Falling asleep was never my problem. Staying asleep — that’s where it all goes wrong.
Out cold by 11. Wide awake by 3, and not the drowsy kind of awake either. Fully operational. Brain booted up like it’s been waiting all day for this exact moment to bring up an email I forgot to send in 2019.
The maths starts immediately and it’s always the same maths. Asleep right now, five hours. Realistically, more like four and a half. Give it twenty more minutes of lying here doing this exact maths, we’re down to four. Somewhere in there I stop doing maths and start doing full dread about how useless I’ll be tomorrow — which, fair, given I’m awake doing dread math instead of sleeping.
I’ve tried the lot. Cutting caffeine at increasingly ridiculous times, an app that plays rain sounds a dog would find soothing, a weighted blanket that mostly made me too hot, a few weeks of not looking at my phone before bed which genuinely might have helped and I abandoned anyway for no reason. One trick worked exactly once and I spent the next month convinced I’d cracked the code. I had not cracked the code.
The actual shift, when it came, wasn’t a fix. It was that I stopped treating every 3 a.m. wake-up like a five-alarm emergency. Used to be: awake, panic, spiral about tomorrow, repeat. Now it’s more like: oh, hello again — and I try not to turn one bad night into two problems, being awake, and being furious about being awake.
Still get plenty of nights staring at the ceiling like it personally wronged me. But there are also nights now where I wake up, notice it, and just go back to sleep, without the whole production. Small thing. Took years to get here though, so I’m not going to pretend it’s small.
Discussion prompt: If you’re part of this club too, what’s the worst thing your brain has decided to relitigate at 3 a.m.?
— nightowl77