Unexpected Insomnia

June 15, 2015

Here’s a weird thing that’s happened over the weekend: I had trouble falling asleep. If you talk to Liz, you’ll find out just how unusual this is. I usually fall asleep within 5-10 minutes of my head hitting the pillow. I fall asleep faster than a narcoleptic on Quaaludes.

So it’s odd that I had trouble falling asleep not once, but twice this weekend.

At the end of the day Friday, I had a small “freakout” moment related to work. There’s a larger projcet I’m working on, and a lot of it has been left up to me to determine. The sheer scope if the work is intimidating, but I think a large part of my anxiety comes from needing more information and help from others.

Things kind of just hit me on Friday, at the end of the day. And it was like this thing where my mind started racing and iterating through steps… but before I could really cleanly finish or address one concern, another would rear its head. And that would trigger another series of iterations that caused more concerns.

It was an odd thing to experience, and it has kind of stuck with me over the weekend. Friday night, when I went to sleep… I couldn’t. I kept thinking about why I was feeling how I was feeling, and how I might rectify/address my worries/anxieties.

I think I figured it out (my solution involves speaking to a few people, and asking other folks for help). But on Friday night, I kept turning things over and over in my head, unable to shut my brain off. Somewhere around 1:30 AM I just gave up, and started playing on my phone as a distraction. I think I finally set my phone down somewhere around 3AM.

Saturday, I slept pretty well (due in no small part to all the work we did). But last night, my head started running through scenarios again.

I feel better this morning, in that I know what I need to do when I get in to work. But I couldn’t stop my brain from churning last night, as it just seemed like a machine that wouldn’t stop running. I remember checking my phone at 1AM, and then later at 1:49AM. I think that maybe 30 minutes later, I started drifting in and out of sleep, a bit.

We’ll see how today goes. My hope is that I’ll be feeling better, once I have a more solid plan in place for my work stuff. At the very least, I’m hoping this insomnia will have made me tired enough that I’ll fall asleep that much faster, tonight.

[ CC photo via Colin Hughes ]