Today I was texting with my friend Tatiana when I noticed that every time I mentioned my gastrologist in Albany, Spell Check had changed it to “my astrologist in Albany.”

“A word of advice,” Tatiana typed. “Watch out for those Albany fortune tellers!”

Also, aside from the fact that referring to a gastrologist as “my gastrologist” seems a little possessive-after all, Dr. Hornblower obviously sees many patients. I was taken aback by how often I brought him up in conversation. I must be more worried about my medical issues than I was admitting to myself, and that’s probably what has been disturbing my sleep.

Insomnia can be a problem. Either you can’t fall asleep, or else you wake up in the wee hours of the morning. The inability to fall back asleep creates anxiety, which starts a vicious circle.

“I have to get some sleep! I’m giving my big speech in three hours!”

The clock strikes four. “Oh no! I’ve been lying awake here since midnight!”

There will always be someone who will tell you “Oh, just get up and do something useful when you can’t sleep!”

In fact, according to the historian Roger Ekirch, for millennia people in Europe and around the world went to bed, woke up in the middle of the night, socialized and performed all manner of tasks, and then went back to bed. In England, this was called two sleeps.

These are different times, and for most of us that isn’t really an option. Even though you are not sleepy, you are tired, and so anything you attempt will turn out wrong.

The obvious answer here is drugs, and you have a choice of uppers and downers.

Although it is counterintuitive, you could take uppers, an energy-enhancing drug like caffeine or methamphetamine, which, while it may not improve the quality of your performance, will give you the impression that it does and get you tearing around the house like a maniac, cleaning walls and vacuuming dog hair you never even noticed before.

There is always a downside, though. Eventually you will have to “come down off speed,” an experience known all too well by speed freaks as one of the most unpleasant imaginable. You will be very cranky and horrid to be around as your sense of personal power, razor-sharp intellect, competence and wellbeing, probably illusory but nonetheless exciting while it lasted, drains away. Eventually you will fall asleep, right before you were supposed to be giving that speech. Still, at least the walls will be sanitary.

Then there are the downers, which come in many varieties. It may require more than chamomile tea to take the edge off; but remember, you don’t want to ingest too much of some highly efficient drug, with the result that you forget to breathe.

Lunesta is a brand name for eszopiclone. Ambien is a brand name for zolpidem. Both of these drugs are sedatives, also known as hypnotics, that may cause people to sleepwalk, eat meals, talk on the phone and even drive around and then remember nothing about it the next day.

My friend Darla said she ate a whole bag of beef jerky under the influence and then next day blamed her husband, who denied it. He woke up and witnessed the whole event. The perils of sleepwalking have convinced some to just go back to passing out from drinking alcohol, which at least has the advantage of being a known quantity.

An overactive conscience will also cause anxiety; worrying about guilt, real or imagined, can keep you awake. Worry is one reason why people can’t get the sleep they need, and it doesn’t help at all to be constantly reminded by the media that not getting enough sleep has harmful effects ranging from heart disease to dementia.

Boredom is an antidote to insomnia. One thing I found reliably sent me to dreamland — this was long ago, granted — was taking eight o’clock lecture classes in the morning. Another foolproof college-related sleep-inducer was attending library science classes that dealt with such subjects as shelving techniques or Melvil Dewey and his library classification system and abbreviated-spelling methodology.

Still, anyone can fall asleep during the day.

And by the way, Spell Check, isn’t it supposed to be astrologer, not astrologist? Then too, maybe it’s gastroenterologist, not gastrologist.

Have a good week.

(Martha Allen lives in Keene Valley. She has been writing for the News for more than 20 years.)