How to fight mild insomnia: audio books as digital sleeping pills
The problem: racing thoughts
I have always had a little difficulty to fall asleep at night, especially during exciting or otherwise eventful periods of my life. My head remains on problem-solving overdrive and keeps juggling frantically with ideas, hopes, fears and I can find no ’standby’ button to calm things down for the night. Then I have to wait for sleep to stifle this dance, like a slow rising tide of foam in a giant foam party, and this can take between half an hour to two hours.
Up until a few years ago, it would be fine as it only happened once each night, when I went to bed. But as I get older, any time I wake up in the middle of the night, the hubbub of thoughts awakens too, with less and less slumber power to fight it with.
It probably does not qualify medically as acute insomnia, but believe me that when I am awaken several times each night by a newborn baby (this is going to happen again soon), by a son with whooping cough, by a cat demanding that the door be opened, by a snoring wife, or by a bad dream, and I toss and turn for one hour each time, this begins to eat away the hours of sleep. The next day, I find myself craving for an afternoon nap just like true insomniacs.
The clue: books
However, there is one thing that can slow down the mental race and make me fall asleep in an instant: books. Not every kind of book. Thrillers and detective stories generally keep me awake. But a good old Victorian novel, a slow paced chapter of Proust, or any nonfiction work has a huge doze-off power. By forcing my mind to focus, these books keep my ideas tame, leaving the dance floor open for a fast sleep invasion.
This is great, but if I fall asleep with a book on my lap and the light on, I am bound to wake up soon. And if I close my book, rearrange the pillows and switch the light off before I am fully asleep, there is a 50% chance that my head has the time to revert to overdrive mode before I am properly set for sleep.
The solution: an ipod and audio-books
I found the solution when I started listening to audio books. It was a chance discovery: I was trying to listen to ‘Treasure Island‘ by R. L. Stevenson, and thought it a good idea to listen to it in bed before going to sleep just like I would with a real book. After one week, I had still not been able to go beyond the first chapter, as I would always fall asleep within the first five minutes.
This was it: this was the solution to my insomnia issues, and it has been how I have kept insomnia at bay for the past two years.
I have identified the following pattern: the first time, the text is new, and the interest of novelty delays sleep for a couple of minutes. Yet I fall asleep within ten minutes generally. Next time I listen to the same chapter, the novelty wears off, but I can still focus. This makes for the fastest sleep effect - less than five minutes. Then after twenty or fifty times, I know the first five minutes by heart, and I have to wait for five minutes of new text before I fall asleep.
One 15′ short story by Maupassant lasted almost one year before its sleep-inducing power became insufficient.
The technical requirements
- I choose an audio-book which is interesting enough to keep me focused. Dull stories may allow my mind to wander away, so that the soundtrack only adds to the cacophony of ideas. The same goes with music, by the way. I have seldom found music that would be captivating enough to prevent my mind from escaping to the circus of ideas.
- I choose a narrator with a soft voice, and a narrow dynamic range: I do not want to have to turn the volume up to listen to whispered lines and then be woken up by sudden roaring as the narrator experiments with pirate voices in a dialog. Note that this requirement is also valid for any sort of outdoor listening (car, airplane, bicycle,…)
- I set the volume as low as possible. The objective is to be able to hear everything to stay focused on the story, but not be disturbed after I fall asleep.
- I use an MP3 player with the best autonomy (and a rechargeable battery). Although I do not recommend it for those who are (like me) suspicious of proprietary formats and windows-only sluggish and buggy proprietary syncing software, my Sony NW-E405 MP3 player has a breathtaking autonomy of 50 hours.
- I use comfortable earphones. As I like to sleep on my side, I often have only one earbud on, and the other one under the pillow. The earphones have to have sturdy cords and connections too, as there can be a lot of wear and tear. The ones which last longest are not necessarily expensive: I have had my little 6€ Philips earphones for three months now, and both ears are still functional (whereas I have had 20€ earphones go kaputt in both ears after less than a month).
- Unless you have an MP3 player which is capable of playing only the specified track and then stop, you want to upload only one or two tracks to the player at a time. Otherwise, you’ll be draining the battery each night as the novel keeps playing to the end, and you’ll probably be woken up at some point. With only one or two tracks in the novel, I can ask the MP3 player to play only the album corresponding to the novel, and the reading will stop (hopefully when I am already asleep).
- An important detail: you probably want to choose an MP3 player which can fast-forward fast (this can only be tested by trying, as it is not often mentioned in the specs). This allows you to skip the first five or ten minutes of a given chapter once you know those minutes really by heart. In this respect, my Sony is appalling: the maximum fast-forward ratio is limited to 2x or 3x, so that I get cramps in the fingers before I can get to the point I want. This feature is very important if you intend you use the same player for listening to podcasts or audio-books in your waking hours: audio-book or podcast tracks can be one-hour long. No way I am going to keep the fast-forward button pressed for fifteen whole minutes just to get to the part I want.
There you go: my very efficientest way of falling asleep or going back to sleep within ten minutes. 90% efficient (for me at least, which is what matters most to, well, me). And not addictive. When I do not have my MP3 player or the battery is empty, I just revert to ordinary sleep patterns (and I use earplugs as a compensation).
Where to find audio-books
For an unlimited supply of free ammo, go to LibriVox.
That’s it: 
