Claustrophobia - A new definition?

(Posted on all my major blogs.)

Ever since the age of 12 or 13, when an uncle of mine taught me the art of relaxation using artificial stress inducement, I have never had a problem of going to sleep. Before my head is settled in the pillow, I am fast asleep. I do not wake up at night and toss and turn. I nod off as soon as the reason for waking up is attended to. I hardly ever dream. Sit in a car with a safe driver, and I can drop off into neverland within a couple of minutes.

I usually wake up fully relaxed, even if the sleep lasted only a few minutes.



I came back from the hospital on Thursday afternoon with my left hand in plaster from the forearm till the tips of my finger. The operation to repair the knuckle of my fourth finger in my left hand had been successful, but it meant that my arm would be in this plaster-cast for 5 weeks. Plenty of painkillers and a course of antibiotic for 5 days, so no real problem of pain.

When I went to bed on Thursday evening, I thought I was going to sleep in my usual fashion. However, when my head hit the pillow, and as recommended, I put my plastered arm in a suitable and comfortable position on a couple of raised pillows, I felt a tremendous and overpowering feeling of restlessness. Sleep was just not coming in the next few minutes. Each passing second was raising an anxiety within me. I was feeling claustrophobic, even though, bodily, I was not in any confined situation.

Then it dawned on me that my mind was reacting to the fact that my left hand had lost its freedom. It was caged, and the stress relaxation technique, which I have used for over 50 years to drop into my slumber, was blocked by an overpowering feeling of fear. My fingers and wrist had lost their freedom. They were confined and this feeling of confinement was causing my mind to say that I was totally confined. And the realisation that I would have to endure this confinement for 5 more weeks was mentally unbearable.

I jumped out of bed, feeling as if I could not stay put down. I walked into the kitchen and expressed my claustrophobic thoughts to Annikki.

She was cool and calm and told me that I should take each day as it came, and the 5 weeks would be over even before I knew it.

I went to the living room and plonked down in front of the tv, but my heart and soul were not into watching any of the programmes. I let tiredness possess me so much so that I allowed my body to react to a mentally created feeling of a body becoming tired. Then when I went to bed, it was not my relaxation that put me to sleep, but a feeling of great tiredness - quite different to my normal situation.

As soon as Annikki came to bed, I put my plastered arm around her, and that claustrophobic feeling suddenly lifted and I dropped quickly into my normal deep slumber.

When I woke up in the morning, although relaxed, I still had that feeling at the back of my mind that I was a caged person. My n degrees of freedom had been severely curtailed. I now understood how anyone who loses any degree of freedom, mental or physical, could suddenly feel claustrophobic.

In all my life I had never experienced this. It was indeed a major revelation to me about the sufferings of my fellow travellers on this earth who had lost their freedom, any part of it.

I will be glad when this hand is uncaged. I will value all the degrees of freedom that I enjoy much much more than I ever have! And I will appreciate the feelings of other men and women, and any animal, who are caged in any form.

Arctic Syndrome

A young student from a country far south of Finland expressed to me yesterday that she was suffering from a seasonal illness. On further questioning she told me that she could feel her heart pounding and it was almost as if she was having a heart attack. She had been advised by doctors that this was because of the darkness, and that she should have more lights in her room.

With lots of Indians now coming to live in these northern latitudes, I felt that maybe I should share some of the thoughts I have on some of my experiences of living in Finland, as it may help some of the newcomers.

What this young student is gong through is what I have labelled many years ago as "Arctic Syndrome". This is not to be confused with "Arctic Hysteria" which is also known as "Piblokto", which  is a condition exclusively appearing in Inuit societies living within the Arctic Circle. This appears most prevalently in winter and is considered to be a form of a culture-specific disorder. The symptoms could include intense "hysteria" (screaming, uncontrolled wild behavior), depression, coprophagia, insensitivity to extreme cold and more. This condition is most often seen in dogs and Eskimo women.

The forms of Arctic Syndrome that I have experienced and is common to men and women as far south as Oulu, about 150 km south of the Arctic Circle, is similar to the extent that it causes rapid increase of the heartbeat, but the hysteria is almost as if the person has become claustrophobic.

I first felt this the very first winter I faced in Finland in 1984. I realised that what was affecting me was the lack of sunshine, and probably the lack of Vitamin D. This may have been part of the reason. I knew I had to overcome this. Nobody I talked to had any explanation and there was no easy access to internet databases those days to tell me what I was experiencing.

My own remedy, which was what my body told me to do,  was that I went to work very early, before the sun rose, and I stayed at work, in a warm bright environment till well after what would have been my normal sunset - after 7 pm, whereas the sun was actually setting before 5 pm. My body told me that my mental clock was out of rhythm with the daylight clock around me. I felt that if I could immunise myself from the actually time clock and fool my mental clock to think I was still in a time zone it felt comfortable with, my body could be fooled into thinking that my mental clock was functioning normally.

The atmosphere where I worked, inside the University, was such that I was able to do this quite well. I found that my mental clock believed that I was in the time zone which I was used to. I had problems on weekends, as I was usually the only one at work and if I happened to look out of my window, I could see the darkness coming down. So I pulled down the shutters of my office room to allow myself the isolation from the darkness outside of my brightly lit room.

It took me about 3 years to get over this and after that I found I was not bothered by this problem.

Annikki also has a similar version of this Syndrome in that she cannot sleep at night till exhaustion puts her to sleep. But she does not have the other side effects as the feeling of being shut in. That is probably because is born in this environment and her mental clock is able to run into the new darkness routine. However, even after the last 20+ years after her return to Finland after living in India, she still finds it difficult to get to sleep in winter.

I have not used any artificial aids to get over this syndrome, but it is likely that extra dosages of Vitamin D could help. Bbut then, I am not a doctor and also not a quack to give any prescription to anyone!

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