Losing Sleep

This is the story of my struggle with insomnia. And I’ll introduce you to the designer who has made it her mission to design a world we can all share.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Today's stories about insomnia, potato peelers, and how dressing up
like an old woman might help you build a better world.
It's also about me your host An pump Care, but
mostly it's about making you smile. Welcome to Anu pump Cares.
Chapter five. Losing sleep. For most of my life, my

(00:44):
friends had a joke about me an pump can sleep
in a crowded room. They would say, oh, he can
sleep in the music is blaring. He just has to
finish your meal. And when he lies down, if you
scream at him while fire was to off in the
background and a pack of wild elephant stampedes through the room,
anupam will still sleep through it all. It's true. I

(01:09):
used to lived in the parties early to get to bed.
For decades, I was blessed with this wonderful ability to sleep.
And then one night, I don't know what happened. I
finished my meal as usual, I got ready for bed,
closed my eyes, and my body just refused. It was

(01:35):
the strangest thing. For the first time in my life,
I couldn't sleep mh Over the next few nights, I
tried everything, warm milk, evening stretches. Wh I am finally

(01:56):
I started taking a low door sleeping pill, but even
then I would wake up in the middle of the night.
So I doubled my doors, then tripled it, and though
it help me fall asleep, suddenly my nights were filled
with nightmares. One moment I was caught in a landslide,

(02:18):
the next flood or an earthquake. I would wake up,
heart racing, my face covered in beads of sweat. It
wasn't long before my inso many I started affecting my

(02:38):
work on film sets. My eyes would ache from the
glare of the spotlight. Can you imagine? I love the spotlight.
My entire career is based on it, and here I
was cowering from it. But in those days, just the
thought of that bright light stripe my eyes made me cringe.

(03:04):
I knew I needed help, so I went to my
eye doctor, Dr Desusa, and I asked him if he
had a moisturizer or an appointment, anything to give my
poor eyes some relief. Truth is, I'm close to my doctors.
We have tea together, we chat like family. So when

(03:27):
I spoke to Dr Desusa, he listened both as a
doctor and a friend, and then he said, m hm,
Mr care Please don't take this the wrong way. But
I don't think you need me and I specialist. I
think you need a psychiatrist. When I heard that, well,

(03:50):
I don't think I've ever laughed so loudly. I said,
don't you know I am the most positive person. Just
look at my book. The best thing about you is you.
It's about optimism. I kept going, I'm a coach and
a motivator by nature. Then I said, doctor, let's just
focus on fixing my eyes. But Dr Desusa is a

(04:14):
good friend and a good doctor, he insisted. He set
me up with a psychiatrist named Dr Savant, and he
implored me to make the visit. That's why I did.
But I chuckled the whole right because I knew there
was nothing to be fixed. When I walked into Dr

(04:37):
Savant's office, I had a plan. I said, doctor, let's
do one thing. Why don't you tell me your problems.
What is a problem that is bothering you right now?
If you have seen me on New Amsterdam, you know
I can play a very convincing doctor. And he went

(04:58):
along with it. He said, my wife is having a
problem with her boss. I went into life coached more
immediately I said, Okay, this is the problem, and this
is how you solve it. I don't know what I
told him, but in my mind I was very convincing,
and now I was on his roll. I asked him
what are the problems he had? We spoke about so

(05:21):
many things, one after another, and I gave him terrific solutions.
At the end of my visit, I hopped up and
handed him my book The Best Thing About You Is You,
which I had brought with me, and I said, I
think we have fixed most of your problems, but if
there is anything else that's bothering you, you will find
the answer in here. Then I gave him my mobile

(05:41):
number and told him to call me if he ever
needed to talk. I was being very cocky, I think.
But as I started to leave, we began scribbling something
in his notebook. I said, Dr Sammons, what are you writing?
He said, your prescription. Mr Kerr. You're depressed and your

(06:04):
over optimism is the way you escape. Now I can
talk about mental illness and the stigma vay Indians have
about seeing a psychiatrist. I can talk about how I
became a mental health advocate. We can talk about depression
because so many of us have been depressed in this

(06:24):
COVID era, and I can tell you about how I
took medicine and then vean myself off as I learned
to change my thought patterns and behaviors. But today I'm
telling you this story because I want to talk about empathy.
During those days, I found myself regularly moved to tears.
I would see a child trying to be brave, and

(06:46):
tears would rolled on my face. I would see an
old man crossing the street and my eyes would water.
Even when I was watching shows like India's Got Talent,
I would start to tear up. So I asked Dr
Sevan Dr Why am I so affected? He said, Mr, Care,
you suffer from radical empathy. You feel greatly for these people,

(07:08):
but then you build up their stories in your mind
and you stay awake at night carrying their problems. You
have to stop making stories. Empathy is one of the
skills I rely on as an actor, that ability to
understand and share the feelings of another, and it's something
that makes the world better. But what he said rang true.

(07:33):
It's part of my job to observe the world, and
when I see someone and try to understand them, Sometimes
the stories spin out in my mind. The poor child
I see from my car window, I begin to wonder
what his family is like. Do they have enough money
for school books or a proper roof over their heads

(07:54):
to shelter them from the monsoon. And I'll build out
the story and carry it with me, or I will
give you a better example. I was in an elevator
in New York with an elderly lady and her dog,
and looking at her, I began to think, Oh my god,

(08:17):
she has no one. What a lonely person she must be.
It's snowing outside and she has come out with a
dog or a walk. Maybe she has lost her husband
in a war, and now she has to go back
alone to an empty apartment. And looking at her, I
was about to get teary eyed, when suddenly I blurted
out stopped making stories. The woman looked at me, shocked

(08:40):
and said, excuse me. Quickly, I said, no, no, I'm
just learning my lines. So I've been following off the
Suven's advice these days. I feel for people without creating

(09:00):
a narrative for them. I'm empathetic without carrying their stories.
And when I rest my head on my pillow at night,
my eyes closed more easily, and I tried my level
best to sleep. H Speaking of empathy, I want to

(09:34):
tell you about Patricia Moore, one of the world's greatest
designers who used an unusual trick to see the world
through other people's eyes. Patricia graduated college in nineteen seventy
and landed a job with Raymond Loewy. Raymond was a
big deal. His office had designed the famous Coca Pola

(09:55):
bottle and the Shell gasoline logo. But on Patricia's first
day of work, he into the office and noticed something
odder Of the three fifty designers, engineers, and architects working there,
she was the only woman. Patricia quickly learned that the
men in the office never seemed to consider what life
might be like for somebody who well, it wasn't like them.

(10:20):
Everything they designed seemed to be tailor made for able
bodied men. Like One day, her colleagues were talking about
how to improve the design on a refrigerator door, and
they were thinking about it the same old way. When
Patricia felt the urge to speak up, she said, couldn't
we design the refrigerator door so that someone with the

(10:42):
arthritis would find it easy? To open. There was silence.
Then one of her colleagues said, Patty, we don't design
for those people. Patricia was furious, as she later said,
I didn't understand the hierarchy that some people deserved good

(11:03):
design and some people didn't. What about people in wheelchairs?
What about emputees, what about the elderly? What about children?
Patricia knew the design had to be empathetic and inclusive,
and the only way to make a truly great product
was to understand what life is like for other people,
So she decided to do something about it. Patricia, who

(11:27):
was twenty six at the time, wow to transform into
an old woman. She hired a makeup artist and was
given an aged, wrinkled look. She started wearing her grandmother's
old clothes and put on foggy glasses that distorted her vision.
She plugged her ears so she couldn't hear, and wrapped

(11:48):
her torshow and bandages, forcing her to hunture. She even
wore uneven shoe that made her hobble in pain, needing
a cane. But this was more than a simple cost him.
Patricia wanted to understand what it was like to live
in the body of an older person. From Patricia visited

(12:14):
more than a d cities in North America dressed like
an old woman to see first hand the challenges facing
the elderly. She climbed stairs, walked through stores, and took
public transit. She struggled with doors, can openers, and other
everyday items. In some of her experiments, she needed a cane,

(12:34):
or a walker or a wheelchair. In one experiment, she
even sought out what life might be like as an
elderly homeless woman. When the experiment was over, Patricia detailed
her findings in a book called Disguised. She was convinced

(12:56):
that many elements of modern life needed to be changed,
and changed immediately. Patricia set up her own design firm
with the goal of creating products that work for everyone.
Since then, her work has helped countless people do simple things,

(13:16):
from creating one of the world's best potato pillars to
building an accessible public transportation system. Today, Patricia is one
of the most sought after designers in the world. Her
approach to universal design has become the industry standard, and
every day she works to make a world that's more inclusive, fair,

(13:39):
and easier for us to live in. Wait. Three items
visited like image home. That's it for today. I'm an

(14:16):
opum Care. Be kind to yourself and thank you for listening.
An O pump Cares is a production of I Heart Radio.
I'm your host A pump Care. Our executive producer Is Mangis,

(14:37):
Senior producer Julian Weller, Associate producer Morgan LaVoi. Sound design
and mixing by Julian Weller and Dan Bauza. Music by
Aaron Kauffman. Production support from Emily Marinov and Married Du.
Writing by Lucas Riley, Matt Riddle, Margon Lavoy and Julian Weller.

(15:00):
Lucas Riley and Madriddle are our story editors. Thanks to
Sikin Paru, Herman de Suza, Godwin Amana, Sidium Studios, coneal Byrne,
and Bob Pittman. H M hmm