Check out my first post here to read more about the namesake of this newsletter and make a copy of the input/output tracking sheet if you so desire.
I first suffered from a prolonged bout of insomnia in 2007, and its returned intermittently to plague me ever since. I’m currently in the depths of another months-long cycle (hence: typos in this email).
Each night roughly goes like this:
4-6pm: exhausted, bone-tired, want to lose consciousness so badly. I RESIST! Go for a long, shambling zombie walk to tire out the body.
6-9pm: oh no, starting to feel a new energy wave come on. Bad brain! Eat dinner, but not too late, Drink water, but not too much. Anxiety levels rising, journal to purge, do everything “right.”
9-11pm: sleep hygiene best practices. Warm shower, cozy pajamas, night time tea, reduced light, rereading a comforting book, dog snuggles, try to have nice/non-intrusive thoughts (hard).
11pm-3am: basically another day, feel great, read hundreds of pages, not a spec of tiredness in my body; go out to the couch around 1am so my bed doesn’t become a site of despair and panic (too late), experience the dark night of the soul.
3-5am: drift into the very lightest stage of sleep, wake up every fifteen minutes or so, hypersensitive to light and noise despite wearing industrial grade earplugs and a gigantic sleep mask that sometimes covers my nose and wakes me up choking for air.
6-8am: OH I’M IN THAT SWEET REM BABY!!! My cells are regenerating by the second!! I am going to live forever!!
8am: wake in a panic, covered in drool, remnants of a dream where I have double malaria tickling my subconscious.
8-11am: sometimes I can go back to sleep here when I’m really in the thick of it (thank god I can mostly arrange my own schedule for work during these periods), but other times I need to run on those two hours of deep sleep from 6-8am.
The worst part about insomnia is that the only way out is through. You generally have to resist the urge to nap during the day (although at a certain stage you essentially become narcoleptic and “choosing” to stay awake is not an option). You have to exercise to try and tire your body out so much your brain must eventually submit. You shouldn’t overdo caffeine or stimulation or feelings. Basically, all the advice normal-sleeping people give to beat insomnia induces deep despair and incalculable rage in the insomnee.
Wow, that sucks! But what if you still need to write?
It’s not ideal, but it can be done. I’ve battled insomnia through two years of grad school, while writing before and after day jobs, writing on deadline, writing for the precision of live performance, editing large projects, creating classes. Through those experiences I’ve created a workflow triage list, a list of tiered tasks I can pull from when I’m in an insomnia cycle (and to be clear, this is referring to additional creative writing, not necessarily day job insomia triage). Below is my current version:
Writing Workflow Triage for the Sleep-Deprived:
Just a little tired: try to conduct business as usual, but refrain from making major editorial choices or professional decisions if possible. If I have a final draft of something due, I will usually abuse caffeine to hit the deadline rather than ask for an extension. Little bouts of exercise can be helpful to reset the brain in this stage. Fairly functional.
Pretty tired: this is a good zone for me to generate since the editor in my head is totally off duty. Writing newsletters, rough drafts of scenes, first drafts of lectures, brainstorming plot points. I’ve actually found I’m quite creative in this stage of tiredness! It’s especially good for writing unhinged jokes—not so much for fine editing. If I had a final draft, I would consider asking for an extension, but might push through and submit. As a sicko, I’ve come to enjoy this stage.
Wow tired: This is when you’re simply dragging, every thought taking a noticeable toll in terms of depleting your energy stores. It hurts to squeeze out a sentence, each word a burden. I would ask for an extension here. The sun is a yellow ball of pain brutally attacking your skull. I encourage you to give in. Pull the shades, put on your cozy clothes, and start hitting your most hated tasks. Why? Because you felt like such shit anyway that procrastinating isn’t even going to be enjoyable. Might as well dive into that quarterly tax itemization, make those PowerPoint slides, pull stats/research together to assemble another day. Sure, you’ll need to come back and edit all of this again with fresh eyes, but the raw material will be there for you to work with.
Fucked up tired: Only do what you need to survive. Drink water. Don’t answer any emails in this state—you will barely remember what you write. Let’s steal a term from the business boys and say that you are your own Minimum Viable Product. Search your manuscript for adverbs and delete them. Brainstorm if possible. Make lists, do creative life admin. Don’t do too much else—you will regret it. Calming music can soothe. I listen to harp music and imagine the angels are descending to free me from this misery.
Borderline hallucinating tired: pretty much the only thing I can complete off my to-do list in this state is: don’t drive a car or operate heavy machinery. I’ll usually do errands or life admin, make appointments and delete junk emails if I’m trying to stay up, but this is the stage where sleep no matter what takes priority. I usually enter this state right before the cycle breaks.
I’m not going to do a toxic positivity here and say that insomnia has become my friend. I hate it and wish it dead. I curse its ancestors. But since I’m coming up on twenty years of these cycles, I do have some techniques to share (other insomniacs will know that any technique can stop working at any time for any reason and thus cannot be trusted long term).
Here are some insomnia practices that can work for me, sometimes:
Counting backwards from 1,000, breathing through your nose, each breath in and out is one number. Every time you lose focus you have to start over. I’ve been told this is a “meditation” “technique?” Eventually you can bore yourself to sleep if you stick with it.
Lately I’ve had success visualizing times when I’ve been absolutely exhausted and would have done anything to be in my cozy bed. Getting to a city after a red eye when I couldn’t sleep on the plane and walking around waiting for my hotel room to be ready is a feeling I channel. I used to take overnight buses when I lived in Indonesia from East Java to Bali, and we would leave at 5pm and get to Bali any time between 3-10am depending on an incredible multitude of factors. I would be…tired (one time so tired that when my seatmate, a delightful Balinese woman named Nana, invited me to her house to take a nap I WENT AND LOST CONSCIOUSNESS IN HER HOUSE FOR FIVE HOURS despite the fact that she was a total stranger, but of course everything was fine and I had a lovely breakfast with Nana and her husband after I woke up and it’s an incredibly fond memory for me now).
Read low-stakes Reddit threads until my eyes burn and the banality of human existence pulls me under.
Listen to an audiobook. I’m sorry, I know people love them, but for some reason I can’t see a story in my mind when I’m listening versus reading on the page. I’ve been listening to the same audiobook for months and keep falling asleep after an hour or so and having to back up. I usually listen to nonfiction for this purpose.
They don’t always work, but sleep podcasts like Sleep With Me can sometimes send me off.
Lately I’ve had some success with the Brainwaves App. I’m not sure it makes me fall asleep as much as puts me into a trance-like state, but you know what? I’ll take it. I used this on a nine-hour international flight in September and I have no memory of the middle five hours.
Fellow writers with insomnia: commiserate with me! Any favorite tricks that sometimes work to break them? How do you delegate your three brain cells when it’s time to write?
2024 Classes!
Note: I am only teaching through April of this year. No more 2024 classes after that!
Write Like an Athlete through Writing Co-Lab. I LOVE THIS CLASS. We’ll combine creativity practices with tenants of sports psychology, drawn from my years as a long distance swimmer (state champ, no big). This is a two-hour, virtual interactive talk, and you’ll receive the slides and a plethora of resources afterward. $75!
Stop Worrying and Start Your Book Proposal! also through Writing Co-Lab. This is the ONLY book proposal class I’m teaching this year. You don’t need a firm idea to take it! In fact, learning about the market and pieces of a proposal can help you shape your idea moreso than noodling on it all by yourself. We’ll run through potential comps, organizing principals, platform superboosts, and more in this three-hour class. You get the slides with google docs of linked sucessful proposals afterward. Bona fides: I got a six-figure book deal in 2018 off a co-written proposal, and I have more news about another proposal coming soon. $125!
And if you want to learn fiction, check out the upcoming classes from novelist and teacher extraordinaire
in her new newsletter Let’s Write. I finished the first draft of my novel in her Novel Generator class in January 2021 so yeah, I’m a fan!
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ABOUT ME: My name is Caitlin Kunkel and I’m a comedy writer, long-time teacher, and creator of The Second City’s Online Satire Writing Program. I currently teach classes and consult on gift book proposals, modern adaptation, satire, and comedic literature. I co-founded The Belladonna Comedy and the Satire and Humor Festival, and I co-wrote the satirical gift book New Erotica for Feminists: Satirical Fantasies of Love, Lust, and Equal Pay, named one of the Top 10 Comedy Books of 2018 by Vulture.
I have insomnia! And to add to that, I don't remember the last time all three of my kids slept through the night. Last night, for example, my five year old woke me up at 3 am to inform me that Saturn's rings are made of gas. Then at 4am, I woke up to my three year old saying "I want to sleep on Mommy's head." But here's something that's been working for me if I have insomnia of because of internal causes: Pretend my kids have just asked me to build them a hot wheels course. And just FEEL how tired that makes me. Works like a charm.
Lifelong insomniac here! Several years ago when it was REALLY bad I worked with a naturopath who determined that my cortisol was firing up at the wrong time -mostly in the middle of the night. We used supplements and acupuncture to re-calibrate and it made a big difference. No idea if that would be helpful for anyone else...