As educated collegiate women we all know the importance of sleep. From getting rid of those pesky eye bags to keeping us mentally sane, a healthy nights rest is absolutely essential for us to function. But sometimes it is just not all that easy to hit the hay and get our recommended 8-10 hours. With school, friends, family, work, and whatever else you may have going on in our hectic lives, by the time we actually lay down our brains are still going a mile a minute. It is one thing to be sleep deprived just because we never actually went to bed, it’s a whole other problem however when we try and try and try to fall asleep but for some reason we just can’t. I’ve broken down the stages we all go through on those particularly restless nights when we go from thinking “if I go to bed now I’ll get a solid 9 hours of sleep!” to “please dear lord if I could just have like a two hour nap here that would be all I need”.
11 pm
Getting In Bed
This is the easiest part. It has been a long day and you are about to lie in that bed like no one’s business. Cuddling up in your comforter feels like a dream and your head just fits so nicely in your fluffiest pillow. This is great; you’ll be off to Slumber City in no time.
12 am
Letting Your Mind Wander
‘Did I ever text Rachel back?’, ‘I should probably wash my sheets soon it’s been a while…’, ‘Wait, did I forget to do my Marketing homework?’, ‘No I totally did text her back we’re good’. This is where the insomnia all begins. It starts small with just thinking about how your day or your week went, but then slowly your mind drifts deeper and deeper into your own thoughts. After an hour or so of lying awake you start to contemplate some heavy stuff. Having that much time just to think can cause your thoughts to switch from ‘these sheets are really gross I’ll remember to wash them tomorrow’ to ‘one day we all just die! I’m gonna die! I wonder who will be at my funeral…I hope I’ll still have friends and family who want to come’. What was going to be a quick trip to Slumber City now has become a multiple hour commute with frequent detours and pee breaks.
1:30 am
Restlessness
After about an hour and a half of contemplating the meaning of life you start to realize how late it is getting and decide to actively try to go to sleep. You roll over on your side…then your other side…back to the original side. ‘Uh oh’ this bed that felt all too inviting two hours ago now suddenly is like laying on a bag of rocks in the middle of the desert during WW3. You cannot seem to get comfortable no matter what you do. Wrap yourself up really tight? Too hot. Kick all the sheets off? Now your room is suddenly an Arctic tundra. This is when you start getting creative and are basically at the point of doing yoga poses to contort your body into a comfy position. ‘I haven’t tried putting my head the opposite direction on my bed maybe that will help’ you think to yourself. In the end you lay face down into your pillow and just try and smother yourself to sleep.
2 am
Burst of Energy
Well now you have been trying to fall asleep for 3 hours with little to no avail. You might have gotten a 5 minute nap in there somewhere but it got lost in between planning your future wedding and getting up for a third pee break. Really after wrestling around in your bed for a while you’re wide awake and decide you might as well put this insomnia to good use. First you grab your phone and quickly scour Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Tinder, and all your text messages, emails, and photos from the last 3 months. Odd how nothing exciting is ever happening on social media at 3 am, don’t your followers know that you need constant entertainment even in the middle of the night? You passive aggressively like someone’s ‘why am I still awake its soooo late :( :(:( ‘ tweet and then put your phone down. You are not feeling tired at all now so you decide to do something actually productive by maybe getting some home work done. Approximately 5 seconds later you realize that’s the stupidest idea ever and put the textbook down and close your eyes. School work at this hour? This lack of sleep must be making you delusional!
3 am
Trying Again
Now you are at the stage where you are desperate to fall asleep. It is finally sinking in that morning will be here soon and if you don’t go to bed now you will be absolutely miserable when your alarm goes off. Here you start to get creative with your tactics to go to bed, like listening to some rain sounds or putting on that old sleep mask is somehow going to be the answer to your restlessness.‘Maybe if I just lay here really still and focus I’ll eventually fall asleep…or if I count sheep…you see that in TV shows all the time it must work’. We all know that never works though. You keep trying for another half hour, tossing and turning and trying to figure out why you can’t just FALL ASLEEP.
3:30 am
Actual Anger
‘This is absolutely absurd. Humans should just have an off-button so that we can maximize on sleep. I’m too busy to be wasting all this time right now just LAYING HERE’. We all get to the point when we’re battling insomnia that it just seems futile to continue trying and we just get mad at ourselves. ‘Why is sleep even a thing?’ ‘I bet I could pull an all nighter if I wanted to but MY STUPID BODY IS SO TIRED WHY CAN I NOT JUST FALL ASLEEP’!!! At this point you are on the cusp of having a mental break down because your brain is just so tired and you have kept it awake with your constant battle over your thoughts. Now you are losing hope as it continues to become lighter and lighter in your bedroom and you throw an actual hissy fit because you are so angry with yourself.
4:00 am
Slumber City, Population: You
Somewhere in the multiple hours that you were trying to do one of the most basic human tasks, you finally went to bed. When you wake up the next morning you realize how much you hate yourself for taking so long to get to sleep, but you have to move on and get out of bed, there is lots to do today. Tonight you will go to be earlier and maybe that will help. Slumber City was an absolute dream.