Six Days Without Sleep
A student’s battle with insomnia
STORY BY ARIANA MOINI
Brett Ward and his friend run through the maze of desks in the lecture hall as they try to escape the man’s pursuit. They are being chased by one of the most frightening characters of all time, the Joker. Ward sits down at one of the desks where he reads, carved into the top of the desk, the words, “Flip this over.” So he does. Underneath, carved even larger, it reads, “I’m right behind you.” He turns around to see the Joker staring at him. Except it wasn’t the Joker that had been chasing them around the lecture hall earlier, it was himself.
Western students shouldn’t be scared of attending class because this didn’t actually happen, it was just one of many exceedingly vivid nightmares that Western student Brett Ward remembers. Ward’s lifelike nightmares add to the difficulties of his insomnia, which he has dealt with since grade school.
Insomnia is difficulty initiating or maintaining sleep, or waking up too early. In order for insomnia to be diagnosable, this has to occur with adequate opportunity for sleep and lead to deficits in daytime functioning, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. More than two thirds of patients seen in primary care clinics seek help for insomnia, says Emily Gibson, M.D., director of Western’s Student Health Center. It is more common in women than men, in the elderly, in lower socioeconomic populations, the unemployed, and divorced, separated or widowed individuals, Gibson says.
Western student Ben Dazey has had insomnia as well as restless leg syndrome since fifth grade. He has gone as many as six days without sleep and says that each day without sleep is a different phase. Day one leaves him tired and groggy. The second day without sleeping is monotone and he doesn’t feel physically tired because his body has adjusted to it. But the third day is the dropping point where things stop making sense. He gets creative and artistic, but can’t function normally. After four days, time starts to melt together, leaving him unable to even remember the last time he slept or what day it is.
“I could physically see my cognition slowing down. You do things that don’t make sense,” Dazey says. “Like you pick up your contact solution and start to brush your teeth with it.”
Dazey is able to get a lot done at night when everyone else is asleep. He likes to stay very productive, doing laundry and cleaning, even going on hour-long walks and working out at a 24-hour gym.
“I’ll do anything. I have a thousand hobbies,” Dazey says. “Literally anything to keep me busy: sewing, nun chucks, soccer, running, climbing, hiking, music, instruments.”
Even with all the productive time, there are still problems that occur due to his insomnia. Dazey remembers a time in eighth grade gym class when he was staring off into a corner, exhausted. His teacher approached him and, assuming he was on drugs, sent him to the office. Administrators brought in a drug counselor who tried to convince him he was using methamphetamine, despite his explaining that he just hadn’t slept in six days.
He’s also struggled with some health issues due to his lack of sleep. He worked for a while at a Starbucks in New York where he was often scheduled to work night shifts until 3 a.m. and then open the store at 4 a.m. Because of his hectic schedule, Dazey got sick. Most people are able to recover from the flu or a cold through rest, but his insomnia made it so he wasn’t able to recover normally. This led to a hole in his lung and he was losing air daily. He couldn’t get time off of work and he wasn’t able to sleep, causing him to be sick for six weeks before finally recovering.
Dazey says his insomnia has little to do with stress, but more to do with a racing mind always full of thoughts. Other sleep disorders, however, often have to do with stress. Ward says his sleeping problems are likely stress induced.
Sleeping disorders can sometimes give people hallucinations. Ward experienced hearing voices at night due to his insomnia, which he has had since third grade. Stressors and family deaths led to his insomnia. For about a month he was only sleeping about an hour a night, and after that he still was not getting enough sleep. Because of this severe sleep deprivation he began to hear a low, evil-sounding, almost undetectable voice that he describes as sounding like the devil talking from his closet at night. As a child he didn’t tell anyone about the voices resulting from his insomnia.
“I thought they would think I was crazy,” Ward says. “At the time I didn’t really understand how important it was to sleep and how it affects your daily life. I just didn’t understand that the voices were tied in with the lack of sleep.”
Because he was so young when his insomnia began, the doctor didn’t want to prescribe him medication and instead recommended natural remedies. Ward tried sleeping with his head on a bag of dried lavender, which has a relaxing effect, drinking chamomile tea before bed and taking melatonin, a hormone naturally secreted in the pineal gland of the brain. Melatonin supplements can help regulate sleep-wake cycles, which Ward says worked best for him in helping with his insomnia. Like Ward, Dazey has tried various herbal remedies, which he says didn’t work. But he doesn’t like medication, so Dazey relies on frequent napping and mapping out time throughout the day for sleep very carefully.
“I take a lot of naps, but I make sure it’s between 30 minutes to an hour,” Dazey says. “There is a lot of balancing and planning when to sleep.”
Ward realized an important part of managing his insomnia would be reducing stress and anxiety. Ward says his sleeping problems were much worse when going through stressful periods in his life. His sleep issues began during a stressful time in his childhood, drastically improved once his life normalized and will come back when something stressful happens.
It can be difficult to reduce stress, however, when there are other factors that can make stress almost inevitable. Ward, who is diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, says anxiety often comes with depression. It’s hard to reduce these effects because of a lack of medication free of detrimental side effects. He took Prozac for a brief period in high school but quickly stopped when it was causing him to have violent mood swings, to get enraged easily and to sleep far too much. The lack of non-medicinal treatments that are actually effective can lead people who don’t want to take pills for their problems to at least try it, only to be disappointed because of the painful side effects.
“I didn’t like how it affected me; I just started having weird mood swings that would make me enraged all of a sudden,” Ward says. “I didn’t want to take the pills in the first place, but I felt like I should try them at least and see if they worked.”
Sleeping problems can also be caused through the use of substances, such as alcohol and marijuana. Alcohol is sometimes associated with sleep apnea, and marijuana interferes with normal sleep patterns and produces change in brain wave patterns due to the THC, according to the New York state office of alcoholism and substance abuse services.
However, substances are also often used to self-medicate when dealing with insomnia or other sleeping issues because they can help someone sleep who otherwise wouldn’t be able to. Ward says if he’s going through a particularly difficult bout of insomnia he will sometimes drink until he passes out so that he can sleep. A moment of stress can lead to a vicious cycle: a stress occurs, leading to insomnia. The insomnia causes him to turn to alcohol and smoking, which in turn can cause more of the auditory hallucinations. Insomnia commonly occurs in people due to life stressors, noisy environments, medical conditions, psychiatric conditions and self-medication through alcohol or caffeine, Gibson says.
Ward has tried everything to help with insomnia from doing sit-ups and push-ups in bed to make him more tired to forcing himself to cry so he’ll fall asleep. He says the most effective method has been stress reduction. Dazey has tried non-addictive sleeping pills, which he says worked great but eventually his body became too used to them and they stopped working, so now he relies on naps and tiring himself out with activities throughout the day. There are a variety of treatment approaches depending on the type of insomnia, but there really is no easy cure, says Gibson. Whether through stress reduction, napping or simply accepting insomnia and keeping busy, insomniacs find their own, unique ways of living with sleepless nights.