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If you’re anything like The Guardian‘s Emma Beddington, then you’re probably in bed most nights, awake, barely able to get even five hours of sleep.

The successive lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic has seen insomnia go through the roof.

I’ll have to let Emma be the voice of insomnia because I for some reason almost always manage a full night’s sleep.

I know, I apologise to all the real insomniacs, who as Beddington also realises, are probably “hissing in red-eyed fury”.

I sleep, but there have been moments when I haven’t, like when I become ridiculously self-aware in Grade Nine and panicked myself out of sleep the moment I realised I was going beyond the recommended eight hours.

The only thing that got me into la-la land was to accept that I was going to wake up with fewer hours of sleep, which is a technique that Beddington has come to hold in high regard.

That is after she tried a couple of DIY insomnia remedies, giving us her “wholly subjective opinion on what to try and what not to waste [our] many waking hours on”.

For mists, pillow sprays and roll-ons, Beddington still wakes up like a “sentient bowl of porridge” because she never sleeps.

Although, that might just be for Beddington.

In terms of a weighted blanket, well, that went straight back into the closet. Not because it has next to no proven research in terms of relaxation and sleep benefits, but because it felt like she was being “implacably crushed to death by boiling lava”.

Moving on swiftly to the tried and tested technique of counting backwards from 1 000 in sevens.

Okay, never mind, it turns out 2AM is NOT the best time for maths.

How about the increasingly popular CBD drops, then, which can be found in crisps, lipstick, and toothpaste now?

Nope, that didn’t work for Beddington, either, and just put her in an almost nightmarish scenario with “[redacted relatives]”.

The US army technique sounds promising, with claims that it works for “96% of people within two minutes after six weeks” all over the internet.

The ‘hack’ works as follows:

You tense then relax your face, make your body go limp, try to think of nothing, then visualise a canoe in a calm lake, or lying in a black velvet hammock.

If these visualisations don’t work, you’re supposed to say “don’t think don’t think don’t think” to yourself until your mind empties, then voilà, sleep.

But the instructions might be confusing for some, AKA Beddington, who managed to develop a “visceral aversion to hammocks”.

Another complex set of instructions that is supposed to send you off to slumber is in the form of what is called “cognitive shuffling”.

The concept is to focus on a series of random, unconnected words that mirror “micro-dreams” before you sleep.

Beddington thought about unrelated common nouns like sausage, paperclip, and lamppost, but you are supposed to choose a letter, think of a noun starting with that letter, and then visualise the noun.

It does sound like a lot of work before bed, but might not be totally worth all the cognitive trouble.

The most popular insomnia cure of the past few months is definitely the #lettucewater trend on TikTok, which Beddington thinks is “daft”.

TikTokers have been dunking common lettuce leaves into hot water and then drinking it before bed, with many claiming that the unpleasant tonic whisked them off to sleep in no time.

But the New York Times reports that doctors and sleep experts have confirmed that these claims are unsubstantiated:

No studies have shown that eating (or steeping) lettuce you buy in the grocery store can help you fall asleep, Dr. Drerup said. But it’s understandable why people think it might.

That’s because this salad ingredient has been used in folk medicine as a natural sedative and pain reliever for centuries.

TikTokers might also be responding to the 2017 Korean study on mice, but that study has been flung out the window by more critical eyes.

Ultimately, Dr. Drerup says the sleep hack comes down to the good old placebo effect:

A 2018 meta-analysis of 13 studies found that people with insomnia symptoms who took a placebo treatment they thought was a real sleep treatment reported better sleep than those who did not receive any treatment.

So, after all that, it seems your best bets are to allow your mind to be tricked as per Dr. Drerup.

Or as Beddington realised, decidedly not putting the ‘bed’ into her own name, perhaps the best medicine may just be acceptance.

[sources:theguardian&nytimes]