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One of the reasons I decided to write a blog about fear and courage was that I kept waking up between the hours of 2 and 4 a.m. with a thumping heart, overwhelmed by the avalanche of fear I had for my children, my bank account, and my poor suffering planet. I figured that if I was afraid, others must be also. And this seemed to be true—an informal survey revealed that many of my friends awaken in the wee hours of the morning, too. Some of my female friends, who are almost all between the ages 30 and 50, figure this might be due to impending menopause, but many of the comparably aged men I know have also begun to experience early morning insomnia—so if this is peri-menopause, then there must be a male peri-menopausal correlate. What we all have in common is that we wake up suddenly, besieged by our worries, as though everything we've had to put off thinking about during our busy day has suddenly caught up with us at 3 am.
As a child, I was a solid sleeper, and as a teenager, I loved sleep more than almost anything else. Sleep was a beautiful, simple pleasure to me—a yummy, sensual experience. I relished Saturdays, when I could stay there for ages, pulling the covers over my head when the sunlight hit my pillow, and sinking down to re-immerse myself in the pure, enveloping sweetness of dreams. (I had vivid, insanely adventurous dreams, dreams of flying and high-speed chases, in color, with beautiful music and delicious food.) My mother and sister got upset when I slept in past 1 pm—they thought I was depressed—but I didn't use sleep as an escape; I was just taking advantage of one of life's greatest pleasures. Since then, psychologists have decided that teenagers just have a different sleep cycle, and that this late-shifted behavior is physiologically normal for them.
The first time I experienced disrupted sleep was late in my first pregnancy, when I arose every 3 to 5 hours for a sleepwalk to the ladies room and back—a lightweight prelude to nursing every 2-3 hours in the months that followed. Nursing required a bit more attention, but still I always fell back to sleep immediately. And up until recently, I had rarely spontaneously awoken in the middle of the night to have coherent thoughts I actually consciously processed.
When it started, I was alarmed; I thought, wow, I must be really stressed right now. But when I looked at what was expected for my age group, I found that my new pattern of sleeping fewer hours and waking up earlier in the morning is not so unusual—although the medical community seems rather intent on pathologizing it. One study showed that sometime between the ages of 35 and 60, most healthy adults begin to experience a reduced need for sleep. This is not a sleep disorder; it's just a reduction in the maximal capacity for sleep, and a shift toward earlier bedtime and earlier rise time. But even this study, which considered only healthy adults, carried the subtitle, "implications for insomnia."
Much of the work done on peri-menopausal and post-menopausal women has the same tendency to define differences as problems. For example, when one group found that hormone replacement therapy didn’t help with insomnia, the authors proceeded to speculate that the insomnia might reflect an independent sleep disorder or "unresolved grief" from going through menopause! But why insist that a period of nighttime wakefulness at this life stage be viewed as problematic? Why do we think we need to replace hormones to "fix" it? As the previously-mentioned study on healthy sleep pointed out, failure to recognize our reduced need for sleep may lead us to stay in bed longer than necessary—and then complain of troubled sleep and early awakening. This might in turn lead physicians to label our sleep patterns "disordered" or "disturbed." What if, instead, we presumed these patterns physiologically normal, perhaps even adaptive, and set about making good use of them?
I've begun to try out this idea myself when I wake up at 2 am. I know this may be the hormones waking me up, so I ask, is this a hot flash? (So far, no.) I consider how I feel in that moment (not as worried as I thought). And I pay attention to all the issues that are coming up for me—that upcoming job interview, the book readings, the kids' birthday parties, the class I have to teach Monday afternoon. Instead of worrying, I hold each item in my mind. Sometimes I ask for help: "Please help me figure this out," I say to the Powers That Be. I have come to respect this time, this still, dark, calm pool of night I find myself in, as a respite. No one will interrupt me to ask if I'll make them mac and cheese; my cell phone won't ring. This is my time—usually about 10-20 minutes of it—to line up my ducks, to consider any unresolved issues from the previous day, to open my mind to the possibilities for tomorrow.
I find when I handle it this way, I often go back to sleep and dream rich and vibrant dreams in my remaining one or two hours of sleep. This is reassuring, because maybe it means I'm not losing out on that crucial Rapid Eye Movement sleep some researchers believe to be necessary for memory consolidation. In fact, maybe part of what my brain processes during those final dreams is the very material that I just produced: the solutions. Midlife is a time of wisdom and power. Maybe we don’t have the opportunity or the physiological predisposition to sleep in until noon, but embracing our early morning thoughts, instead of worrying that we are worried or panicking that we are panicked, may just be the developmentally appropriate response for a busy grown-up on the go.
