Snooze blues

Insomnia

The stress case Kelly Kress is so stressed out about how tired she’ll be the next day that she can’t sleep. Workplace minutiae, money woes, relationship issues: You name it, it’s keeping Kress, a 39-year-old archivist at the Newberry Library, awake at night. “It’s hard for me to just put things aside,” Kress says. Since a firm devotion to two cups of Yogi Calm tea each night is about the closest she’s gotten to an effective treatment after two decades of suffering from anxiety-related insomnia, she was willing to try anything. She just needs something that will allow her brain to check out when it’s time for bed so she won’t dwell on things that happened that day.

The holistic treatment “One hour of reiki is equivalent to four hours of sleep,” says Bernadette Doran, a reiki master-teacher at Equilibrium Energy and Education in the South Loop.

Doran asked Kress to lie down fully clothed on the treatment table, then pressed her warm hands onto Kress’s head, face, chest, stomach and feet. This was no massage, though: Doran’s hands were seeking to connect with organs and chakras (energy centers in the body). This form of touch therapy is particularly effective for insomniacs, Doran says.

“Just the warmth of her hands was very relaxing,” Kress says of the hour-long treatment. “She identified where I’m holding energy—which was in my stomach and behind my heart. If I didn’t have to get up and go back to work, I could have fallen asleep right there.”

The result According to Doran and other reiki practitioners, the calming effect of reiki should last from the table to bed that night, and Kress confirms she was yawning for the rest of the day and felt relaxed for the next few days. But getting on a reiki routine isn’t exactly in her cards: “Eighty-five dollars a session isn’t something that would fit in my budget,” she says. Doran did tell her she can be trained to perform reiki on herself, which is something Kress might look into. In the meantime, she’s taking some of Doran’s less-expensive advice: Place two drops of lavender oil on her pillow, remove all electronics (including an alarm clock with an LED display) from her bedroom and make sure there is no light coming into the room. And at least she got one solid stretch of shut-eye out of the whole thing. “I had a really, really good night’s sleep [after the treatment],” Kress says.

47 W Polk St, suite M-5, 312-786-1882. $85 per treatment.

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