Better Living Through Chemistry

posted 22nd September 2009    Written by: Kendra    CATEGORY: All Posts, Kendra, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 1

59259529_68336a92e0Last summer for the first time in my then 28 years of life, I couldn’t sleep. For eleven consecutive weeks I averaged between 3 and 4 hours of sleep a night, never more, sometimes less.

I could only fall asleep once sufficiently exhausted and three to four hours later I’d be awake, my mind cycling through a mental list of things to do, my heart racing.

I tried all of the conventional advice.

My attempts at a sleep schedule meant that when I’d put myself to bed at 11pm, if I was fortunate enough to fall asleep, I’d be left watching crappy infomercials at 2am while waiting for the rest of the world to wake up around me.

I exercised, I gave up caffeine, bid adieu to alcohol, tried over the counter sleeping pills and brewed pot after pot of valerian root tea.
And still I couldn’t sleep. Until one day, I could. One night in Mid-July I put my head to the pillow and I woke up seven glorious hours later well rested and late for work.

And then I slept the next day, and the next, and the next.

I didn’t know why I could suddenly sleep. My life hadn’t gotten any less stressful but sleep came and I wasn’t going to question it. And although I never slept as consistently well as I did pre-insomnia, I had managed to regain the ability to nap (which I had also lost during my mad, mad insomnia) which meant that after a bad night’s sleep I could at least catch up.

I was more or less at peace with my new wonky sleep cycle until I found myself in Montreal in February once again unable to sleep, only this time with a healthy side of anxiety and depression.

I’d be at my internship after a fitful night of sleep working on a brochure when I’d be overcome with the sudden desire to cry that was divorced from anything that I was actually thinking or intellectually feeling. Or something as simple as going downstairs to buy a cup of coffee would make my belly do flip-flops even though ordering coffee is ordinarily as anxiety inducing as breathing.

So I did what everyone without health insurance does. I loaded up WebMD, typed in my symptoms and what came out was a diagnosis not of depression, but of vitamin D deficiency.

It turns out that Vitamin D deficiency is fairly widespread; the easiest source of it is from the sun and most of us do not get enough sunlight- fairer skinned individuals need at least 15minutes of sun exposure (without sun block) a day, dark skinned individuals such as myself need nearly 40 minutes.  And anyone who lives in latitudes north of New York City cannot physically metabolize vitamin D from sunlight from mid-October through Mid-March creating a vitamin D deficiency.

The side effects of adult-onset deficiency include depression, anxiety, bone pain, and insomnia. I had all four.

Once I realized this I started putting together the pieces. For example, my insomnia ended the first time as I had begun farming and had started to get 5-7 hours of sunlight a day.  The taste for dark beer I had developed in graduate school, was probably due in part to the fact that dark beer is one of the few dietary sources of vitamin D that I could actually consume (I’m lactose intolerant), as was my sudden obsession with egg yolks (a food I previously merely  tolerated instead of adored).

And once I started to get Vitamin D I started to feel, well, better. More myself.  When I was sad, I was actually sad (and understood it) and when I was happy the same was true.

The reason I’m writing this I guess, is because sometimes in our quest for happiness the roadblock is not always a physical one, it’s a biochemical one. It’s also an under reported problem and a very easy fix. A quick blood test can check if your levels are low, and Vitamin D supplements are thankfully, ridiculously cheap.

kendra-bio1

photo credit: e-magic

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Comments (5)

5 Responses to “Better Living Through Chemistry”

  • Annemarie Says:
    September 22nd, 2009 at 3:10 pm

    Dude, thanks for this. I had no idea about Vitamin D. I gotta get some supplements; I’m on freakin Newfoundland latitude here!

  • Renae Says:
    September 22nd, 2009 at 9:15 pm

    I didn’t know about this either – I need to pass this info along. 40 minutes of sun a day, huh? Interesting.

  • Kendra Says:
    September 23rd, 2009 at 7:10 am

    Yeah, I had zero idea until I moved to Canada. In hindsight I think it’s been going on off and on for years, like undergrad (Ithaca doesn’t know sunlight), but that the combination of a year in VT with a year in Canada on top of the fact that adults just spend less time outside than adolescents conspired for this all to come to a head. The reality is that there are very few natural food sources for vitamin D; milk is only vitamin D fortified it’s not naturally occurring and most cheeses don’t have it; so if you don’t get sunlight you can’t eat your way to enough D Vitamin. You have to supplement. A lot of doctors are calling it the silent epidemic. One study says that even in southern Arizona, 55% of African Americans and 22% of Caucasians are deficient.

  • Kendra Says:
    September 23rd, 2009 at 7:13 am

    sorry to double post, but I forgot to mention the biggie about Vitamin D is that it acts not like a Vitamin but like a hormone in the body (hence the link to depression amongst other things) and that the ‘normal’ way of getting it is through the skin’s metabolization of sunlight. Also the 15 minutes for white people/40 minutes for black people is assuming face and hands are exposed without sunblock (& that you’re not really pale, or really dark). If you’re a woman who wears make up in the morning, your make up likely has sunblock built into it. Sunblock increases the amount of time you need to be exposed to the sun.

  • Marisa Says:
    September 24th, 2009 at 10:54 am

    Wow, I’m going to get some today.

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