Dead Tired, Avoiding Sleep (Tinnitus at Bedtime)

From Coach Morgan’s Tinnitus Journal, Written November 10, 2021

I don’t talk about my tinnitus a lot in this blog. Mostly because I’m still trying not to think about it. As my audiologist says, “if you think about your tinnitus, you’ve already lost.” (No really, he says that. Constantly.) But mostly I’ve skirted the issue because there’s no clear solution for tinnitus. While I’m learning to live with the condition, I think I also try to pretend it isn’t there. 

But for today’s blog I want to look at one aspect of my tinnitus that is making me behave irrationally: I find myself dead tired, avoiding sleep.

I may get in bed, even turn out the lights. But then I grab a tablet or smartphone and start streaming, scrolling, or reading. (I give myself a gold star for grabbing a paper book and sleep-friendly booklight some nights, but the sleep loss is the same.)

Maybe you’ve been irrational too. Tired, yet putting off rest.

For me, the silence of twilight is always a moment of truth. Depending on how my hyperacusis is doing (a topic we’ll leave for another day), the volume and texture of the ringing in my ears can go from a dull roar to a bloodcurdling screech. I can lay there in the darkness, struggling to remember what silence ever sounded like. As I write this I’m 348 days from auditory normal (the last day my ears knew how to be silent was November 25, 2020.) So the memories of what quiet sounded like are crumbling. 

I can’t quite bring to mind what it felt to live without the chaos of neurological noise.

One of the most prominent strategies people use with tinnitus is called “masking.” It’s where you cover over the sounds of tinnitus by turning on music, listening to a noise machine, or watching TV. By absorbing yourself with sounds that you control, you dis-attend to the sounds you cannot.

Unfortunately for me (since I also have a condition called Hyperacusis), masking activities can actually make the tinnitus worse. So whatever I’ve done to pretend I’m normal during the day all comes home to roost at bedtime. 

Sonic backlash that continues washing ashore on my brain for a couple weeks noise exposure creates a mess of consequences that don’t feel quite in my control. Too much audiobook binge could be why my ears are screaming 8 days later. But it’s not certain. Maybe I just talked too long with my neighbor, and their spurts of laughter caused the rebound. No way to know for sure.

So bedtime comes, and I chicken out. Instead of facing the music, I turn on rain sounds in my sleep buds and start reading a new sci-fi series. My sleep window gets munched by my avoidance, and tiredness grows in my body. 

But here’s the thing. Tinnitus is my current excuse. But before, in the blessed silence of my pre-tinnitus bedroom (when I didn’t know how lucky I had it, all that silence in my head), I still frequently avoided sleep, binging books or shows instead of getting the sleep my body craved.  

Why do we do it? 

In Adam Grant’s viral New York Times article on Languishing, he admits joining the rest of us with staying up late consuming content on his devices, tired but still avoiding sleep. He talked about the various reasons we do this. Not always because we’re wildly unhappy, or self destructive. It’s more that we’re feeling disconnected from ourselves, from our lives, maybe from each other.

In his article, Grant quoted journalist Daphne K. Lee’s translation of a Chinese expression that means “revenge bedtime procrastination.” What a phrase! When I read it I resonated instantly. It’s not so much that I’m simply delaying sleep..there’s a sinister element, a brutal edge to putting off sleep when I’m tired and frazzled. While she imagines this sleep delay as “staying up late at night to reclaim the freedom we’ve missed during the day,” Grant wonders if it might be “an act of quiet defiance against languishing. It’s a search for bliss in a bleak day, connection in a lonely week, or purpose in a perpetual pandemic.”

So who am I seeking revenge against when I stay up late? 

Is it my ears for rattling my nerves? My brain for its frazzled confusion? 

Or perhaps myself for not being willing to face this life without silence.

I sense that I am doing business with my fractured silence in small scoops. Facing this new, possibly temporary reality when I have the strength and bandwidth to do so. 

And that’s the real cost of my sleep delay. My bandwidth to deal with what’s really bothering me is shrinking in the wake of my growing sleep debt. 

Maybe you’re languishing, or depressed, or avoiding some painful truth like me. Whatever got you here, if you’ve become sleep deprived it may be wise to restore your rest before you do business with the big questions. I certainly needed to.

"Sure," you say, "I’d love to not be tired anymore, but how do you just start sleeping more?"

I asked that question. Actually it was more of a prayer. Out on my morning walk, I was talking to God about my yet-again-tortured bedtime the night before. I asked “what could take away the difficult decision? How could it be easier…more mindless…to just go to bed?” 

The answer came in the form of another question that popped into my head… “what would happen if you put your lamp on a timer? Do they have timers that could just turn your light off when it’s time to start sleeping?”

Mid walk, I opened my Amazon app and ordered a timer plug immediately. 

It’s been 3 weeks now, and my body is a different place to live than it was before my “twinkle timer” arrived. I’ve been mindlessly “obeying my twinkle lights” – a set of christmas lights strung around my bedroom, plugged into my timer switch. The light goes out, I put my book down and face into the void.

I don’t decide. There’s no room for choosing. 

The screaming abyss still has teeth. The tinnitus is still waiting for me when those lights go out at night. But I get my 30 minutes of existential wrestling done without decision fatigue added in, and slip into deep sleep several hours earlier at night. The result is more time asleep.

I trust that my confused brain is doing its best to recover and adjust. If it’s successful, the hyperacusis and tinnitus will ease or disappear. But whatever that takes, I know sleep is one of the best gifts I can give myself to help me get there.

I don’t know if a twinkle timer would be useful to anyone else, or if robots can help you fight languishing. But I’m grateful for the big impact this splash of mindless technology has brought me, and look forward to seeing what my better-rested brain can do in the months to come.

May you too find the mindless tricks that help you make more of your powerful brain, and the rest we all need to be your best self.