Is my mind my own? Inside managing self-diagnosed insomnia in a mixed economy: a critical autoethnography

All humans need sleep to survive, whereas primary insomnia is said to be a common occurrence among all age groups. A myriad of factors can influence one’s sleep patterns, stress simply being one of them. Sleep happens at night for most people while the largest part of the day is apportioned to labour and priming future labour. Some people fall asleep without thinking about how to, how long they must sleep for and/or why they need a perceived amount of sleep. However, the quality and a set number of hours of sleep are a growing obsession with a tight grip on the populace in the West and thus the expanding billion-dollar sleep industry. This study aimed to de-commodify the self-management of what society designates as primary insomnia.

I used critical autoethnography to examine physical, psychological and socioeconomic aspects of self-managing primary insomnia in a mixed economy. I combined narratives with visual inspirations as sources of data throughout this undertaking. Historical materialism as an organising concept for Marxian analysis and the adaptive control of thought–rational shaped my narrative analysis and synthesis to derive explanations for mechanisms influencing night-time sleep struggles.

I established that primary insomnia is an anxiety about night-time sleep due to the structured window of opportunity for sleep to occur, which the controls of social order determine. A range of commodities are available on the sleep market for individuals to consume and compel night-time sleep when human nature sways out of the expected order. The efficacy of sleep commodities for ameliorating quantity and quality comes into question as sleep commodities work to perpetuate night-time sleep anxiety. The type of consciousness embedded in the material form of things often comes before the awareness of their use value. The sleep anxiety stemming from evaluating purchases against the quality and amount of sleep awakes the realisation about the worth in the commercial dealings of sleep, which is essentially innate to humans.