8 Ways to Spice Up Your Insomnia

We all suffer from the occasional sleepless night. Perhaps we’re excited about an event; maybe we’re worried about what our boss is going to say in that upcoming meeting, or it could be that we’re too busy combing through everything we should have said in a recent argument to get some shut-eye. But have you ever failed to fall asleep at all; every tiny sound only further fuelling the fire of adrenaline that you have raging inside your dumb anxious self? Or skated by for four days straight on just a couple hours of snoozing before the rest of the world rudely announced that it was time to wake up? I know I have!

Whilst I would not recommend purposely staying awake for any longer than you should, (with some symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation involving: difficulty concentrating, forgetfulness, unstable mood, paranoia, difficulty processing the emotions of others, cognitive impairments, high blood pressure, stroke, obesity, heart disease, type two diabetes, potential hallucinations, and of course, drowsiness – to name a few), sometimes that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.

After several months of trying everything in the good sleep hygiene handbook and still coming up short, I decided, why fight it? In fact, I thought, why not make the experience fun? Here are eight ways you can spice up your bouts of insomnia, for when you’ve done everything you can but you’re still conscious.

Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer!!! This is not advice; this is the delusional ramblings of a deliriously exhausted 25-year-old.

(1) Redecorate your whole house:

Official advice for insomniacs states that when you’re tossing and turning, it’s actually worse to stay in bed stewing about it. In fact, if you’ve been staring at the ceiling for more than twenty minutes, it’s suggested that you get up and go to the bathroom, sit on a comfortable chair, maybe listen to quiet music or read a few pages of a book…

Instead of that, you’re going to think it’s a great idea to redecorate the entire house! You need a task, any task to distract you from the stressful thoughts currently keeping you awake. So you pull on some protective gloves, open up your toolbox, and retrieve that old paint you left somewhere in the back of the shed.

It is as if you are the host of a classic British daytime TV program, like Changing Rooms or Homes Under the Hammer, and you are going to transform this house. You might not be able to see through your puffy eyes, concentrate on painting inside the lines, or quell the increasing irritation steadily growing inside you as you question whether the activity is actually making you feel less tired… but thinking of the surprised/disorientated looks on your housemates’ faces when they wake up to entirely new living quarters drives you onwards.

(2) Learn how to make the perfect Beef Wellington:

All of that painting has caused you to work up quite an appetite and you’re eyeing up the fridge. You fancy a challenge and you remember that one episode of Hell’s Kitchen…or it might have been a couple of episodes actually…where Gordon Ramsey is especially displeased about the way his contestants are preparing the infamous Beef Wellington. You reckon you’re a miles better cook than anyone on that program and find yourself impulsively setting the oven to 200°C.

It doesn’t matter that the food you have in the kitchen fails to even account for half of the ingredients in Ramsey’s recipe, and the tired brain fog that is currently building up inside of you is making it difficult to remember why you’re making this... You’ll make do, mix and match; you’re sure the dish will be a success in your mother’s eyes! You take out your most professional-looking kitchen knives, load up the first recipe you find on Google, roll up your sleeves and get cracking. …Or maybe you’ll open up a packet of Doritos first.

(3) Practice your tennis skills so you can impress that one friend who’s - like - REALLY into it:

At this point, even you’re wondering if your growing fatigue is impairing your ability to make sound decisions. But the ‘Wellington’ is in the oven and you have to fill your waiting time somehow. So, with nothing but a ball, an old racket, and the walls of your house, you decide to up your game by practising some crucial Tennis skills!

As the walls vibrate and the sleepy groans of disgruntled housemates begin to echo throughout the building, you briefly pause to consider, “am I in the wrong here?” When the groans stop for a significant period of time and you are alone with nothing but the sound of your own breathing, you begin to question whether you ever heard any noise at all. You decide that you didn’t and carry on.

You’re trying your very best with this game, but your frustration is slowly growing as you keep missing your shot. In fact, the tennis ball is hitting you more than it’s hitting your racket. The bruise to your ego almost hurts more than the bruises on your face as your phone dings loudly. It’s a message from one of your roommates: “can you stop that banging?”

(4) Knock loudly on your housemates’ bedroom doors and roast them for all of the things you THINK they have done wrong to you:

You stare at your phone screen in annoyance. How do they know that it’s you making those noises? Come to think of it, they’re always making assumptions and framing you in a bad light. You didn’t say anything when they broke your plate and didn’t replace it, or when they knocked your plant pot off the windowsill and you had to repot it, or even when they hid your shoes behind the toilet “for a laugh”.

If you’re being honest with yourself, you’re starting to feel a little emotional about it. It might be difficulty processing social cues or you might just be hangry, but you remember the dirty look they gave you on December 15th 2018 and you need to let them know about it or nothing’s ever going to change! Fueled with determination and angst, you rap your knuckles against their bedroom doors, ready to have it out with whoever comes out first.

(5) Stare at yourself in the mirror for 20 minutes wondering if you’re real:

With the previous argument working out about as well as anyone could have foreseen, you’re curled up in a ball, stress-crying in your bedroom. You ignore the extreme feeling of fatigue that washes over you as you stumble to your feet and begin to wipe your eyes in front of the mirror.

Chills shoot down your back and your hands have an anxious tremor as you run your fingertips over your skin. You’ve never really looked at yourself this closely before. As you begin to put every bump, curve and lash under a microscope, you start to think about how crazy it is that out of all of the possibilities the universe has to offer, you exist, here, standing in front of this mirror, at this point in history.

You wonder how we all got here. You ask yourself if anyone will remember you. You question if your life is going in the right direction before speculating about whether the right direction even exists, or if it’s just another thread woven into the fabric of a carefully constructed set of rules designed to control you.

You begin to dissociate from the present as you stare intently at your own reflection, observing they way you blink, the shape of your nose, the part of your scalp where the hair follicles turn into actual hairs... Everything seems almost artificial, as if you’re not really there, or as if you’re watching yourself from afar. You start to get the sense that some of your body parts appear a bit distorted. The more you ignore it, the more noticeable it becomes. You briefly remember reading about the effects of sleep deprivation and its link with depersonalisation but thinking about it is freaking you out, so you look for something to distract yourself with instead.

(6) Remember the food that should not be but still is cooking in the oven:

At this point, you’re so exhausted that you’re experiencing episodes of microsleep. As you bitterly wonder why you can’t stay asleep if you’re that tired, a strange smell starts to waft under your bedroom door.

You jump up in alarm, instantly realising what it is! Running into the kitchen, you hurriedly shut off the oven and open all of the windows. Your Beef Wellington is more than a little well-done, it’s charred. In fact, it’s so burnt that should you have left it to cook for just five minutes longer, you reckon it might have spontaneously burst into flames.

As realisation sets in that you’re never going to be the next head chef at one of Ramsey’s restaurants, the fire alarm goes off!

(7) Start a conversation with the coat stand:

As you climb down from the chair you were standing on to reset the fire alarm, you notice one of your housemates standing in a dimly lit corridor by the front door. You apologise to them (this one was your fault after all) and ask them if they’ve ever had trouble sleeping too. You’re hoping they can give you some advice that actually works. They blank you. You speak up once more, but they snub you again.

You can’t figure out why they’re not responding or why they’re standing in the dark. You question whether they might be sleepwalking; you’ve heard that it’s dangerous to wake up somebody in that state.

Are they going outside? You turn to switch on the light and get a better look at who it is but when you turn back, they’re gone. You don’t think you heard the door shut so you stroll over to the front of the house to see if they’ve gone into another room. They haven’t. It doesn’t occur to you that there’s a large possibility you’ve been making conversation with a coat stand. Now you’re the one standing on your own in the corridor in the middle of the night.

(8) Let go of the present reality and slip into the void:

Your urge to sleep at this point has become unbearable, and your perception of reality is starting to feel severely distorted. You’re tired of being tired, exhausted with your state of exhaustion and your thinking has become too disordered to allow you to rationalise the situation you’ve found yourself in. So you don’t.

You feel yourself disassociating from reality, slipping into an alternate universe where everything is brighter, louder. The colours of your immediate environment seem more vivid somehow, as if everything is animated – like what happens to the characters in that one show, Trailer Park Boys, that you remember watching.

It’s entirely possible that you’re just falling asleep (finally) but you don’t want to jinx it. So you curl up on a comfortable chair (something that you had been advised to do at the very beginning of this tumultuous night) and slip into the void.