Why Carrie Bickmore can’t sleep at night

I HAVE tried wine, warm milk, reading, sex, different beds, the couch — nothing cures my bouts of insomnia, writes Carrie Bickmore. I have resigned myself to being a non-sleeper for life.

Carrie Bickmore: “I envy people who put their head on the pillow and pass out till noon the next day.”

SLEEP. It’s a fundamental human requirement, and yet it can be so hard to come by.

I have always had a problem/obsession with sleep. As far back as I can remember, even in my teens, I had trouble falling to sleep. It even stopped me staying over at friends’ houses — I was always worried I’d be stuck lying awake in a strange house while everyone around me slept.

I envy people who put their head on the pillow and pass out till noon the next day. I could never do it, nor have I ever had the opportunity to snooze that much. I started working breakfast-radio hours while at uni, so those typical years of partying and sleeping were non-existent! I’d party all night, then get two hours’ sleep before rolling into work at 5am.

Then in my 20s I added a kid to my regimen. I gave birth to a sleeper. He literally jumps out of bed happy. He slept through the night as a newborn from 7pm to 7am (you can imagine the look I got when I told my mothers’ group that), but I never reaped the benefits. I would pop him down at night then lay in bed stressing about how I had to get up in the night to express milk before heading into work at 4am. That anxiety made it impossible for slumber. I got used to running on four hours a night. It’s fair to say I was not getting any much-needed REM sleep!

This woman is not Carrie Bickmore. Because Carrie Bickmore doesn’t sleep very often. (Pic: iStock)

Now all these years later, with a decade of life’s worries under my belt and another child, my sleep hasn’t improved. I think about it the moment I wake up with a little person standing by my bed at 5.45am; I live in a permanent sleep-deprived haze and I am ecstatic if a dinner date gets cancelled so I can go to bed early. How many hours will I get tonight? How many nights can I go without sleep? You know you can survive three times as long without food as you can without sleep? I Googled that at 3am one morning.

I have tried wine, warm milk, reading, sex, different beds, the couch — nothing cures my bouts of insomnia. My smug sleepy friends say things like, “Just get up and write down your thoughts.” If I did that, I’d be writing an essay. Every tiny thought I have during the night becomes a state of emergency. I’ve literally woken my partner and/or my children from their deep slumber convinced something has happened to them in the night.

Carrie Bickmore features in Stellar magazine.

There are only two places I fall asleep easily. In movies, when I have just paid to stay awake, and when I have jet lag. I have fallen asleep on the shoulder of many a cameraman in the back of cars while driving through the backblocks of a foreign country, and yet I cannot snooze in my own damn comfy bed.

If you sleep like a log then I am not sure there is much in this article for you, but at least take a moment to be thankful that you are not a nocturnal creature like me.

Given my mum is awake most of the night, and my nan was too, I have resigned myself to being a non-sleeper for life. It’s in the genes. As I write this, my two-year-old daughter is fighting going to bed, screaming at the thought of being stuck in that fluffy paradise for the next 12 hours. Guess she got those genes, too.

Carrie co-hosts The Project, 6.30pm weeknights, on Network Ten.

Originally published as Why Carrie Bickmore can’t sleep at night