It was that ghastliest of hours — 3 a.m. — bedtime a distant memory and daylight an eternity away. In the silence of his Salisbury, Conn., house, the interior designer Matthew Patrick Smyth jolted awake.
Semiconscious, he felt himself in a strange state of turmoil, his thoughts a tangled skein of hopes and expectations, though mostly fears: about the toll of Covid-19, voter suppression during an epochal election, racial tensions, an economy that may not rebound for years.
Against his best judgment, Mr. Smyth, 66, did what every sleep hygiene expert advises against. He fired up his phone.
“I go on Instagram and start scrolling and see people liking photos and remarks and wonder whether it’s impolite to answer,” Mr. Smyth said.
To do so would be to acknowledge an awareness that his followers were awake at an awful, liminal hour at which, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, foreshadowing the Age of Amazon, “a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence.” And — worse yet — that he was up, too.
But of course he was.
According to a new survey conducted by the Harris Poll for the American Psychological Association, more than two-thirds of adults in the United States — or 68 percent — view the divisive 2020 election as a “significant source of stress in their lives,” a stark increase from the 2016 presidential election, when 52 percent said the same. So chronic a source of stress is a seemingly unending pandemic that no polling statistics are required.
At least they were not for Maria Bonta de la Pezuela, the chief executive officer for the Americas at Carpenters Workshop Gallery. “I try to do breathing exercises,” to restore calm when undifferentiated terrors arouse her at 3 a.m., Ms. Bonta de la Pezuela, 54, said recently by email. “I end up scrolling nine out of 10 times. The anxiety is real.”
And the remedies for the new night terror seem to vary as broadly as its sources. For Dave Herndon, 63, a freelance editor in Santa Fe, N.M., guided meditation apps assist in “reprogramming negatively firing neurons,’’ induced by “the Covid anxiety dance,” as he said by phone.
“Then, rather than starting to flip out about how you’re not getting enough sleep and are not going to be able to do what you need to tomorrow, you have this distraction from the ruminations that accompany waking up at three in the morning,” Mr. Herndon said.
Relief, for Jacqueline Coumans, 77, a retired decorator and French instructor, from fears induced by what she termed “our political chaos” has recently come from reciting the fables of the 17th-century French fabulist Jean de La Fontaine. “I could not fall asleep at all after the first debate,” Ms. Coumans said in a Facebook message. “I was waking up at 3 a.m. sweating with anxiety.”
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No matter that the sonorous tempo of the French in use when she memorized the fables in childhood is often paradoxically at odds with their harsh underlying moral lessons — “The Wolf and the Lamb,” with its conclusion that might is right, is particularly unnerving — Ms. Coumans finds them soothing. “There’s a balance in the sentences that balances your brain.”
To find her own equilibrium in parlous times, Sally Fischer, a Manhattan publicist in her 60s, turns not to literature, she said, but to vintage sitcoms. “I’m a naturally calm person, so I actually find it difficult to jump out of my skin,” Ms. Fischer said.
Yet in the run-up to Nov. 3, Ms. Fischer has become all too familiar with a physical anxiety evoked by that figure of speech. “I’ve never been much of a TV person, but now, from 3 a.m. until I fall asleep again, I retreat into ‘The Andy Griffith Show’ or Dick Van Dyke or ‘Make Room for Daddy,’” Ms. Fischer said. “This may sound stupid, but watching how Andy Griffith raised Opie or Danny Thomas raised his TV kids, in a world where the work ethic, doing charitable work, being good to thy neighbor is such a counter to the disgustingness we’re going through now, helps me suppress the demons.”
A widespread, palpable sense of being hunted into the predawn darkness hardly seems out of the ordinary with the world in the grip of a lethal and invisible menace, said Asha Tarry, a psychotherapist practicing in Manhattan. “To the multiple stresses we’ve all experienced during Covid,” Ms. Tarry said, “add the compounding factors of racial tension, furloughs, the elections, so much social isolation, and it is not surprising people are sleepless, grinding their teeth and having 3 a.m. nightmares.”
Grief, too, plays a part, Ms. Tarry said. “We’re seeing more clinicians talk about, yes, the grief of actual human loss but also the loss” of access to familiar people, places and things.
“There is an avalanche of issues,” said Sofia Borges, 35, a graphic designer in Los Angeles. “Almost everyone I know has lost their job. Almost everyone is beleaguered. Almost everyone is holding on by a shoestring.”
Many, embroiled in what Ms. Borges termed a “toxic quagmire” of current events find themselves shaken out of sleep by furious dreams as reliable as an alarm. “I was feeling that kind of rage that makes you hot,” Ms. Borges said. “A friend suggested, ‘Let’s scream really loud,’ but I couldn’t because I was sick and had lost my voice. She said, ‘Let’s break plates.’ But that’s messy and dangerous.”
Rather, Ms. Borges devised and then self-published “Anger Confetti: An All Ages Stress Reduction Activity Book,” filled with colored pages arranged in a rainbow gradient and that users are encouraged to rip to shreds. “It was my response to losing sleep, losing work and the grief you experience when you feel you’re losing your stability and sanity.”
In a snapshot overview of a typical grief cycle, recovery may be expected to begin at about the six-month mark, Ms. Tarry, the Manhattan therapist, noted. Yet with a second and third wave of infection expected and no vaccine in sight, there are those who find themselves searching for answers to why we are seemingly back where we began.
“To tell you the truth, when Covid started, my husband and I were sleeping better than ever,” said Chanda Parbhoo, 55, a jeweler and voting rights activist in Dallas. “We did this pause and were waking at nine in the morning to take leisured walks.” Soon, though, as video meetings began to colonize her workdays and the presidential election neared, Ms. Parbhoo, the founder of SAAVE or South Asian Americans for Voter Education, gave up hope of getting anything near a solid eight hours.
These days she considers herself lucky to achieve three. “I am up at all hours, and it is worse the closer we get to Nov. 3 because there’s so much to pack in,” she said.
And lately, when Hapi Phace, 62, a performance artist who, before moving to Arlington, Mass., almost a decade ago, was for many years a fixture of the downtown New York scene, finds his eyelids snapping open like window blinds in a pitch-dark bedroom, his universe dwindled to the size of a mattress, he thinks about pandas.
“It’s not even that I like bears or bear culture,” he said. Wide-awake in the middle of the night, he plays YouTube videos of falling rain on his smartphone and makes block prints on bandannas, T-shirts and cards of the reassuringly placid creatures that sustain themselves on a diet of shoots and leaves.
“I don’t know why I’m doing it,” Mr. Phace said. “I just do it until I’ve exhausted myself. Having an artistic focus is the only thing that’s keeping me from crawling out of my skin at 3 a.m.”
