16 years chasing the dream of a good night’s sleep | 4 minute read
The things we do as teenagers to look cool. For Margaret, a former nurse, it was smoking. The habit took hold and after her second marriage to a fellow addict, it became a serious one. By then she was working on the respiratory ward of a city hospital, and the irony of being a heavy smoker was not lost on her. A day dawned when she, a fellow nurse and the ward sister agreed that enough was enough. They’d give up together. ‘We were seeing too many coffins,’ Margaret says. She put out her last cigarette and the habit became history. Except . . .
Two weeks after giving up she was hit with an unexpected side-effect: Withdrawal from years of nicotine dependence left her struggling for a night’s sleep. ‘I never regretted giving up the cigarettes,’ says Margaret, ‘but I’m sad about the sleep.’ As she recalls, she just stopped being able to shut down at night, and if she did manage to drop off, she’d wake in the early hours.
All this was sixteen years ago. Now an active retired person, Margaret recalls the different solutions she tried to cure her insomnia. From the start, her doctor refused to prescribe sleeping tablets and gave her travel pills instead. Frustrated and struggling, she attended a sleep clinic but that got her nowhere. She tried CBT, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, where she was told to buy a book and then had to work through it alone and unsupported. In despair, she visited a hypnotherapist. That gave her a few weeks’ blissful sleep, before the benefits faded away.
Wind the clock on a further fifteen years and Margaret came across the Zeez Pebble while scrolling sleep solutions online. Her first thought was, ‘I’ll never be able to afford that,’ but she was in last-resort territory. She bought her own Zeez Pebble and began using it with all the hope and trepidation that comes with knowing that everything else has failed. She has since enjoyed over a year of good sleep and her sleep quality is still improving. Cue another “However . . . “
A striking feature of Margaret’s experience was that the Zeez Pebble addressed her ingrained insomnia slowly. It required perseverance, and she is clear that for some people, a measure of faith will be needed. Maybe she’d have abandoned it after a couple of weeks getting no results, she says, if she hadn’t exhausted every other gadget and therapy.
Over a period of six months, the Pebble began to work. While Margaret describes her sleep as still being ‘imperfect’, she uses her Pebble every day and her sleep quality continues to improve. She wakes early still, but the important point is that she wakes because she has slept! She wants to put her sleep story out into the world, not only to share her experiences but to tell people that in some cases, the good effects of using a Zeez can take time.
A year on, she reports having more energy, and feeling a brighter, better version of herself. ‘Two thousand times better,’ she laughs. In her eighth decade, Margaret cycles regularly and loves housework. Her CBT experience had encouraged her to go to bed later and later, the thinking being that if she got sufficiently tired she would sleep. With the Zeez Pebble under her pillow, she discovered her natural bedtime to be around 10 pm.
Being a non-sleeper is a tough thing on many levels, she says, not least with all the doom-laden articles about the dangers of no sleep whirling around in your brain. These feel threatening, making a person feel complicit in their own suffering. ‘When you can’t sleep, you take it all to heart,’ says Margaret and in the same breath, ‘If you can help others, saying what works for you, it helps change the balance.’ Margaret has no reservations in stating, ‘You won’t get better than Zeez.’ After sixteen years chasing the dream of a decent night’s sleep, she’s in a good position to know.