After a full day of classes, work, socialization, or whatever takes up your day, everyone looks forward to the end of the night when you can just drift to sleep. A solid eight hours of complete and total relaxation. The sun starts lowering, and the moon and stars come out. Everything I needed to do today is finished; I suppose it is time to go to bed, close my eyes, and sleep. So, I brush my teeth, wash my face, and set up my bed for the perfect night of sleep. The world is a little quieter, yet I cannot sleep.
My mind races with a million thoughts, whether it’s about what I should’ve done differently during the day or that one time when I learned bananas are radioactive. I could be tired all day long, but by the time I get in bed, it’s like my mind snaps back into it.
You would think after 20 years, I would have this sleep thing down, but night after night, a mental process occurs. You would also assume that after dragging my half-awake self through the day, I would be exhausted enough to sleep. This is how it feels to deal with insomnia.
I’ve tried everything: meditation, drinking tea, sleep masks, changing my sleep schedule, not going on my phone before bed, reading anything, taking medication, working out before bed, etc. When I get in bed, my brain realizes I am going from being conscious to unconscious, and it doesn’t want that.
So, on one of my nights of restlessness, I decided to do a deep dive on insomnia, not looking for tips but rather the why.
When I started researching, I learned that insomnia is rarely just about not being tired. It is about hyperarousal, a nervous system that refuses to power down. Apparently, some brains don’t understand that nighttime is not a threat. Cortisol, the stress hormone meant to help with surviving deadlines and awkward social interactions, lingers longer than it should. Even when my body is exhausted, my mind is still standing guard, scanning for problems that may have happened or might still happen, but do not exist at 12:47 a.m.
Then, I learned about the circadian rhythm, the internal clock that is supposed to cue sleep and wakefulness like a well-rehearsed stage manager. Light exposure, lying in bed all day, inconsistent schedules, late-night scrolling, all of it can nudge that rhythm off balance. For some people, that clock runs a little late naturally. For others, anxiety presses the snooze button on rest. The more you worry about not sleeping, the harder sleep becomes (extremely relatable). It is a cruel cycle; the fear of being tired tomorrow keeps you awake tonight.
Finally, I read about something called “conditioned arousal,” which essentially means your brain starts associating your bed with frustration instead of rest. If night after night you lie there awake, your body learns that the bed is a place for thinking, not sleeping.
Although not always the case for me, during a long period of intense insomnia, this does bear true. Sometimes, the second my head hits the pillow, it is like my brain clocks in for a night shift. Suddenly, I am replaying conversations from three years ago, reorganizing my future, wondering if I locked my car, or Googling whether that guy in that movie is married to that girl in that other movie. My bed is soft, my room is dark, and yet my thoughts are fluorescent.
What surprised me most was learning that insomnia can be tied to being “tired but wired.” That phrase felt written specifically for me. On certain days, I move through life in a fog, yawning in class, rereading the same sentence three times, counting down the hours until I can crawl back into bed. But when nighttime arrives, my brain panics at the idea of shutting off and clings to consciousness like it is something fragile.
Understanding why did not solve all my problems, but it softened the frustration. It reminded me that this is not a personal failure or a lack of discipline. It is tangled up with stress, expectations, and the quiet pressure of being a young woman who feels like she should always be kind, be smart, be right, be helpful, be original, be extraordinary, be… be… be.
So now, I try to meet myself with a little more patience. I remind myself that rest does not always look like eight uninterrupted hours. Sometimes it looks like closing my eyes and letting the thoughts pass without chasing them. Sometimes it looks like accepting that tomorrow might be fueled by coffee. And sometimes, it simply looks like forgiving myself for being a tragically tired young woman who is still figuring it out, even at 1 a.m.
Certainly, this won’t last forever, right?