![]() Their patience – or mine, anyway – also grows thin at the wise words dispensed by so-called experts – for example, that we should avoid caffeine and alcohol, wind down at night, put screens away early, eat healthily and learn mindfulness. Nor, after weeks in which each day begins with gravelly-eyed misery and yet another sleep-deprived hangover, are people necessarily in a position to begin a course of therapy that will try to make them relax about the very thing ruining their lives. Therapy can take months to have an effect, and even then, it’s far from a dead cert. ![]() Saying sleeping pills don’t work in the long run, while therapy does, is pretty obvious. In that sense, a new study carried out by a team at Brigham and Women’s hospital in Boston is right: sleeping pills don’t work in the long term and, as the UK’s Sleep Charity added, what people with sleep problems need for permanent change is cognitive behavioural therapy, not drugs. In normal times, I have many ways of dealing with my insomnia, and attitude has always been the most important. But in September 2015, I’d have taken anything to break the cycle. In the past, I had been given standard sleeping pills – zopiclone and Ambien (zolpidem) – and while they had caused me to pass out, eventually, they made me feel poisoned the next day. I had held off doing so for ages because I had previous experience seeking medical help for my insomnia, which has dogged me since I was a child. I became obsessed with what was happening to me, and the sense that it would never end and I would never have my life back. ![]() Not for the first time, during that rash of sleeplessness in 2015, I grew desperate. ![]() What you, if you are lucky, take for granted to be sleep – that thing that makes you feel you have fuel in the tank and that your systems have been restored – can actually evade people for days, weeks, even months. If not sleeping for six weeks sounds like drama and hyperbole, it isn’t. It was mid-September 2015 and I had not slept in six weeks, except for one night, which I still remember as the mysteriously offered slice of heavenly respite in an otherwise bewilderingly brutal period of insomnia. ![]()
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