agonyaunt | Dear Prudence: Sleep Sorrows

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Dear Prudence: Sleep Sorrows

Q. Sleep deprived and it’s ruining everything: I listened to your “Insomnia” podcast recently and nearly wept when you said the letter writer with the sleep-disrupting boyfriend should kill him. I am part of a service corps and must share a room with “Sasha.” Sasha snores. Incredibly loudly. She also has the worst sleep habits I’ve ever encountered. She survives on three hours of sleep a night and looks at her phone under her covers. I’ve tried talking to Sasha about her issues so many ways: jokingly, at a party, telling her she needs to go to a sleep clinic; writing her emails explaining her problems; setting sleep schedules for her based on what I’ve observed reduces the snoring. She shuts down every time I confront her. I’ve made her cry, and worse, because some of my emails were written under duress—I am falling apart I’m so tired and angry—she’s shared them with our roommates and now I’m the bad guy. I don’t know what to do short of quitting the program. Sasha says she has a medical condition and is making appointments to see doctors, but I know what she needs to do: get proper sleep and not look at bright screens before bed. I have no energy and am suffering at work and socially because of Sasha. For some reason, everyone in our house adores her and takes her side. I have no idea how to explain that I’m this angry because a lack of sleep is ruining my life. What can I do?

A: If you haven’t already tried minimizing distractions from your side of the room, please do so immediately. If you have other roommates in the house, ask to switch with one of them. If your service program has a housing department, make a transfer request. In the meantime, get the heaviest-duty earplugs you can find, buy a blackout sleep mask, find a white-noise machine or (if you can’t afford to drop a ton of money on sleep hygiene) get one on your phone.

For future reference, some of your strategies for talking about serious issues with a roommate are fine (nothing wrong with a clear email) and some of them are counterproductive, like making jokes at her expense in public, or trying to set a sleep schedule for a grown woman. Don’t joke about something that’s really bothering you, because those jokes tend to land with serious barbs and don’t go half as far as a genuine, honest request. And don’t try to manage your roommate’s sleep schedule. You can tell her that her snoring is making it hard for you to sleep, you can ask for a roommate transfer, you can encourage her to get checked out for underlying medical conditions that might contribute to intense snoring, but you cannot tell her when to go to bed or when to wake up. If she’s looking at her phone under her covers, that suggests she is at least trying to minimize the distractions to you, and means you two might be able to work together to find a livable compromise.

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Please help me not hate the LW. Especially since snoring is often correlated with size (or maybe I'm just overidentifying with Sasha since I'm fat and I know I snore) but having my assigned roommate hassle me IN PUBLIC about my snoring and nag me repeatedly about getting a sleep study would make me want to push back. Especially the public humiliation. (LW maybe everyone "takes her side" because they watched you use a party as a chance to shame her, and they cringed. Do you want them to all drive her into the woods for your sake? Probably, actually.)

because some of my emails were written under duress—I am falling apart I’m so tired and angry—she’s shared them with our roommates and now I’m the bad guy. Whatever, LW, in irae veritas. I can just imagine what was in those letters. I hope LW can get a new room for Sasha's sake, really.

The one thing I would advise Sasha is to not use the phone in bed, not because of Sleep Hygiene (TM) but because that kind of light in the darkness can disrupt the sleep of the other(s) in the room. Otherwise I'd mostly commiserate with her.

(I spent 8 years in dorms, so I do know the pain of having others' actions prevent one from sleeping. But I also know how people use that as a reason to bully depricated people such as fat women)

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ forever.

The only reason I haven't murdered my husband is because we bought a bigger house and now sleep in separate rooms. I don't think I could have survived much more of trying to endure his snoring and not having anywhere to go to escape it. Never being able to sleep makes you crazy and resentful and seriously clouds your judgment.

Is this LW trying the wrong tactics? 100% yes. Is it deeply horrible never to be able to sleep? 100% yes.

Oh, I want to smack the LW. Every part of these is about Sasha's problems -- but by all account, Sasha has no problems, or none of note that bother here. Has the LW tried saying (in private ffs), "hey, Sash, I'm getting sick from disrupted sleep. Do you think you and I could work out some systems so my sleep isn't disrupted?"

Maybe they can agree on white noise machines, on not using screens in a shared bedroom, or on some kind of schedules. But LW will get absolutely nowhere if they insist on telling Sasha that Sasha has a problem and Sasha's irresponsible and Sasha should fix it.

The LW comes off badly.

That being said, there is a friend I will not share a hotel with anymore because her poor sleep hygiene involved : waking up repeatedly during the night, watching or listening TV on her phone , supposedly with earphones but they didnt work properly, at high volume.

we were on a shared vacation in Cuba once, and I kept waking up to the blaring (and I do mean blaring) sound of the Law and Order opening sequence. Each time she looked (in the dark of the room) like she was asleep, so I was mentally cursing the adjacent hotel room for the noise while not saying anything (because if she was somehow sleeping through it, she was the one withthe auto-immune condition and sleep issues and I didnt want to disturb her).

Finally after about the fourth or fifth time, I saw her shift enough, realized she was the source of the law and order, got angry about the noise waking me up repeatedly (she either turned it down or fixed her headphones plug after that) and the next morning we were both exhausted and underslept on our big “spend the day in Havana” travel day.

So while I side-eye LW about the snoring, I get why the “playing with ohone in a way that disturbs others” is a trigger point for her.

Yes!

Also, Sasha might have sleep apnoea, in which case they need to get checked out by a sleep Dr.

For years, people who shared a room with me complained about my snoring,

but it wasn't until a friend said "I thought you were choking to death" that I realised it was something that I needed to see a Dr about.

And now I have a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine, and it helps keep my airways open and keep me breathing. Oh, and I make less noise in my sleep, too.

Disclaimer: there are so many possible demographic variables in play with this that possible missing missing reasons make this letter into Swiss cheese. But I'm diving in anyway.

TIL a good quarter-century ago: one of the biggest things to ask for WRT situations where people who don't know each other are assigned as roommates are things related to sleep cycles and introversion. And also I have Opinions about how service organizations would definitely benefit from having introvert-friendly activities as well as the extrovert-friendly ones.

So, okay. I'm trying hard not to rant here. But I am very much Team Sasha. Not everyone can stand having all their waking moments being Around Other People and Having Them Talk At You and maybe at night under the covers is the only time Sasha gets to enjoy things she likes without other people sticking their noses in and chattering and having opinions about whether what she likes is Acceptable or even just sticking their noses in to her time to herself. LW is actively making this worse.

I am seriously reading LW as a sanctimonious extroverted morning person.

I would sympathize with those feelings, but on the other hand, if you're sharing a room with someone who is patently having trouble sleeping and the light from phones being on is contributing to them not being able to sleep, courtesy and kindness would require you to not do that. Specifically, I would think, a no-lights-in-the-room schedule. If Sasha is awake anyway, perhaps she can find somewhere else to be by herself on her phone.

I do wonder from the tone of this letter if the LW has actually mentioned the phone screen specifically to her, though, because I find it a bit hard to imagine someone continuing to use it a lot at all hours after that. If she's just been lectured about her sleep schedule and told she needs to sleep more and shamed for snoring it's quite possible it hasn't even occurred to her that the phone is an irritant.

I have sympathy for the "other person's need for screentime in the bedroom disrupts my sleep" problem--- my mother can't sleep without the TV on, loud enough for her to make out what the people on it are saying, and I can't sleep with that, so when we need to share a room, I have a noise-and-light-cancelling eye/ear mask. (Oh, and? I pretty much need to read until sleep sneaks up on me and my mom can't stand that kind of light. So I have itty-bitty book lights galore.)

Which I think is what's getting me about LW, and thanks for a comment that made me think about how to clarify what that is: LW is framing this as being something that's not just a difference in sleep environment needs, but something that is objectively wrong with Sasha. Instead of trying to figure out mutually acceptable workarounds, she is just straight-up framing it as "Sasha needs to sleep when and how I think Sasha should sleep and anything else means there is something not just selfish but unhealthy about her behavior and I get to decide that." Which, I think we agree, is very different from, "Sasha, you do you, but I literally cannot sleep with the light from your phone or the sound from your snoring; what can we do so that I can sleep that's also workable for you?"

Yeah, you're right, that's The Thing about this letter. It's both the most judgy and assholish thing and the really weird part, because it's obviously not an approach that's working for them. I'm inclined to think it's a blind spot because it's really working against their interests here and they seem so desperate that I'm sure they'd have tried this negotiation-so-we-can-sleep angle if it occurred to them/if it seemed like it had a chance of working. A weird blind spot, though.

The thing is... I wish LW's position were weird to me, but I'm entirely too used to people reacting to introverted night-person needs with "stop being who you are and having your actually baked-in immutable needs, who you are is wrong and weird and if you would just stop being who you are and stop having those weird needs everything would be fine".

'I know what she needs to do, get proper sleep'

No shit, really? And your resentful monitoring of her activities, public shaming, and unhinged morning after emails have only blown up in your face, you say? Maybe you should drink more water...

One of the perks of being an older married commuter student to a big ten school was rubbernecking other people's dorm roommate horror stories. This one is just infuriating and sad.

Sasha says she has a medical condition and is making appointments to see doctors, but I know what she needs to do: get proper sleep and not look at bright screens before bed.

How about you reel your neck in and mind your own business, LW? You are within your rights to let Sasha know that there's a problem and ask if she's willing to consider a sleep study or something else to help her stop snoring. You can offer the information you have. You can go ask for a change of room. You can definitely ask her not to use her phone in the sleeping area because the light disturbs you.

You don't get to decide you know everyone's medical status based on the sound of their snoring.

"Joking" about Sasha "at parties" is... wow. That's just low.

I'm not even trying not to hate the LW. Look, I share a bed with a serious, serious snorer. Like, "we've often just not slept in the same room," can be heard downstairs snorer. So I sympathize.

OTOH, said snore shares the bed with a serious, serious insomniac, and if I can get out of bed and go read in my recliner, I'm getting the feeling that Sasha does not have that option.

LW's basic, critical error here is focusing entirely on Sasha, on what, say, reading on a bright screen might be doing to her instead of how it's disrupting LW's sleep. In fact, it's not clear at all to me besides the obvious issue of snoring just how this impacts the LW. I mean, if Sasha's only sleeping three hours, she's only snoring three hours, right? But instead of controlling what they can control, namely themselves (and thus getting earplugs, a night mask, and/or requesting reassignment), they're being rude, controlling, and invasive to Sasha. And FFS, making someone's sleep habits a Very Big Thing, making Sasha feel like she's being monitored for every shift, every sound, isn't quite the worst thing for insomnia, but compared to it, a loud party downstairs is mild.

Request reassignment, LW, and in the meantime, focus on YOU and what you need to sleep. And Sasha? Use a blue-light filter on your phone at night.

This jumped out at me too. LW says at first that their own sleep is disrupted, but then it's all about how to make Sasha have a different sleep schedule and fixing Sasha's sleep issues. But the LW can't change Sasha; they can only change themselves. And they don't mention trying any of the basics like earplugs or masks. What about hanging a blackout curtain between the beds so LW can't see the light from Sasha's phone (while also asking Sasha to turn the screen to dimmest setting with blue filter)?

Also, LW? You didn't write those emails under duress. No one was forcing you to write them.

This, this, this, this, this, forever this. (I'm so glad this comm is Team Sasha. ♥♥♥)

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Dear Prudence: Sleep Sorrows

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