Carrie Bickmore opens up about her daily struggle
On the surface, Carrie Bickmore seems to have it all – a Gold Logie-winning hosting gig on The Project, a happy relationship and two beautiful children. But her busy life has taken its toll.
In a candid article for The Daily Telegraph’s Stellar magazine, the 37-year-old opened up about her biggest struggle – sleep.
Bickmore, who revealed she’s struggled with insomnia since she was a teenager, says she envies “people who put their head on the pillow and pass out till noon the next day”.
Having maintained an erratic work schedule since her university days, when she began working breakfast radio, Bickmore’s sleep struggles only worsened when she welcomed her son Oliver in 2007.
“I gave birth to a sleeper,” she writes. “He slept through the night as a newborn from 7 pm to 7 am (you can imagine the look I got when I told my mothers’ group that), but I never reaped the benefits.
“I would pop him down at night then lay in bed stressing about how I had to get up in the night to express milk before heading into work at 4am. That anxiety made it impossible for slumber. I got used to running on four hours a night. It’s fair to say I was not getting any much-needed REM sleep!”
The mum-of-two confesses she lives in “a permanent sleep-deprived haze” and is “ecstatic” if a dinner date is cancelled, as it means she can get to bed early.
“I have tried wine, warm milk, reading, sex, different beds, the couch — nothing cures my bouts of insomnia. My smug sleepy friends say things like, ‘Just get up and write down your thoughts.’ If I did that, I’d be writing an essay. Every tiny thought I have during the night becomes a state of emergency. I’ve literally woken my partner and/or my children from their deep slumber convinced something has happened to them in the night.”
Bickmore says there are only two instances when she can fall asleep easily – in a movie theatre (“when I have just paid to stay awake”) and when she has jet lag.
“I have fallen asleep on the shoulder of many a cameraman in the back of cars while driving through the back blocks of a foreign country, and yet I cannot snooze in my own damn comfy bed.
“I have resigned myself to being a non-sleeper for life. It’s in the genes. As I write this, my two-year-old daughter is fighting going to bed, screaming at the thought of being stuck in that fluffy paradise for the next 12 hours. Guess she got those genes, too.”
Do you have trouble sleeping like Carrie Bickmore? Tell us in the comments below.
Image credit: Carrie Bickmore/Instagram.