When You Can’t Sleep, Try This
A 3-step process that helped me battle anxiety at night
You wake up in the middle of the night and go to the bathroom. You rush back to bed and close your eyes with the intention of going back to sleep but your mind turns up with a smirk and surprises you with a few unwelcome thoughts that cause you to trip up.
You try to balance yourself by thinking of tonight’s earlier dreams and focus on sending your consciousness to the back of your mind but it makes a joke in the form of an insult.
Your ears have perked up and although you’re telling your mind to be quiet because it’s 3 AM, she knows she’s got your attention so her jokes become louder and more full-on.
She whispers how silly you are to think that you could possibly make it as a writer since nobody cares about what you have to say.
She laughs at your futile efforts to restore any kind of objective thinking about perseverance, determination, and belief in yourself.
Your anxiety is winning yet another battle because she got to you at your weakest state — when you were half asleep and your guard was down. If it takes such brainpower to not spiral during the day, you’re screwed in the middle of the night.
Identify the Issue
This literally happens to me 2 or 3 nights per week, but I go through phases of it happening every day for weeks, or not at all.
Sometimes, I go back to sleep within an hour, sometimes I don’t.
The days where I don’t go back to sleep, I fight really hard to remain optimistic. My mind plays tricks on me and sees cracks in myself where there aren’t any. Or rather, she sees the cracks as weaknesses when they should be seen as opportunities.
I needed to get to the root cause of my lack of sleep. I found the pattern here was my fear of failure as a writer due to there being virtually no time to make a career out of it.
Acceptance
I had spent hours in the night for weeks worrying about the issue without really accepting its presence. Rather than breaking the problem down I was trying to fight against it, to no avail.
I had to accept that it was there until I figured out a solution.
- Getting 8 hours of sleep a day.
- Finding extra time to write without compromising time with my son or burning out.
Exploring Solutions With Practice Rather Than Theory
Today, when my husband’s alarm went off at 4:50 AM and he dragged himself out of bed, I confessed I had been awake since 3:20 AM and could not for the life of me go back to sleep. This is not the first time he’s heard me complain about the same thing.
Normally, I stay in bed till at least 5:45 and then I get up and start the day. That’s my prime time for practising my version of meditation and mindfulness in the form of coffee and writing or reading. But if I have not slept for 2 hours before then, it takes a lot for me to feel “good” again.
Today was different. Today was the start of a new coping mechanism which hopefully is going to be more productive and efficient, or at least turn something I see as negative into something positive.
“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” — Benjamin Franklin
Devonte asked me how many hours I’d slept. I thought about it, and actually, it was around 5.5/6 hours. Not ideal, I’m a straight 8 hours a night kind of person, but at this point, good enough. It was impossible even if I did go back to sleep at 5 AM to get my desired count, and that was unlikely to happen anyway.
Devonte challenged my method of being utterly determined to go back to sleep when he has seen me fail more often than not.
He commanded me to get up. He told me not to think about it and to just do.
So I sprung out of bed, threw on my favourite hoodie, hood up, and ran downstairs to make coffee.
While the coffee brewed, I stretched with my husband and as he headed outside to work out, I came into my office and wrote this very piece.
Getting up so early would not have been appealing at all had I thought about it— I look after an energetic toddler all day and it’s draining. However, I knew I would have been exhausted regardless of whether I got up at 5 AM or not since I was awake. Now, I feel good that I didn't waste my time focusing on going back to sleep when I knew I wouldn’t.
This is in no way a sustainable long-term solution. I think I genuinely need to look into ways of going back to sleep in the middle of the night. But, in the meantime, I concur that tossing and turning in bed is counterproductive.
Two Weeks Later
I have gone back to this very article after waking up at 5 AM for the last two weeks.
I feel renewed.
I feel fresh and motivated.
More importantly, I have slept through the night every day. The insecurities that were haunting me in the night were due to a glitch in my career as a writer — I needed to set a new routine.
I was worried about failing because I had less and less time to write. And then, the universe woke me up at 5 AM every day, strengthening my resolve to make it.
I share this because although I am generally happy with myself, I want to show I still feel anxious and low sometimes, and that’s normal.
What is more important is how we choose to react. I am practising being a doer and feeling good in spite of my anxiety.
Last Words
It’s about carrying out the following:
- Identify the root cause of your anxiety.
- Accept that it’s there with an objective mind.
- Trial and error your solutions with practice — had I thought too much about getting up at 5 before actually doing it I would’ve entered the new routine with a sceptical mind and failed before I’d even started.
I have written, read, and meditated more in the last week than I have the previous couple of months and I feel damn good.
I had an issue that needed solving, it just took me some time to figure out what the issue was. The problem wasn’t anxiety — the problem was time.
Time is the ultimate gift that allows you to fulfil your potential.
Time is the great equaliser.
Time is love.
Sylvia Emokpae, thinker and philosopher, is passionate about self-love, motherhood, and pro-race. See more work like this.