But first, sleep. Lucy and Ricky were onto something.

After 20 years of terrible dysfunctional sleep, I may have broken the spell.

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Years ago, when I first blogged about my struggles with chronic insomnia, a man left a comment speculating on how miserable my family must be to have to deal with a sleep-deprived, overly exhausted, and most certainly short-tempered and irritable human in the house.

Ouch.
Okay.

Maybe there was a tiny grain of truth there, but on a blog that was read by an overwhelming majority of women, you could guess how this rare comment from a man went over. Not well.

I may or may not have entered perimenopause at that point. I don’t remember. I was in my early 40s, so I think my propensity for sleeplessness was more self-inflicted, or at least situational, than hormonal at the time. Just as I found it fascinating that babies need to be taught how to fall asleep, I shouldn’t be surprised to learn how difficult it is to rewire our internal clocks after years of disrupted sleep habits. I just knew that what I was calling “sleep” since I became a mother was nothing short of a perfunctory act to get me through the next 18 hours of wakefulness.

We all know that the early years of parenting before a baby sleeps through the night is basically survival. Just take a nap when the baby naps, they said. Okay, well what if the baby only naps in 30 minute cycles? The real change in my sleep, however, came a few years later when my work started creeping late into the night.

Sleeplessness had now become a choice.
And it was worth it.

I was addicted to the quiet when those hours were all mine. When all the lights in the apartment flickered off at the end of the day, my evenings were just beginning while everyone drifted into sleep. No cries, no demands, interruptions or disruptions. Just myself and my thoughts alone. I felt like I had unlocked the secret to juggling all of my various jobs while raising children, and while I was at it, did some of my best strategy and design work when the clock hovered around midnight.

But then midnight turned into 1am, then 2am, and sometimes would stretch to even three.

Some babies resist sleep, especially during growth spurts and milestones because they don’t want to miss a single moment when they’re busy absorbing everything new. Being alive is just too exciting. I get it. Every night, I would reluctantly force myself to bed and only because of the looming early morning alarm that was two children who woke up at ungodly hours as babies, and later, as school-aged kids with early morning subway commutes.

I resisted sleep because I protected at all costs the hours that I had to myself. I found it an inconvenience when I had so much to get done. Who needs sleep anyway, I argued with myself. I was productive and I felt invincible.

The link between sleep and cognitive decline

We are not, in fact, invincible. You can train your circadian rhythms into bad habits, but at some point it all takes a toll. After nearly twenty years of late nights, interrupted sleep, and terrible bouts of insomnia, I could no longer fall asleep before 2am—and just like clockwork, I would wake up four or five hours later, no matter what.

How was I going to fix this? Is poor sleep genetically linked? Did I inherit my dysfunctional sleep from my mother who famously never sleeps more than a few hours a night, but is the most productive, accomplished insomniac ever?

I think it was about a year ago that I started reading articles and medical journals citing the connection between lack of sleep and cognitive decline. Then, I read this rather alarming study:

Researchers found that individuals who slept fewer than five hours per night were twice as likely to develop dementia, and twice as likely to die, compared to those who slept six to eight hours per night.¹

Excuse me, what? THIS IS ME.

After having lived through the harrowing experience of Alzheimers with my father, I am deathly afraid of losing my memory. I wrote about it last year. The connection between sleep and brain function isn’t exactly surprising, but recent studies suggest that inadequate sleep in midlife in particular, could increase the risk of dementia.

It makes a lot of sense. Good sleep is crucial for memory function and cognitive health. It’s logical and scientific, but when you’re pushing the boundaries of what your body can take because you cherish having a few extra hours in a day, logic flies out the window.

Sleep was top of mind when I made the conscious decision to slow down my career two years ago. I thought eliminating work stress, multiple jobs, and deadlines would help. But poor sleep during the menopausal years is a commonly shared grievance and my body had other ideas. Whether it’s anxiety, hot flashes, brain fog, or any of the other countless symptoms that disrupted my sleep, I suddenly felt like sleep was even more out of my control.

Lucy and Ricky were onto something

I've been on a two year journey to fix my sleep issues. Progress has been non-existent, though, because I’ve been fighting against my own body. So I don’t know whether it’s because I’m emerging from the other end of peri into full-fledged menopause, but something miraculously clicked this summer.

I mentioned a few newsletters back that during my trip to the PNW, I got my first full night of seven uninterrupted hours of sleep in ages. Yes, the flu knocked me out and a friend had given me a pill of progesterone, but I woke up seven hours later shocked that I had slept through the night. The next day it happened again. I hadn’t even taken any sleep aids and much to my surprise it kept happening day after day.

My instinct to capitalize on my summer vacation to right the ship was correct; it seemed that I needed to break away from deeply ingrained bad habits at home in order to reset my circadian rhythm. Whatever it was, it broke the spell, and I am now going to bed before 12:30am every night. An earlier bedtime has been critical.

But here’s a realization that dawned on me: the key to jumpstarting my newly improved sleep was that for three weeks while away, I slept alone.

Sitcom couples in the 1950s and '60s, like Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, slept in twin beds because portrayals of married couples on television were cautiously conservative back then, but sleeping in separate beds for better sleep health makes a whole lot of sense.

The Guardian reports that for almost a century, between the 1850s and 1950s, separate beds were seen as a healthier, more modern option for couples than the double, with Victorian doctors warning that sharing a bed would allow the weaker sleeper to drain the vitality of the stronger.²

That last line. OMG.

And then I remembered that both sets of parents in our family not only had separate beds, but separate bedrooms.

When I think about the years I trained my body to sleep through 5 a.m. alarm clocks when Mark was a pastry chef, or the times he woke up just as I finally dragged myself to bed at 2 a.m., it’s no wonder sleep felt like a battleground. Add in the occasional snoring, thrashing limbs, teeth grinding, and the arrival of an adorable rescue cat who believes the bed is his and defends it with sudden attacks on my leg when he's accidentally kicked in the night, and it’s no surprise I wasn’t getting any sleep.³

I have no idea how this 11 pound cat takes up so much physical presence on the bed

We have not resorted to sleeping in separate beds yet, though it is tempting to entertain considering we have two unoccupied bedrooms at the moment. With ear plugs and an occasional pillow thrown over my head, I’ve managed to stay the course and have been getting at least six hours of sleep every night, so maybe I can ignore the fact that I get the best quality sleep when I sleep alone.

I know it’s only been a month and it hasn’t been without some bumps, but it isn’t lost on me that my sleep issues are finally starting to improve now that my kids are grown and out of the house.

Considering that it all started to fall apart when I became a parent, there is poetic symmetry at play here that is hard to overlook.

Yours, in better sleep (finally),
–J

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Links and things

• Rolled over: why did married couples stop sleeping in twin beds? A new cultural history shows that until the 1950s, forward-thinking couples regarded sharing a bed as old-fashioned and unhealthy. (The Guardian)

• Tuition: $9,400. Dorm Room Interior Designer: $10,000? (NYTimes)
  Um…I have no comment. Well I do, but I may just save it for Threads where I don’t usually hold back on snark or politics.

• Pause. ‘Nothing can prepare you for this.’ Mary Ruefle on menopause. (Granta)
  The last few paragraphs had me breathless, is was so beautiful in its writing.

• What we'll eat on a warmer planet (Ted Radio Hour on npr)
  From the farm, to the lab, to our tables, what we eat and how it's grown is changing. Agriculture contributes to global warming—and is being transformed by it.

• Soup broth is damaging South Korea’s highest mountain, warn officials (CNN via Accuweather)

  Dumping soup broth, apparently, is causing environmental damage. Just drink the broth for God’s sakes!

1. https://www.aging-us.com/article/202591/text

2. sleepreviewmag.com

3. It’s maddening to be married to someone who has never had any problems falling asleep the instant his head hits the pillow, even if he is woken momentarily. All the times I have laid in bed for hours, awake, while both spouse and cat are sound asleep…I am forever envious of people who have no sleep battles.