When the world keeps you awake: Finding sleep in anxious times

7 hours ago 3

Words like payload worry me. Deploy and warhead. Bunker-busting munitions. Diagrams to illustrate how the Shahed-136 drone works, from target-lock to firestorm. Images of bodies like so many parallel ghosts. A wide-eyed child amid the ruins, her bakelite doll.

You get the picture. This mess we’re in. The need to know the names, the nuclear strike zones of Natanz and Fordow. Our urgent geography lessons, the squeeze point of Hormuz. Welcome to our new vocabulary. And also the reason unthink – the modern verb – has gained traction across databases, as futile as “un-thought” can be.

Perhaps this madness is why I found a book last week, or it found me. The tiger on the cover caught my eye, as did the title: The Shapeless Unease (Vintage, 2021). Sound familiar? The freefall anxiety we struggle to manage. The doomscroll morsels we never seem to ration. This invasive language we’ve gained overnight.

Overnight being the key term. Samantha Harvey, winner of last year’s Booker Prize for Orbital, has seen this earlier work repackaged, an eclectic swag of thoughts and memoir dealing with her chronic insomnia, or My Year in Search of Sleep to quote the subtitle.

In brighter times, in calmer nights, we take sleep for granted, dozing like bears, invidiously oblivious. No scientist can pinpoint exactly what sleep offers us, not to the nth degree, which is why Harvey relies on Shakespeare to underscore the miracle. Macbeth calls sleep the death of each day’s life. A state of suspended innocence “that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care”. Elsewhere it’s “the balm of hurt minds”. Or the “chief nourisher in life’s feast.”

Terrific, but how do you get enough? Or in Harvey’s case: any. She lies awake dwelling on the Brexit shitfight (this was a pre-Gaza publication), her cousin’s undignified death (“which has invited all deaths”), her ongoing sleeplessness. Grimly it dawns on the author that “the desire for sleep in also the denial of it; the more you want it the less it comes.”

There it is again: the futility of unthinking, or maybe the cost of overthinking. The burden of carrying the world to your bed, despite our nightly privilege of respite. In a salvo of self-reproach, Harvey writes, “Stop thinking. You are always thinking. Then the thought: that was a thought, the thought to stop thinking. Then the thought: that was a thought, the thought that it was a thought to stop thinking.” And so on. A vast gyre of wakeful static in the lost cause of letting go.

Like the best of restless writers, Harvey bumps into a vital discovery, this notion of “nocturnal forgiveness”. Globally, if not personally, life can be too heavy to carry for a day, let alone a night as well. You need to unbuckle, unthink, put the Sisyphean sack down for a spell.

So spare yourself for seven hours, grant your brain a makeshift amnesty. Smart bombs and dead cousins will still be waiting in the morning light, but until then, be still. Accumulate the energy you’ll need for the next battle.

So why the tiger? It relates to fear, that stomach-pit horror we nurse on seeing a direct threat. While anxiety, sleep’s other enemy, is our inner self second-guessing the tiger’s shadow. If you can, if you persevere, do your best to unthink the animal. The dreadful beast, prowling hungry in daily news, can wait until tomorrow.

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