Interview with Gayle Greene | Sound Authors Radio
November 7, 2008
Dr. Kent: Welcome back to Sound Authors. Today is Friday, June 27th and my next guest on the show wrote a book called Insomniac. Her name is Gayle Greene and she is a professor of literature and women’s studies at Scripps College in Claremont, California. She’s published books on Shakespeare and other things. Insomniac is an interesting book; it’s not only a guide to insomnia, it’s a wonderful story. So welcome to the show Gayle Greene.
Gayle Greene: Thank you.
Dr. Kent: You have quotes on this book from Joyce Carol Oates and from Billy Collins and it’s a book about insomnia. Tell us a little bit about it.
Gayle Greene: Many people suffer from insomnia I found out, many authors have it but it’s practically an occupational hazard. I’m not a writer like I chose to write or anything but I’m an academic writer. I’ve had it all my life and I just decided finally that I would look at it squarely and say what’s going on here? Why do I find no better help for it than I found 50 years ago when I first went.
My father was a doctor so I had a doctor in-house so to speak and I would get this kind of good advice but kind of not very helpful advice like lie there and relax and you’ll get sleepy, don’t get so wound up and it was something that I was doing wrong. So I set out to find out what the research was really up to in all those 50 years. So it was kind of a quest for something that would help me sleep but also to find out where the research was and also to talk to insomniacs, which the researchers have not really done.
Science doesn’t have a lot of interest in what they call anecdote, but since I come to this from the side of literature, I find it very interesting and I wanted to hear about the experiences of people and how they manage and where they thought it came from, what they thought the problem in life was. So I sort of took a two pronged approach; talk to the people that have the problem and also talk to the scientists and see how those two versions square, add up.
Dr. Kent: One of the fascinating things is on the very front page of your website sleepstarved.org you talk about a survey that says 10-15% of the US adult population suffers from insomnia. And then you talk about the numbers spent on advertising Ambien and the small amount of money researching insomnia.
Gayle Greene: Yeah, I was shocked at how little research is spent. The NIH in the year 2005 spent 20 million dollars researching insomnia, now that’s pocket change to a drug company and in fact NIH had spent 123 million that same year advertising Ambien. That’s just one of their drugs. So there’s something so screwy in those figures and I think that insomnia isn’t more researched because its not taken seriously, it’s said to be a symptom of depression.
Well many people who are insomniacs are not depressed except about their sleep and many people who are depressed are quite anxious and sleep quite well. So this is a correlation that wasn’t borne out in the interviews I did with many insomniacs I talked to. But if you make and dismiss insomnia as something secondary health then it doesn’t really exist in its own right and therefore it hasn’t gotten serious attention. Plus it’s not something that’s life threatening; they say nobody has died from insomnia. Well, you don’t drop dead the next day but it has terrible health consequences long term. So yes it’s a really neglected subject.
Dr. Kent: I’m not really an insomniac myself but I carry a very strange schedule you know. I go to bed I guess I call myself an owl. I go to bed late, late at night and I don’t need much sleep so it could be that I have sleep issues. My father for example was a pediatrician. His whole life he slept four to six hours a night. Do most of us have some kind of sleep disorder?
Gayle Greene: See, no that’s not a disorder. If you don’t need any more sleep than what you’re getting, what I would call that is lucky. Insomnia is where there’s a complaint. That’s actually the medical definition of insomnia is it’s a complaint. The patient has to come in feeling bad about sleep. I sleep four or five hours a night or sometimes two, three hours, but I don’t feel good on it. I feel kind of really miserable on it and that’s what insomnia is.
Its when there’s a problem. Short sleepers are people who simply don’t need more than four, five hours and that is genetics. You were talking about your father having the same sleep pattern on how long we sleep. There’s a normal range like between five and ten hours. It’s a very kind of typical normal range. Some people are not happy with less than ten hours.
Dr. Kent: So some people really don’t need as much sleep as others?
Gayle Greene: Right, absolutely.
Dr. Kent: So when we talk about insomnia, what is insomnia? If you go into a doctor and they say you have insomnia, or does that even happen?
Gayle Greene: It generally doesn’t. The patient is more likely to come in with the term than the doctor I think because the patient has to talk about it. I just can’t get enough sleep; I have enough time, its not like I have to get up, its six in the morning or something. I’m just awake after two, three, four hours – that’s my pattern and I can’t get back to sleep. Then the doctor will say it sounds like insomnia; generally.
They will then go on to say its anxiety with depression, here take a pill when it’s a lot more complicated than that and people have to work out their own responses to the problem. That was one of the things I found. It’s like this one size fits all solution you’re given when it’s a very individual problem. It may come from lots of different things but insomnia is a problem. It’s when you have a problem. You don’t have a problem, right? You get the sleep you need; you’re a short sleeper, that’s what’s called a short sleeper. There are short sleepers, long sleepers; many famous people were short sleepers.
Actually Albert Einstein was a very long sleeper. So it’s not an issue, no. You are lucky I mean I wish I needed that little sleep. I need seven hours of sleep and my body seems to want to give me two, three, four, or five and I’m not happy on even five.
Dr. Kent: Let’s talk about drugs. Ambient of course is all over the television but is it okay to take sleeping pills? I’ve heard from people that it’s not as effective as real sleep. What is the issue with drugs and with this disorder?
Gayle Greene: The best sleep is certainly your own sleep. On drugs sleep, all of the medications affect the architecture of sleep. The very intricate sleep structure that we have; the deep sleep, the REM, and the alternation of pattern; all of the drugs affect that. On the other hand, there’s no blanket answer to that. Its bad for some people to say take some drugs for too long. It’s good for other people to take. What a person has to do is first of all find out what drug works on them. They all work differently.
The doctor may give you a drug and it may be awful and you can come back and say it doesn’t work and you can try something else. You have to do trial and error to find something to help you go to sleep and many people have. I have; I just live on a short acting; I can get some sleep on my own but then when I wake up I can nibble off a piece of what I use, which is Ambien. But if I can nibble off a piece of that very short acting, I can get a few more hours of sleep that way. So I can keep some of my own sleep and the rest is what I call drug sleep. But other pills that I’ve taken I’ve gotten really badly messed up on so I’ve had to do trial and error.
The other thing is once you find something you like you have to monitor yourself really carefully and make sure you’re not getting too much, increasing the dosage and that these weird things aren’t happening to you. Ambien is of course associated with strange things like sleep driving, sleep eating and all these strange things happen. If you monitor yourself you can probably keep those things from happening and you have to really know how to manage the drug. So there’s no blanket answer, and also people react so differently to drugs. When I mention Ambien some people go oh, I got so messed up on that. Well then don’t take it, shop around for something else.
Dr. Kent: This book really reads almost like you’re speaking now. For an academic to write a book that’s so accessible is a wonderful thing to see. Talk about that.
Gayle Greene: That’s a great compliment; I’m so pleased to hear that. I hate academic writing, it’s so unnecessarily complicated and I just really tried to get the style that communicated and I think my students have helped that because here in the classroom you have to communicate with people. So that’s really a nice thing to hear. I really wanted a book that would help people and would reach out and they could use. One of my big messages is find your own way with sleep so I suggest lots of different ways that people have found.
You just sort of cobble something together that works in your own life. I should say also going back to the drugs some people have said the minute I retired I was okay, the minute I got rid of this job and had regular hours I was okay; the whole thing of structuring your own time is a huge factor in sleeping for people who have fragile, uneasy, insomniac sleep. If you can get a hold of your own schedule so you don’t have to be up to the world’s time, do the work on your own time. That really helps.
I mean I’m an academic so that really helps, I can teach late and pretty much structure my own work hours. I’ve heard a lot of insomniacs say it really helped them when they could do that better than any drug.
Dr. Kent: This has been a real pleasure speaking with you. The book is Insomniac by Gayle Greene. She has a website sleepstarved.org. The book was published by the University of California Press and its available everywhere. Do you have anything else you’d like to tell us?
Gayle Greene: No, just take sleep seriously. It is the fuel of life, its something you don’t get talked out of. Don’t let people tell you oh you’re getting as much sleep as you need if you’re feeling bad on account of your sleep. Make a space for it and try to find a doctor who will hear you and take the problem seriously. Employers ought to do this too, give us flex time if we have a sleep disorder. It’s a very serious issue now; it doesn’t go away if you take a hot bath or all those old placebos. Or sleep in a dark, quiet room; I hate that one.
Dr. Kent: It’s been a real pleasure speaking with you.
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