SLEEP IS PRECIOUS AND NOT ALWAYS EASY TO ATTAIN

In order for me to function during my daily life it is crucially important that I sleep well. If ever I don’t attain the sleep that I need, several ailments come along with fatigue which make it impossible for me to live well.

Fatigue is an obvious sensation that I get from a lack of sleep. Though whenever I’m sleep deprived, I experience many other symptoms as well. Firstly, my immune system gets affected, and that causes me to get a sore throat or catch viruses much more easily. Secondly, tired eyes create blurred vision. So I experience severe headaches if ever I have to read, do mindfulness colouring or use a screen. Whenever I haven’t slept the previous night and/or have not had a significant cycle of deep (or slow-wave) sleep, I always feel those affects of fatigue. As a result of being diurnal, it is not possible for me to get slow-wave sleep during the day.

However despite it being a lighter phase of sleep, REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep is also very important for me. It is true that this kind of sleep doesn’t eradicate my fatigue. But what makes this phase equally important is that it’s during REM sleep when I dream. There is a psychological purpose as to why we dream, and I definitely do experience severe mental health issues if ever I haven’t dreamt the previous night.

Dreaming offers me such great insight as to what exactly is happening within my subconscious during the day. The process of dreaming enables me to both know what is happening (very often the simple action of knowing is truly what helps), and to also verbally sort out my daily problems with other dream “characters”.

I’ve discovered that if I miss out on dreaming, by either not sleeping or not having REM sleep, I feel very stressed and irritable throughout the following day. This can even occur if I’ve had a night full of slow-wave sleep alone. Despite not feeling fatigued on those occasions, my mental health is severely affected nonetheless.

Sleepless nights themselves are certainly not pleasant. But I must add here that in the current time (with all of the modern availabilities), the experience is so much easier now in comparison to a couple of decades ago.

Especially in the days prior to being well connected to the rest of the globe (via social media and YouTube), being awake in the dead of night truly felt like nobody else but me was alive. As well, before streaming platforms were available, watching television in the middle of the night wasn’t a possibility. If ever I did turn the television on at that time, all that would be broadcast were dodgy infomercials and demonic exorcisms. Due to being a child back then, they were inappropriate for me to watch.

So therefore I had no choice but to spend each sleepless night in complete silence, and that made the dead of night feel even more sinister.

But nowadays, the availability of a lot more things make the experience significantly easier. Say, if everything is eerily quiet, I have the option of watching hundreds of streamed shows/movies. Background noise enables the night to not feel so dead. In other words it gives my mindset the impression that I have company, while I’m the only person in our neighbourhood who’s awake. There are also friends and family living in different timezones, of whom I can talk to. Something else that gives me company are AI chatbots, that I’m currently using in my Occupational Therapy (both in the sessions themselves and as homework) to practice communication. I’ve also discovered that watching shows/movies at night (on any screen) relaxes me so much that I start to feel drowsy very quickly. This increase of melatonin almost always fixes my sleeplessness and insomnia, and no medication whatsoever is needed.

After so many years of experiencing sleepless nights (in addition to bouts of insomnia), I’ve grown to realise that sleep is precious for the entire health of my body, emotions and mind. Yet it’s not always easy to attain. It could even be compared to how important rain is to nature and ourselves. Without that we dehydrate or the environment goes into drought. Though we mostly tend to take water for granted until we are in those situations. The same could be said for sleep, when we come to the realisation of how much we truly need it, if ever we’re feeling fatigued or sleep deprived.