The cruel reality of sleeplessness in grief

Three days without sleep sent me to a breakdown. It’s said two weeks with sleep deprivation can send someone into the land of clinical depression. Months of sleep deprivation, and we had four months of it with my eldest daughter when she was an infant, creates a sleep debt that possibly takes triple that length of time and more to recover from.

The breakdown I had, when a lamentable grief hit the abyss, out of nowhere news that made the worst news unimaginably worse, emerged out of one night when I just agonised. The following few days my mind was tormented by fearful thoughts that swarmed relentlessly, each quiet night so noisy in my mind that the seconds lingered like despair.

Grief creates paradoxical issues around sleep. Patterns of tiredness change as the mind swings into convolutions of circular thought that are not easily arrested. Preoccupation is the order of the season as loss wrests every echo of peace, producing emptiness of soul.

Anxiety keeps us awake and
depression makes us want to sleep.

Indeed, being asleep when we’re in deep grief or depressed is the only sanctuary — to be unconscious. At times of incredible mental and emotional stress, sleep may only occur when we’re too exhausted to stay awake. Grief and exhaustion are co-combatants in testing our sanity in loss.

But sleep when we’re exhausted doesn’t arrest the sleep debt we’ve accumulated.

One thing I’ve become convinced of over the years is the wellbeing sleep provides. And the research seems to back this view. Studying sleep in my occupational safety and health career helped me to understand just how debilitating fatigue is. The mind is our strongest ally in the quest for mental health, which converts to emotional and spiritual health.

Our mental health is significantly compromised
when we run into sleep debt.

So what sort of advice works? I know dieticians and other health professionals suggest going to bed before 10pm or not more than 3-4 hours after the evening meal, so we don’t consume foods that are more likely to be stored as fat before we sleep.

I have found a 10pm curfew hard to maintain, but rewarding when I do. For someone who rises before 5am, I really need to be in bed around 10pm to get close to five full cycles of sleep — each cycle being around 90 minutes. And I find a 20-minute nap vitalising during the day.

Of course, shift workers may laugh; those working during the night know full well the challenges to wellbeing in being awake when the body and mind need to be asleep.

It can be overwhelming in grief to even contemplate a solid sleep regime. You feel driven by a never-ending ebb-and-flow tide of thought and emotion. Stability might sound good, but it can feel unfathomably out of reach.

Perhaps the best gift we can give ourselves as we wrestle with our grief is to invest in our overall health — sleep, diet and exercise — through applying good professional advice. But we also need to accept that this at times can seem a bridge too far.

Best to hold the goal in tension with the reality that it can seem too much.

One day at a time keep hold of the hope for health to combat the debilitating effects of grief.

Photo by Gregory Pappas on Unsplash