I’m writing this at 1:22 am, on a Tuesday morning, and I can’t sleep.
I’ve struggled with insomnia all my life. It was never a huge problem when I was younger, perhaps because I had no desire to get a lot of sleep or to even get up early, but I have memories of long, sleepless nights spent staring into the dark.
When I began studying in England at the cusp of my twenties, I remember it being really bad. I would lie awake, count hours, minutes, seconds, hoping that sometime soon I’ll be able to fall asleep so that I could be rested and ready for the day to come. I tried so many tricks to deal with it, get up for walks, read, have a snack, lie completely still and meditate, counting sheep, you name it. Just about everything except sleeping pills—I’d even have the occasional night cap, which only ever really helped if I had so many that it ruined my next day anyway.
A lot of my time awake in bed was spent worrying. About the papers I had to write. About upcoming tests. About my grades, my degree, my future, and money. And when I’d been lying there long enough, trying to force myself to fall asleep, I began worrying about not getting enough sleep. About being too tired to function the next day, and then the whole spiral would continue, and I’d worry about my grades, and my degree… It got to the point where I would sit up all night to study and do my papers, because it was the only way I could exhaust myself enough to fall asleep at some point, usually the morning after.
It got immediately better when I was done studying and started working. (I got my degree, by the way.) I think it had to do with not being expected to perform at a job in the same way as at the university. There were no grades to worry about, no tests. Only the slow, relentless churn of the workday, which rolled by at a constant rate, regardless of my ability to stay awake and function. I remember not having slept so well in years.
I’m in a good place now, sleeping wise. I’ve turned my habits around from being a night owl to being an annoying morning person. I get up before 6 and spend my time writing and reading before work, and I try to get to bed early. Staying up late these days does me no good.
But occasionally those sleepless nights will come back to haunt me. I don’t know if people who don’t suffer from the occasional bout of insomnia even understands what it’s like, because it’s not like I’m not tired. I’ll be so tired my eyes hurt, both from being shut and being open, and I’ll be so exhausted I can’t imagine getting up and doing anything. Yet, I’ll never fall asleep.
I think it has a lot to do with worrying. I’m not sure if I can’t sleep because I worry, or if I worry because I can’t sleep, but there’s something there. I’ll worry about where I’m headed in life. Worried about wasting my time. Worried about my art, my writing mainly, but also my music. Am I doing enough? Am I enough? Is it all even worth it? What other things could I have accomplished if I wasn’t spending my time the way I am?
It's an endless array of questions, all of them too complex for me to answer or even understand in my exhausted state. The worst part is, when I wake up—after finally managing to grab a few hours of sleep—they’re all gone.
Every single worry.
They don’t exist anymore in that pale, tired light of the dawn. They’re all washed away, and I am both happy and content with not just my life, but all that I have and all that I have set out to do.
I’ve spent about thirty minutes that I could have spent trying to sleep to write this, and I hope that maybe it can help someone else.
Maybe you don’t struggle with insomnia, like me, but maybe you worry. We all worry, most of us too much, and for no reasons at all. I worry because I can’t sleep and then I can’t sleep because I worry, but I know that it doesn’t do me any good. Worrying never does. Worrying isn’t problem solving. It doesn’t set out to fix anything. Worrying doesn’t change bad habits or create new patterns of behavior. Worrying is just worrying, and it’s utterly useless.
Take it from me, worrying over lost sleep has never made me sleep any better. And all of those worries that used to keep me up at night, way back when—but also now—never amounted to anything. I can honestly say that not a single one of those things I lay there in the dark, thinking about and dreading, ever came true.
It’s even later now. I’m going to go back to bed and try to get some rest before I have to go to work.
And I’m going to try not to worry about it.
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