Insomnia. Nature vs. Nurture - The Wolf of Wall Street Can’t Sleep

According to this article,  Jordan Belfort appears

 to have had a sleep disorder from infancy.

Clearly this story is more psychologically complicated,  but the article captures the essence of a nature-nurture debate with respect to insomnia and its impact on a life.  JR

(Photo: Lauren Greenfield)

The Wolf of Wall Street Can’t Sleep

You can see why Leonardo DiCaprio wanted to play Jordan Belfort in the movie.

The courts at the tennis club in Manhattan Beach are full, and the pool is overflowing with bikinis. It’s a brilliant summer afternoon, and over at the juice bar, drenched in sweat after hitting for an hour or so, Jordan Belfort and I are parked on stools and talking about his Big Problem. It’s plagued him since he was a child. Even in prison, he couldn’t make it stop.

“I can’t sleep,” he tells me as the waitress arrives to take our order.

..

“From the time he was born, he never really slept,” Leah Belfort, Jordan’s mother, tells me in the kitchen of their two-bedroom apartment in Bayside.

“He can’t sit still,” Max Belfort, his father, says.

“We’d come into the room, and he’d be watching his fingers,” Leah says about Jordan’s infant years. “I’d say to Max, ‘He’s not sleeping. He must be dumb. What kind of dummy are we raising?’ ”

...

Consider the following list of ingredients he packed inside “a brown leather Louis Vuitton shower bag” on a trip to Czechoslovakia, according to his memoir: “a half-ounce of sinsemilla, 60 pharmaceutical Quaaludes, some bootleg uppers, some bootleg downers, a sandwich bag full of cocaine, a dozen hits of ecstasy, and then the safe stuff: a vial of Xanax, a vial of morphine, some Valiums and Restorils and Somas and Vicodins, and some Ambiens and Ativans and Klonopins, as well as a half-consumed pack of Heineken and a mostly consumed bottle of ­Macallan’s to wash things down.”

....

“In a single word, it’s attention, a craving for attention,” Coleman says. “I think it’s the issues that cause the insomnia, not the insomnia that causes the issues.”

Full artilce on Jordan Belfort