Time to Sleep
It’s 11:30pm. Shit. Ok, 5 more minutes, Shohini. It’s midnight. Close the laptop try to sleep.
Turn off the lights. Breathe. Count the sheep. Lump in my throat. Chest is hard. Intentionally relax my shoulders. Chest is still hard. Count backwards.
Nope, says my brain.
Turn on the light. Open the laptop. Watch something. Anything. To stop the noise and talk inside your head. It’s 3:30am. The brain is so tired, it has finally shut up. It’s quiet now – I can sleep.
Nights are the hardest. It’s when everything else is quiet. No work. Nobody else awake. Nothing to do but to quiet your mind, relax and sleep. But that’s when all the thoughts come rushing in like a wave. Some days the breathing and relaxation works. The rain-making sleep app on my phone runs for five minutes and I’m asleep. Other days, all the thoughts that I have been pushing aside start appearing one by one.
“That thing I told my colleague, her face changed a little bit I think. What does that mean? Will she not like me anymore? Have I offended her? I should have said it slightly differently.”
Then I have to tell myself that I am overthinking and it’s happened and I need to forget it and sleep. My brain tells me ok and then — boom, another thought. It might be something from that day or even possibly something from last decade.
Overthinking. Active brain. I’m grateful for it most of the time. I think about things a lot. About how my actions affect other people. What my behaviour tells me about myself. Everyday changes I need to make. But it also leads to decision paralysis, trepidation about everyday activities and then of course, sleepless nights.
So I constantly work on my anxiety – try to take the good and change the bad. When I’m counting the seconds at the red light and can feel my heart rate increasing, I consciously look the other way. When I’m obsessively checking the Instagram picture that I uploaded 17 minutes ago for recent likes and feel the irrational thoughts forming, I tell myself to get off of social media. When I’m typing an email to my boss and suddenly notice that my shoulders are crunched and I’m not breathing, I stop, take 3 deep breaths and continue.
But those are the good days. The good moments when I catch myself and push back to stress less. Then there are the days when it’s 1am and nothing I did worked so I wrote a blog post.
Time to close the laptop.
