Having been an insomniac for literally almost all of my life, I recently reached my rope's end and decided that I was going to start sleeping normally or die trying. That may sound like an exaggeration but if you suffer from chronic sleeplessness you know that it often makes you feel like your life isn't even worth living. You know what I'm talking about-nights full of dread and days full of forgetfulness, inexplicable mistakes, mood swings, and generally feeling like you're falling apart.

It seems to me that the worst part of long-term insomnia is the hopelessness it drills into you. I know that as I tried every single remedy and piece of advice known to man, all to no avail, my hopelessness became like a giant, immovable boulder that I thought I would never be able to push away. I've tried everything and nothing works, I thought, so I'll just have to learn to live with this. And when I say I tried everything, I mean EVERYTHING.

Getting out of bed and doing something is the first thing everybody tells you to do. Don't lie there all anxious, thinking about how you're not sleeping. Fine. I'd get up and do something, and continue doing something for hours into the night, until it was so late that even though I would eventually fall asleep, it would only be three hours or so until I had to wake up, tired and stressed yet again.

Booze got me to sleep, but only to wake up a few hours later thirsty and dying to pee. From then on I'd sleep fitfully until the morning, when I'd crawl out of bed haggard, hungover and truly in worse shape than if I'd just stayed awake for most of the night.

Herbal teas made me feel warm and fuzzy inside like a patchouli-smelling hippie, but as a sleep aid they were pretty much a joke. And again there’s that having to pee in the middle of the night.

Valerian, the ancient sleep-aiding herb, worked for about two nights, then I had a near-total tolerance to it. It also smells and tastes like raw dirt and made me feel very anxious.

Over-the-counter drugs like Sominex and Tylenol PM knocked me out in no time, but they put me in such a deep artificially-induced state of sleep that waking up to my alarm the next day felt like coming out of a coma. I'd feel groggy and slightly dumb the whole day, and often get a headache mid-morning. Even worse, if I'd take them before a day off, with no alarm, I'd sleep 10 hours or more and wake up feeling like I'd just risen from the dead, with no idea which way was was up. Besides, acetaminophen, the active ingredient in most of these, can seriously damage your liver, and the last time I checked, I didn’t have a spare liver.

Melatonin may work for some people but I've always found that it stays in my system too long, bringing on sudden bouts of intense drowsiness at random moments of my day when I really need to be awake and aware. This may work as a short-term solution for people with occasional insomnia, but for hard cases like me it just didn't cut it.

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