By Armchair Mayor

ROTHENBURGER: When will healthcare system wake up to the sleep crisis?

Dec 8, 2018 | 5:00 AM

“YOU HAVE INSOMNIA,” the doctor told me as she scrolled through screen after screen of charts, graphs, notations and squiggly lines, the results of my night at the sleep clinic.

This was earlier this year, after I’d travelled out of town to find out why I haven’t been able to get a good night’s rest in years. These were supposed to be the real pros, the scientists who can look at your REM and your RAM and your ROM and whatever and tell you exactly what’s going on and how to fix it.

“Don’t sleep on your back,” she said.

Insomnia. Don’t sleep on my back. Got it.

Four in 10 Canadians have some degree of insomnia. One of those four uses prescription medicine to sleep. Francophones sleep better than Anglophones. Women sleep longer than men. All of us are getting less sleep as time goes on. It has nothing to do with age.

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Canada is the third most sleep-deprived nation in the world, behind the U.K. and Ireland. The U.S. is fourth.

I read an article on how to diagnose insomnia. I can save you millions on studies — the answer is, you know you’ve got insomnia if you can’t sleep. You can put the cheque in the mail, thank you.

Insomnia comes in all shapes and sizes, figuratively speaking. Some people have trouble falling asleep, others have trouble staying asleep. Some manage more sleep than others. For the most part, I fall asleep quite nicely and sleep well until 2 or 3 a.m., at which point I jolt wide awake as if being shot from a cannon. The rest of the night is pretty much a loss, a rotation of short naps and sudden wakefulness.

I know when I am sleeping, I know when I’m awake. It’s a strange thing that your brain can tell you on a conscious level that you’re asleep, unless and until you blessedly drift into that deep state of sleep where the brain shifts into neutral.

People my age are supposed to get seven to eight hours of sleep. I consider six a really good night.

The effects of sleep deprivation are serious: a variety of diseases and personality traits including heart disease, depression, irritability, diabetes, for example. They say it shortens our lives significantly, though they won’t say by how much. I might die at 95 instead of 100?

But I suspect many sleep-deprived people, like me, simply adapt to a chronic shortage of sleep; we’re what you might call high-functioning insomniacs. (The next time I seem snappish, just remember, it’s not you, it’s my sleep.)

“Short sleep duration and poor sleep quality are prevalent among Canadian adults,” concludes a Canadian Health Measures Survey done last year.

This being the case, why isn’t more done about it? Telling people they aren’t getting enough sleep doesn’t quite fill the bill. I already knew I had insomnia before I went to the sleep clinic and got wired up with about a gazillion electrodes.

The options are frustratingly limited. The attitude of the medical profession seems to be that it’s our fault. We’re supposed to fix our “sleep hygiene,” as they like to call it.

This means consistency in the time we spend in the sack, avoiding blue light, 15 minutes of contemplation, reading before bed time but definitely not reading in bed and so on.

And then there’s the relaxation techniques and finding a way to focus our minds into a blank spot and putting all the appointments we forgot to write down, the bills we need to pay, the people who made us mad yesterday, etc. etc. on hold.

“That’s impossible,” I said. “In about 10 seconds my mind starts working on an editorial idea.” (I once wrote that I do some of my best work between 2 and 4 a.m.)

“Practice is everything,” they said. “Practice, practice.”

But our poor brains. They have lost their way; they’ve forgotten how to tell us when to sleep. A few weeks ago, I had a consultation with another sleep doctor and, basically, begged for a new plan. He gave me one, outlining a week of shorter, more concentrated night-time sleep periods with absolutely no napping during the day.

This was followed by another week of gradually adding more sleep time, and another week of adjusting to a full night’s sleep. This, he said, will re-boot my brain to get with the sleep program.

“Does that work?” I asked.

“Eighty per cent of the time,” he said.

I carried out every detail to the letter. I discovered I’m among the other 20 per cent.

This is one of the biggest health challenges in the country, maybe in the world, and nobody is giving us answers. Sleep deprivation is a major industry and yet the best they can come up with is a new pillow, or recordings of whale songs? Where’s the cure?

Sleeping pills work well for some people but they can be addictive and potentially debilitating. It would seem that, without them, we die sooner, and with them, we live longer but end up not remembering our own names. The number of prescriptions written for sleeping pills every year numbers in the millions. Sales are worth hundreds of millions.

Mattress sales (I’ve never seen a mattress commercial that didn’t promise me a better sleep) in Canada topped $1 billion in 2016 but that same year sleep loss cost the Canadian economy $21.4 billion in lost productivity.

The direct and indirect costs to the healthcare system must be staggering. As much money as a lousy night’s sleep makes for some people, it costs much more.

If more doctors and scientists were losing sleep, I’ll bet they’d find a cure.

Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops and newspaper editor. He publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.