To Sleep, Perchance to Dream Amidst the COVID-19 Cocktail of Caffeine, Alcohol, and Angst
If you are experiencing poor sleep, strange dreams, or an increase in your coffee and/or alcohol consumption, you are not alone. I have had more bad dreams (a ship full of people throwing up, my children launching COVID-saturated glitter from a slippery roof, endless grocery shelves of chunky, but no smooth, peanut butter, a dead crow in an abandoned Coliseum) in the last week than I’d had in the previous year. The whole world is preoccupied with the current public health emergency, adjusting to restricted movement, perhaps managing a home school program while working, and pivoting to respond to a myriad of other challenges. It is normal and universal that our minds and bodies are getting a little, or a lot, twitchy.
Are we dealing with more than we can handle? Our answer to that question largely determines our reality. If we cast ourselves as victims of circumstance, or of isolation, or of home schooling, or our own frustration, we are at an impasse. It is useful to frame the current situation broken down into small chunks or baby steps, not as a global whole with no clear endpoint. Our lives, rather than an endless streaming crisis, can be divided into morning, afternoon, and evening blocks, each with a series of approachable puzzles to suss out, sometimes soothed by a routine, sometimes cracked with ingenuity and improvisation. The word (even the thought) crisis sounds an alarm bell in our psyche, raises our blood pressure, and can instill a conviction that we’re defeated or without agency; whereas seeing our daily challenges as puzzles to be solved, or dragons to be slain, with us as the proactive protagonist, can get us in the right mindset to maintain emotional equilibrium and keep anxiety from boiling over. Beware of catastrophization and denial, two maladaptive defense mechanisms that can lead to despair, bad choices, and chaos.
Anxiety is a major contributor to insomnia, and alcohol is widely used to ward off anxiety. But that fix is temporary, at best. In fact it’s so short-lived, the same drink that laid you gently to sleep will rip you from rest a few hours later. The world around us may feel entirely out of our control right now, and this feeling of helplessness can lead to compelling rumination and jittery restlessness, fueling early but prolonged cocktail hours, tumultuous nights, and caffeine-fueled mornings.
We all know the “secret” to good health is maintaining healthy habits in what we feed our bodies (and our minds) and how much we move our bodies (and same). There is no secret. There is also no substitute for a good night’s sleep. Exercise, a sense of humor, reading a novel, talking to friends, making art, playing and listening to music, hugging, journaling, and mindfulness and meditation practices are all healthy approaches to calming the nervous system and lowering blood pressure and improving mood and sleep. One glass of wine or a beer is not usually problematic, barring you’re in addiction recovery, but any alcohol intake can interfere with the sleep cycle and wake us up in the middle of the night. Alcohol intoxication suppresses REM sleep, and diminishes dreaming and restful sleep. As the night moves on, alcohol is metabolized, and its sedative effect wears off, waking us up. The depressant effect on the central nervous system which causes somnolence, bounces back as our body rids it like a poison, dehydrating us and sending us to the bathroom at 3am. The cliché of the snoring drunk is borne out by science. Our soft palate, larynx, and throat muscles go slack and we may take in less oxygen due to repeated obstruction and gasping for air, with tens or hundreds of mini-awakenings during the night. These effects can occur after only one or two drinks. Further on in the night, alcohol now rinsed from our bloodstream and brain, a REM rebound occurs. We dream more intensely. Flashed with vivid themes and images, coupled with the pandemic anxieties we’ve carried from the day, we’re thrust into a symphonic dreamscape that easily careens into nightmare, which can also wake us up. This is not the restorative sleep we need and a few nights like this lead to increasing daytime drowsiness. So we reach for coffee and more coffee. We have difficulty relaxing or falling asleep and we reach for wine or whatever and more of the same. And once sleep cycle distortion begins, we may find ourselves inexorably hurtling toward worsening exhaustion and mood swings, aided and abetted by alternating substances to bring us up or down.
Memes abound poking fun at going from caffeine to alcohol to handle the day, like these:
They are funny because we can recognize the absurdity (and perhaps familiarity) of such a cycle. And satire is a wonderful antidote to despair. We also recognize the need to wind down, and to seek physical and mental serenity.
What I like about this meme is the acknowledgment of the overwhelming desire to escape into a state of serenity, while also recognizing that our stress level is perhaps too great right right now to be tempered adequately with alcohol without serious consequences.
There are no quick fixes for our subjective feelings of tension, anger, and disappointment. Serenity isn’t achieved by summoning it from outside ourselves like a magic trick.
Serenity Now — Frank Costanza Montage
The answer is not how to make feelings go away in the moment, but how to withstand them to ward off the escalation of our fight or flight panic response. Seeing even serious challenges as puzzles to be solved rather than provocations or harbingers of doom is an important mental and emotional element of maturity, and sometimes survival. Meditation, prayer, mindfulness, and gratitude teach us to practice for challenging moments. There is no mastery without practice. We have to consciously practice tolerating and being still with unpleasant emotions, including anxiety, grief, fear, jealousy, and anger. By tolerating them, instead of searching for a means to discharge them, via substance use or temper tantrums, or even excessive rumination, we master them.
