WAKEFUL

(def: not being asleep or able to sleep)

3am. Again. I’m lying in bed, have been for half an hour, trying to beat back the fragments of thoughts, the noisy nonsense of insomnia, breathing in and out, my brain churning through indefinable problems which probably don’t even really exist, until finally, I admit defeat, walk downstairs, make myself a cup of caffeine-free tea and try to work. My only company is the birdsong – and, perhaps, you. Because I know, during this lockdown and pandemic, there are others out there, somewhere in this city, somewhere in the land, somewhere on Twitter. This is lockdown. Days and nights don’t work like they used to.

They neither work for those of us trapped in our homes in quarantine, nor for those on the frontline. One study found that one-third of healthcare workers suffered insomnia during the Covid-19 epidemic in China. Those reporting sleeplessness were also more likely to feel depressed, anxious, and have stress-based trauma. I can’t help feeling my own sleep struggles are nothing compared with the torment of being unable to drop off while also knowing you have to go, exhausted, into a hospital the next day, to do your work of trying to save lives, perhaps with equipment that is inadequate.

But all of us listen to the news. All of us have heard the stories about the extension of lockdown, the impact on the economy, the rising figures in intensive care, the elderly dying in care homes. Almost all of us have lost the routines that kept us rooted. Almost all of us are worrying about something or somebody. We are all in touch with the collective trauma of this pandemic.

Sleep expert Dr Donn Posner, speaking at a Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health online forum, recently described the current pandemic, with its lockdown conditions, as a “perfect storm of sleep problems”. He observed: “The actions that we’re taking to protect ourselves can not only precipitate problems with sleep, but lead to chronic problems with sleep.”

We probably all know the common advice on what’s called better sleep hygiene – don’t drink caffeine after lunchtime, avoid too much alcohol, do plenty of exercise, turn off your screens in the evening, create a bedtime routine, meditate, aim for around seven hours' sleep, avoid daytime napping. Yet that advice doesn’t seem quite adequate for these times of fear and social distancing. Our bodies are bound to react to the combination of being cooped up and under the kind of stress that triggers the fight-or-flight response. One clinical psychologist, Lucy Johnstone, interviewed by Wired last week, noted: “I think it’s important not to medicalise our responses, whether emotional or physical, and of course these are intertwined. Personally, I would be more concerned about someone who is not feeling alarmed by the threats we are facing.”

In my view, worse than insomnia is worrying about insomnia. Even sleep experts like Posner advise not trying to force it if you can’t sleep. “Good sleepers,” he says, “put no effort into sleep whatsoever.” That's why I'm up and working. That and the fact that I do think there may be a place for working our fears out during the night. Waking in the early hours may simply be a natural response to what we’re collectively going through.

LETHARGY

(def: lack of energy or enthusiasm)

Just as the nights are wakeful, so are the days slumpy. It’s the middle of the afternoon, the kids are under their duvets, and I wonder where my husband has disappeared off to, only to find he is there in bed reading some council report. I ask him if he’s okay, loading the word “okay” in that way that makes it a shorthand for, “Have you got a persistent dry cough, headache, loss of taste or fever?” He nods to say he’s fine – too much effort to properly reply.

I try to read a book on the sofa and find myself swamped by the kind of woozy tiredness I haven’t felt since pregnancy. Soon I’m looking up “lethargy and the virus" – it's my symptoms search of the hour. Unsurprisingly, tiredness is associated with the illness. But, says the internet, lethargy is also a symptom of the cabin fever all of us are getting during lockdown, and the best antidote to it is moving around.

I tell the children: “It’s not true that we’re too tired to exercise – the only thing that will give us energy is exercise.” No-one moves. The idea of getting them out the house wearies me.

So I slump back onto the sofa and look up “weariness and the virus”.