1:10am

Sleep is ruining my training life. (And My Life.) Here's what I'm doing about it

I am a pretty tough (and sensitive) gal. I love to work hard and push myself, especially when the doing is novel, challenging, or participatory. Unfortunately, this full-on way of living requires me to rest a lot, and more importantly, to sleep. These days, I am losing the sleep game.

Let’s call out the obvious elephant first: I am a middle-aged woman, and that means my sleep is likely compromised to a certain degree. But right now, my crap-tastic sleep is ruining my life.

Here’s my brand of sleeplessness: I fall asleep fine, then wake up at an ungodly hour and can’t get back. My body decides it’s morning even when the clock says 1:10am — like it did last night. The second I wake up my thoughts are going a million miles an hour and won’t slow down. Sometimes I read, in a fruitless effort to fall asleep again. But if the clock reads anything later than 3:30, I just get up and start my day — knowing full well I’ll be a zombie until I can put my PJs back on and try again.

I started losing sleep a little before 2020. But this aggressive middle-of-the-night wake-up-and-solve-all-the-problems situation started in earnest during the pandemic and has never really stopped. Slam that post-apocalyptic anxiety against the glorious hormonal shitstorm of perimenopause and you have a recipe for chronic sleep deprivation.

Being chronically exhausted ruins everything. It’s hard to focus — writing this essay, for instance, feels like rocket surgery because my brain is mush. And training? Training becomes a fun game of “when will I feel good enough to do what I actually want to do.” Some days I feel sorta normal. If I get in early enough, I can beat the crushing fatigue I know is coming. Other days I show up and never make it past a warm-up. I’m experienced enough to know when to push through and when to chuck it. But this requires me to take each day as it comes, so it’s nearly impossible to plan or make progress. As a result, I’m losing strength, and my body feels bizarre.

Frustrating and ironic: hard training actually helps me sleep. Can you say “cruel joke”? But I can’t train hard if I don’t sleep.

But I’m not taking this as defeat, I’m just rearranging my priorities. Training hard is still the goal. Right now though, I can’t do anything if I don’t sleep. So I’m honoring what my body is doing and addressing the issue, while keeping my eye on the long view, so this slog through insomnia doesn’t ruin my life completely. When you get a flat tire, you don’t cancel the trip. You change the tire and get back on the road.

So what am I doing about it? First, I’m accepting that I have insomnia. I was pretty mad at it for a long time and refused to admit this was chronic. It is. I’ve tried pharmaceutical interventions — they all left me feeling like groggy-town-U.S.A. No good. Besides, falling asleep is not a problem. Second, I’m paying attention. When am I not sleeping, and why? I’m looking at exercise volume, non-training activity — especially things that are fun and social — caffeine intake [from my cold dead hands], and I’m working with my doctor on hormonal fluctuations.

But honestly? The big culprit is anxiety. Chronic, low-grade, functional anxiety — driven in no small part by my ambition, my need to prove myself to myself, and the existential swamp of midlife. Add to that the state of the world, our culture, our government, the general mess of living in 21st-century America. That’s what woke me up during the pandemic. It hasn’t really stopped.

So my third line of intervention is to take on the spinning in my brain, little by little. As a former yoga teacher, I have some game when it comes to tools for quieting my mind. But a while back, I tried to restart my meditation practice and found it made me feel panicky rather than peaceful. So I stopped. Perhaps that was the clue that things had gone haywire in my monkey mind. Maybe the solution is a few minutes every day to calm my mind — not necessarily meditation, but a few minutes of sitting still, quiet. If I start cutting the clutter in my waking hours maybe, eventually, I won’t wake up to 405 freeway chatter.

Sounds like an easy enough solution. It’s not. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from over a decade of strength training and competing, it’s how to do hard things.

I don’t want to. But I have to. Seems easier than giving up coffee.

In strength, Elizabeth