that I had lost 27 pounds and had early signs of ulcers and couldn’t work? Both instances would have been medical leaves approved by a psychiatrist, a trained M.D. Would I have been welcomed back so sweetly?

I can honestly say the answer is no because both those experiences happened to me before, at previous jobs. I had alerted my bosses that I would be leaving the jobs and gave plenty of notice. But my mental health had other ideas, and I had to leave early. To this day neither of those bosses have said boo to me – even when I called to apologize for having to leave my position early! Crickets.

That is an issue – our work society’s view on mental health. If it’s a physical problem, like my rotator cuff surgery, everything was fine. But a few years ago, when I was going through a lot of loss and stress in my life and my mental health issues needed attention, I was treated like a pariah.

Both bosses professed to support me and were dear friends of mine. I quite honestly don’t know what I did wrong. I was ill, and I want to clean up my side of the street. We have a policy in place in my current office that if someone isn’t feeling physically well, they should stay home. It’s a good one, since we share germs like pencils.

But what about working America at large? Why can’t mental health be seen in the same light as physical health? Why can’t we get past that barrier? Being ghosted by my ex-bosses doesn’t faze me that much anymore – I’ve put it behind me, and only bring it up here as a living, breathing example of the ignorance and hypocrisy of our society. How many Naomi Judds, tWitches and Taylor Hawkinses do we need to shine the light on the fact that mental health and addiction issues aren’t like eating mushrooms in “The Last of Us”? It’s not contagious. You can’t catch it by small droplets from your spit or a gritty deli counter. But they can be just as disastrous.

Mental health issues, and mental illnesses, need to be normalized in our human psyche, if possible. All they women I know over 50 take an antidepressant, or, as a nurse friend of mine calls it, “Vitamin P,” for Prozac. That staves off depression. Isn’t that an indication that mental issues are extremely prevalent in “normal” society?

And no, sorry non-Boomers – it’s not just women of a certain age. Mental health issues are all around us, especially in our teens, tweens and young kids. Heck, they survived the worst thing that happened to the worldwide collective in a century and *seemed* to have bounced back. Some school districts are doing a better job of monitoring their kids, and I salute them.

Meanwhile, my daughter is getting married in three weeks – that’s another story. Despite being the MOB, my fiercely independent daughter has not called on me for a lot of help. In fact, the only thing she said to me was, “I’m not going to let you do anything until you get your own stress under control.” The next day I temporarily cut back my hours at work. My family will always come first. And I have been stressed, ever since I came back to work early. My shoulder may have healed, but did the rest of my body? My current employer understood the stress I was under and was kind enough to work with me.

As a mom, I still feel all my daughters “feels,” and, of

Part 2 of 2 course, my own. I’ve been depressed, anxious and panicky about things, sometimes all in the course of one day. I’ve been snappy and cranky, with a short fuse and a long regret.

Still, I am not falling apart completely. I am thankful for the tools I have, the skills I’ve learned and the mental health support I do have from forward-thinking medical professionals. (Not all are like my orthopedist, whom I dumped for a younger, smarter model.) It all keeps the worst symptoms of my illness under control (like wanting to hide under my bed covers every day and cry). It’s like I have a flare up of diabetes, lupus or a peanut allergy.

They’re all the same. They can all be deadly. With mental health, we’ve hidden it in our back pockets too long. Here’s a call to action to all people of all ages: Mental health issues can kill – help stop the spread. Acknowledge them if you or someone in your family is suffering. You’ll be surprised by how many open arms there are to help you.

[If you or someone you know may be struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can call the U.S. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255) any time day or night, or chat online. Crisis Text Line also provides free, 24/7, confidential support via text message to people in crisis when they dial 74174.]