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Tiffany Hansen: It's The Brian Lehrer Show here on WNYC. I'm Tiffany Hansen in for Brian. We're going to end today's show with a conversation about insomnia. For most of us, sleep is a refuge that helps us recharge after a long day, but in his recent New Yorker essay, What An Insomniac Knows, Adam Gopnik offers a look at what happens when that refuge is not so readily available. Rather than just lamenting sleeplessness, Gopnik portrays his insomnia as an experience with its own conscious architecture. "Be warned, however," Gopnik writes, "Veteran insomniacs seeking reassurance in these pages will not find it."

While many of us are told to find comfort in the idea that creative giants wrestled with sleeplessness, his essay reminds us that mythologizing does little to ease the isolation and frustration of insomnia. So talk more about sleeplessness and the way it defies and defines our expectations about sleep. Adam Gopnik is a New Yorker staff writer and he joins us now. Hi, Adam.

Adam Gopnik: Hey, Tiffany. How are you?

Tiffany Hansen: Good. How'd you sleep last night?

Adam Gopnik: Glad you asked. Very much as I always do, exactly as you quoted, insomniacs have an architecture of the night that in a way imitates the architecture of sleep itself, which is, everyone knows, you have deep sleep and REM sleep. So us insomniacs aren't just awake and working. We're pursuing sleep as best we can. I fell asleep at my usual hour. I took, because all insomniacs have their own rituals, I took a melatonin, a chewable melatonin. Then I fell asleep, woke up again at 3:30, lay in bed for 10 minutes, and every sleep expert tells you it's a big mistake just to lie there for more than 10 or 15 minutes.

I went to an empty sofa. I listened to an NFL football podcast, which tends to calm me down. I breathe deeply, and then I listened to a meditation, fell back asleep after about an hour and a half, and was up again at 7:30. A very typical night for me.

Tiffany Hansen: I think a lot of folks might say, "I have really bad nights of sleep a lot of the time," but that's different, right, than a true insomniac, right? So explain for us what the difference is, because a woman of my age has a very hard time chasing sleep as well, but I think I'm not an insomniac.

Adam Gopnik: Yeah, there's a real difference. We all have what the French call white nights, where we just can't sleep, anxiety, election results, whatever it might be that's haunting us. Then there are those of us who very often since late adolescence, which is when it seems to descend, just have a terrible time sleeping. That is, as you said, a legion of people, which includes artists as great as Proust and Kafka and political figures as dubious as Napoleon and Henry Kissinger. So it doesn't seem to divide up neatly according to virtue, but in true insomniacs spend a life pursuing sleep.

Night after night, we have a very hard time sleeping. When you meet another insomniac, you know that they're insomniac because they don't say, "Oh, I had a hard time sleeping last night." They have a, as we've been saying, a kind of labyrinth that we walk through on our way to sleep. It's clearly, Tiffany, it clearly has some strong genetic component because we have two kids. My wife is a fantastic sleeper. One of my theories is that people tend to partner up, insomniac and good sleeper, right? She's fantastically, but she can literally sleep through an earthquake. She has done that in truth, and one of our kids is an insomniac, and the other one is a great sleeper.

So I suspect that it has a genetic component. I should add right away, Tiffany, that I don't mean to make light of. It's a real affliction and all of the scientific literature that I review in that essay reveals it has very bad medical effects. It can be assisted and aided by cognitive behavioral therapy, not very effectively by sleep aids. Everybody tells you to stay away from the benzos that will addict you, but in the end, what we manage to do, it's like going down a river. We learn where the white water is and we learn to cope.

Tiffany Hansen: Do you and your wife do as my husband and I do, which is to spend the first several minutes of our mornings together basically going over the night's sleep with each other. Like, "How was your night?"

Adam Gopnik: We don't have to go over the night's sleep because I know she slept well and she knows my nightly odyssey. As I say in the piece to one of the classic sleep, not sleep, partner exchanges, as always, you say, "Are you asleep?" in the morning, and your partner says, "Yes," meaning that they are officially asleep. They are not to be disturbed.

The other thing that always happens is that she's a dream narrator and I am not. Those of us who are insomniacs, dreams are kind of a side dish. When you're a really good sleeper, dreams are the main plate, the entree.

Tiffany Hansen: All right, listeners, are you an insomniac? Do you have a partner who is an insomniac? What is your experience with sleep? We'd love to invite you in this conversation with Adam and I, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Let's bring Emily in Huntington into the conversation, Adam. Good morning, Emily.

Emily: Oh, hi. Yeah, I can completely relate to everything your guest is saying, the architecture. I'm like clockwork. I go to sleep, I wake up four hours later, but a few things that I do that definitely help go back to sleep, if there is anything on my mind, I have my pen and paper next to me to write down anything I want to remember in the morning so then I can put it out of my mind. The other thing that my 12-year-old suggested, I listen to the Wall Street Journal. If you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, and maybe there are other things like this you can subscribe to, it will read article after article. It'll just keep going. And you can put your cell phone on a timer that when it ends, it'll say stop playing. So if I set that for a half an hour or an hour, I mean, sometimes it's a good way to catch up on news and then if I'm successful, I've fallen asleep.

Adam Gopnik: That's fascinating, Emily, because there's a kind of whole like mini universe on YouTube especially that's just devoted to this idea, that if you listen to boring but informative audio, it will put you to sleep and educate you at the same time. I'm not making that up.

Tiffany Hansen: Yeah, Adam, there are entire-- there are apps devoted to this where there are sleep stories that I often wonder how do you get to be that person that writes a sleep story that is supposed to put people to sleep? But this is an industry, first of all. It's also there are to your point about YouTube, so many people who have tips and tricks. What that tells me is that you're not alone, Adam.

Adam Gopnik: No, we are not alone. That's what part of the comfort of being an insomniac is that you know you're not alone. Even though the one thing that insomniacs won't do typically is you don't make phone calls in the middle of the night to other insomniacs, though I must quickly tell you a hilarious story. The philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, the French philosopher, bizarrely has a new book out about his insomnia, same week as mine, about my essay about my own. One night he noticed a light on in the Elysee Palace in Paris, which is the French White House. He thought to himself, "Hmm, maybe that's President Macron."

Being a French philosopher, he had his number and he called him. Sure enough, the president picked up the phone and said, "I'm awake. Are you awake?" and they had a philosophical political conversation at 3:00 in the morning. That's the kind of thing that only happens in France, not here.

Tiffany Hansen: Wow. You can have a philosophical conversation in the middle of the night, A, and B, doesn't that wake you up more?

Adam Gopnik: I can't do this. My friend, the French philosopher can. No, I follow Emily's advice, which is that--

Tiffany Hansen: The more boring, the better?

Adam Gopnik: The more boring-- It's a very special branch of things. I find that there are lots of pseudo hypnosis apps that don't work for me, but I find something that's absorbing but not agitating to listen to like, this will make you laugh, early Christian history. Because I don't really care about the schism between the Gnostics and the Orthodox, but it keeps me interested enough that just like Emily, after about half an hour, I fall asleep.

Tiffany Hansen: Well, I think that there are-- there have been lots of studies about how our bodies need sleep, how this is our way for our bodies to recharge themselves, and if we don't, bad things can happen to us physically, mentally. I'm curious how you find insomnia affects you during the day.

Adam Gopnik: When it hits you bad, it hits you bad, and it reduces-- I have to write four or five hours a day. But as I said before, one of the things that happens, and especially it's what we mean by maturing, is that we learn that coping is good, that we learn that we can cope with things that seemed oppressive to us when we were in our teens. Just like Emily was saying on the phone a moment ago, you've developed coping mechanisms and coping mechanisms are good. It's the way to do it. I think most insomniacs, I don't know about you, Tiffany, we try everything. It's not like that we are indifferent to sleep hygiene. We don't look at blue light before we go to sleep, we don't have a glass of wine after 7:00 PM. We try to be good, but the sleeplessness descends anyway.

Tiffany Hansen: Well, I wonder, Adam, if you aren't romanticizing it a little bit when you talk about these philosophers who are insomniacs, who are up having these wonderful conversations. Here I am snoring away thinking I'm horrible because I'm not up having all of these conversations and doing all of these things. Do we romanticize--?

Adam Gopnik: I don't do these things, Tiffany. I'm reporting. I'm not witnessing.

Tiffany Hansen: But do we, are we romanticizing sleeplessness? Wouldn't you talk about it that way?

Adam Gopnik: Sleeplessness is a serious condition. Nobody, I think, can die of it, but it can really be debilitating, and it has been in my life. It also is something that does get romanticized. I'd report that rather, as I say, than endorse it. Great artists like Proust and Kafka, Nabokov, have relished their own sleeplessness because they see it as a superior form of consciousness. There's this great tomb of the great French queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, that shows her wide awake and reading while her husband is sound asleep in death beside her, so there's a sense in which sleeplessness is a sign of the insubordinate imagination. There's a whole literature of women's insomnia. But no, it's not healthy for you, but like many unhealthy things we have to deal with, we do better learning to cope with it than struggling against it unsuccessfully.

Tiffany Hansen: It can be profoundly isolating. You talk about her reading her book next to--

Adam Gopnik: For all eternity.

Tiffany Hansen: For all eternity, but to be serious about it, it can feel very isolating.

Adam Gopnik: Oh, it's awful. I don't mean to-- lots of people romanticize insomnia, but I don't mean to sentimentalize it. It's an affliction. I've been dealing with it for almost 50 years, and there's you wake up yet again, despite having done everything correctly, and you suffer a little bit, but like many kinds of phobias and anxiety disorders and so on, one of the keys is to understand that if you can get it 10% better, you're doing well. That's one of the keys to cognitive behavioral therapy is to understand that your intelligence can argue with your anxieties. And if your intelligence can move your anxieties 10% over so you could get that additional hour's sleep, you're doing okay.

Tiffany Hansen: We have a listener who has more tips and tricks for us. No overhead light, no phone, obviously--

Adam Gopnik: Don't you do all those things already?

Tiffany Hansen: Yeah. I mean-- well, I don't know. Maybe some people-- look, I mean, I look at my phone just going to say. I wake up. I do look at my phone. I know, cue everyone getting all uptight about that, but I wonder if worrying about that is often worse for our sleep, and obsessing over all of these tips and tricks might be worse for us.

Adam Gopnik: Yeah, that's exactly right. Obsessing over anxiety is in itself an acute form of anxiety. One of the things we need to do, is step back from it, and one of the reasons why I think we enjoy the literature of sleeplessness, if you like, is exactly because it suggests a sisterhood, a brotherhood of sleeplessness, of the sleepless. We recognize that though we feel at 4:00 in the morning utterly alone, we are not.

Tiffany Hansen: Adam Gopnik is a staff writer at The New Yorker. His essay is about sleeplessness. It's called What An Insomniac Knows. Adam, good luck tonight.

Adam Gopnik: You too, Tiffany.

Tiffany Hansen: Appreciate it.

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