Why We Can't Sleep

by Ada Calhoun

  Maybe we should refuse to play the #winning social media game. It’s exhausting to maintain the facade, and bragging all the time alienates others. There’s another, perhaps even more destructive, drawback to telling our stories in short bursts on social media: it could be keeping us from contemplating our lives’ broader plotlines.

  Even if we opt out of posting, though, we’re stuck with phones. Our mothers and our grandmothers never spent the busiest phase of life carrying around smartphones—little machines that demand charging and updating and that punch every emotional button. On our phone, we can see how much money we have, how much fun everyone else is having, what everyone’s thinking politically, who isn’t writing back to us. This steady drip of distractions is happening at just the stage of life when it’s arguably most important for us to focus.

  Even though I know I’ll see something upsetting, I still want to look at social media. I don’t really like looking at it. I almost never learn anything useful.⁸ I don’t feel my heart warmed. But I’m curious, and social media is like a mystery box. Every time you open it, there’s something new in there—A kitten! A newborn baby! An ex’s wedding pictures! Never mind that, intellectually, you can conceive no point in seeing another kitten or another baby, much less your rapturous ex. I find myself staring at my phone, opening one app and then another. The time just goes away.⁹

  Before bed, I used a banking app to deposit a check. I emailed with someone about a potential work project and with various friends. I played a dozen games of Scrabble. I checked and rechecked a transit app. I looked at social media and breaking news, heard about global threats, and felt envious of my friend enjoying a sunset on the beach. (Why is there always a friend on a beach?)

  Then, in the middle of the night, I wake up feeling warm, so I open the window and pull my hair back into a ponytail and drink some water. I glance at my phone, delete a few things, and see some spam. Unthinkingly, I hit unsubscribe and go back to bed. Then I lie there thinking, What if by opening that spam email I got myself hacked? What if I just sent everyone in my contacts a Burger King ad at two in the morning?

  Screen time, as we all know, correlates with poor sleep.¹⁰ Generation X is more addicted to social media than either Millennials or Boomers. According to a 2017 Nielsen study, we spend almost seven hours a week on it, about forty minutes more than those ages eighteen to thirty-four.¹¹ A 2017 national report found that perimenopausal women were least likely to sleep more than seven hours a night, followed by postmenopausal women.¹²

  A frequent topic of conversation when women gather is how to fall asleep and stay asleep. Some swear by a white noise machine, herbal tea, or melatonin. My friend Sheri buys something called the MegRhythm Gentle Steam Eye Mask at Asian grocery stores. It’s a disposable eye mask that gets hot and exudes a smell like lavender. “It looks like you’re wearing a maxi pad on your face,” Sheri said, “but otherwise it’s awesome.”

  “In our forties, we’re in the throes of everything—in the middle of our careers, in the middle of parenting, in the middle of whatever’s happening with our own parents, all the big financial stuff,” said Janet K. Kennedy, clinical psychologist and founder of NYC Sleep Doctor. “There is so much stress. And sleep is very sensitive to hormonal shifts. When your hormones start shifting in wild ways, there might be insomnia, changes to bedtime, night waking. It can come in any of those forms or all of them. The hardest part is that it’s unpredictable.”

  Laura Vanderkam, the author of Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done, says our phones do more than just rob us of sleep. They contribute to our moods of panic and the sensation of never having enough time.¹³ If we keep a time diary, she says, we can see that the necessary time is there. She had nine hundred people track their time for a day and she compared people who felt they had plenty of time with people who felt rushed and harried and unhappy.

  “I found that people who felt more relaxed checked their phones less often,” she said. “It feels less like free time when you chop it up. And you’re most of the time not dealing with a work problem … You’re waiting at a red light. You’re bored at a kids’ game. You’re sitting around waiting for everyone to get their shoes on to get in the car … Put the stupid thing in airplane mode.”

  I should. I know. I talked to a small army of therapists for this book, and not one of them said to look at screens more.

  “Overwhelmed by the volume and velocity of our lives,” writes Sherry Turkle in Alone Together,¹⁴ “we turn to technology to help us find time. But technology makes us busier than ever and ever more in search of retreat … Technology reshapes the landscape of our emotional lives, but is it offering us the lives we want to lead?”

  I think about this as I fall asleep. I resolve to wait in the morning, at least until I’ve had coffee, to go online.

  The alarm goes off on my iPhone and when I go to turn it off I see a bunch of notifications. Before I’m out of bed, I’m scrolling.

  On Twitter, a bunch of literary prizes got announced. I didn’t get one. I wasn’t eligible this year, but for some reason I still feel hurt. There’s a walkout today to protest sexual assault. Oh God, look at all these sexual assault stories. Oof. Oof. Oof. Oh, now I see battles over “diversionary propaganda” and ah! Please don’t get in a fight, friends! And they are fighting.

  In middle age, past generations of American women faced a world that could be seen, objectively, in many ways, as more stressful than ours. As babies of World War II or the Great Depression, our mothers and grandmothers had less power to determine their own lives. Their worlds were beset not only by economic downturns. They dealt with the effects of assassinations and wars. There may just be something about the way we live now that makes things feel worse. That may have something to do with the world being too much with us.

  We know, but somehow it doesn’t help to know, that companies and political machines use social media to spread anger, misinformation, and especially arouse fear. During the 2016 election, it was hard to avoid the churn of the news cycle—much of which we now know came to us via channels that were not, to put it mildly, concerned with the pursuit of truth or an informed electorate.¹⁵ Every day, there was more drama and more ugliness and yet another shocking allegation; there were ever more stories about rape and terrorism and gun violence.¹⁶

  Whenever the news is particularly bleak, therapists say they see in patients a rise in anxiety. One doctor coined the term “headline stress disorder.”¹⁷ Gallup surveys reported that the 2016 election served as a “significant source of stress” for many Americans. While Democrats have worried more since the election, Independents and Republicans haven’t been far behind. The most worried groups were women, black people, those earning more than $90,000 a year, and people aged thirty to forty-five.¹⁸ Gallup found that Americans’ overall well-being declined significantly in 2017, with emotional and psychological metrics showing the worst effect and women among the groups suffering the most.¹⁹

  One Gen X woman told me that since the election she’d been at “Defcon One every day. I feel like my head is going to explode.”

  According to the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey, more than half of Americans believe this is the lowest point in our nation’s history—and that holds true not only for Generation X but among elders who lived through Pearl Harbor and juniors whose earliest memory may be of September 11.²⁰

  I called the APA and asked if the researchers were surprised by the immense number of Americans in despair.

  “Yes, I think we were,” says Vaile Wright, who was on the research team. “Particularly that it seemed to be across all four generations. There was a sense that younger generations that have less perspective may say that this is the worst time in America. But we saw older adults—Baby Boomers, everybody—reporting a lot of stress. That was surprising.”²¹

  Of the four generations polled, Gen X was the most distraught.

  The internet exacerbat
es anxiety that was already there, and it heightens the already trying physical self-consciousness of midlife, too.

  One afternoon a colleague of mine sat down across from me looking ashen. “Someone in the elevator just congratulated me,” she said. “She thought I was pregnant. I said, ‘No, just fat!’ and tried to laugh it off, but everyone was mortified.”

  And that is why you should never congratulate someone on being pregnant unless you see the baby coming out of her. Only then, at the crowning, may you say, “Oh! Are you having a baby?”

  Among middle-aged women in the United States, 38 percent are obese, according to a comprehensive study by age group done in 2011.²² The world’s toilet stalls, airplane seats, and restaurant chairs are not built to cope with this reality. The fashion industry caters to the thin, though the average American woman now wears size 16–18.²³ In the Washington Post, Project Runway host Tim Gunn writes,²⁴ “Many designers—dripping with disdain, lacking imagination or simply too cowardly to take a risk—still refuse to make clothes for [plus-size women].”

  Gen X women often try to exert control over their bodies at midlife only to find that the middle-aged body is remarkably resistant. “The illusion that each person can have the body that he or she wants is especially painful for women,” writes Barry Schwartz in The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less,²⁵ “and especially in societies, like ours, in which the ‘ideal’ body is extremely thin.”

  Professor Judith A. Houck, author of the history of menopause Hot and Bothered,²⁶ tells me that a woman’s wish to control her body frequently shades into a sense that she has an obligation to do so. Houck cites the old-timey childbirth strategy known as “twilight sleep,” a kind of anesthesia that didn’t take away any of the pain of childbirth but that erased women’s memory of it.

  “This typifies one of the ironies of asking for more medical intervention,” says Houck. “Middle-class women wanted more control over their childbirth. They wanted less pain, less trauma.” They asked for twilight sleep, but when they got it, they realized it had huge drawbacks. “This is a perfect example of the messiness that’s always going to be with us. You want more medical attention, because you have significant problems. But once we start attracting medical attention, we get more than we asked for. The unintended consequences of medical attention are always complex.”

  The last thing women of this generation need to hear is that we have to work harder to get our bodies into line. Step counters like the Fitbit, which so many women of our generation have strapped to their wrists, monitor every move we make. When we were young women, our bodies often inspired admiring comments. Now, they attract a different kind of attention: concerned scrutiny. Our bodies are under constant surveillance—and we are both the guard in the watchtower and the prisoner.

  “I’m not looking for inner peace,” a friend quipped when I asked her about why she skipped the resting stage of Savasana at the end of a yoga class. “I’m looking for outer hotness.” She is far from alone. In the past two decades, there’s been an increasing focus on self-perfection.

  So much of the advice older women receive when we express dissatisfaction involves bringing our bodies in line. I look at the women my age on treadmills at the gym—so determined, grinding away. From morning television to the evening news, experts tell us to make chore charts, to save a certain percent of our income, to clean out our closets, to get our BMI under twenty-five. Nothing seems to stimulate the economy like women feeling bad about themselves. And yet: “The effort to try to feel happy is often precisely the thing that makes us miserable,” as Oliver Burkeman writes in The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.²⁷

  Put another way: “Those who try to refuse suffering,” wrote W. H. Auden in an essay about characters in Shakespeare, “not only fail to avoid it but are plunged deeper into sin and suffering.” Everyone suffers in Shakespeare’s plays, according to Auden. The difference is that in tragedies, suffering leads to “self-blindness, defiance, hatred”; in comedies, it leads to “self-knowledge, repentance, forgiveness, love.”²⁸

  The barrage of advice we receive about how to avoid suffering reinforces an idea that Gen X women don’t need emphasized: that we have to do more, work harder, try ever more classes and cleanses and programs. But the truth is that the most blameless lifestyle won’t necessarily get anywhere near where the trouble is.

  “I remember after my second kid was born,” said one friend of mine, “and putting on three pounds every year, and thinking, Huh, this isn’t that great … Okay, these are the things I’m going to do to work out and blah, blah, blah, and then at some point being like, Can I actually just be a mom? Can I not have to be a MILF? I’m just about to hit forty, so I’m solid MILF material, but also could I just be a squishy mom? Do we ever get permission to look forty rather than twenty, to just be old? And not even old, but ‘Yeah, I popped a couple out, give me a break.’ I don’t want to have to go to Pilates. I don’t remember all our moms looking that good at forty.”

  Second-wave feminist, activist, and writer Carol Hanisch, best known for popularizing the adage “The personal is political,” told me that in some ways life for women in the 1970s had advantages: “Whether women have it better now is debatable. Certainly, there are more women in professional jobs, but on the other hand, we weren’t pressured to shave our genital area and wear spike heels.”²⁹

  A woman in Michigan told me that it’s only in midlife that she’s finally able to let go of her body shame. “In my twenties, I was a bartender,” she told me. “I had a boob-job fund. And people would tip me extra money because I had really little tits. I raised thousands of dollars, setting aside this money because I was going to buy boobs, and thank God I had some little voice in my head that was like, ‘No.’ I spent it on a couch and a refrigerator. And I’m so glad. I remember this lady saying, ‘Oh, honey, don’t do it. As soon as you hit forty, they’ll get bigger.’ And she was right. I’m a little chubbier now, but she was right.”

  Judith Houck thinks that women should cut themselves slack during this phase of life. Self-denial is not inherently a virtue, she told me: “This idea that you get some sort of points for saying no to chocolate—where does that come from?”

  Until Houck asked the question, though, I hadn’t really thought much about it. Why can’t we be pudgy, grouchy, or uncontained? I think about my heroes, whether teachers who were encouraging, writers I’ve tried to emulate, or relatives who were good to me when I was little. Not one could be mistaken for a supermodel.

  “It’s not the worst thing in the world,” Houck said, “to be living with a body that’s a little bit out of control.”

  One solution to the insecurity nurtured by social media: replacing virtual connections with real ones. Middle-aged women tell me that one of the great gifts of midlife is connecting to other women.

  I’ve begun to find camaraderie nearly everywhere a few women my age are gathered together.

  “I hate this,” a weary-looking woman in a hospital gown said out loud to me and everyone else in the waiting room at a New York medical clinic. We were sitting there together among the old InStyle magazines, traces of ultrasound gunk lingering on our breasts, making our blue “open to the front!” gowns stick to us.

  Everyone made sympathetic noises.

  She received her results before the rest of us got ours and she was fine. She looked surprised. “Well, that’s a relief,” she said. We cheered her good news as if we’d known her forever.

  You can happen upon spontaneous support groups like that, or you can plan them. There used to be a culture of socializing around shared interests. In Robert Putnam’s famous book Bowling Alone, published in the year 2000, he noted that we’ve moved away from that custom. Fifteen years later, he revisited the question in Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. Putnam reported that “both kin and nonkin networks have shrunk in the past two decades,” with nonfamily connections decreasing even more rapidly. “Americans�
� social networks are collapsing inward, and now consist of fewer, denser, more homogeneous, more familial (and less nonkin) ties.”³⁰

  Since turning forty, I’ve decided I need more support and more camaraderie than I happen upon in the course of most days, so I’ve started to schedule both.

  “It’s like at forty you decided you wanted more women in your life and you just manifested them,” my husband said.

  I was inspired by my son. Last year, when he was eleven, he and a twelve-year-old girl at his school formed a British Club, and it has continued ever since. The two of them meet each Friday at lunchtime. There, they pin a Union Jack to the wall, drink tea, eat British snacks, and speak in British accents. They even have a secret handshake, which involves pretending to clink teacups, pinkies out, and yelling, “To London!”

  Hoping to capture the bonkers magic of British Club, I’ve formed as many of my own groups as possible. I’m in a monthly low-stakes poker game that rotates from one player’s apartment to another’s, and I sit in on a friend’s trivia team that competes weekly during the summer. I have a Scrabble nemesis, Lisa, whom I meet for games a few times a year, and a regular Anagrams night with my friend Emily.

  Most ambitiously, this year, two author girlfriends and I started a bar night for women nonfiction writers to talk shop, play the arcade game Big Buck Hunter, and engage—in the words of the classic Onion article about what really happens when girls go wild—in “validating the living shit out of each other.”³¹ It’s a two-hour meeting every month or so at a dive bar with drinks and snacks cheap enough that showing up isn’t prohibitive for anyone. We’ve named it Sob Sisters, after the old-fashioned, dismissive term for women reporters. The first meeting, we thought we’d get maybe ten fellow journalists. Fifty showed up. A few came in from out of town. I guess maybe we need this, I thought, as the women gossiped about editors and bought one another drinks.