2083: Insomnia

I find it really difficult to get to sleep. I think I always have to a certain degree, but I feel like I’ve become a lot more conscious (no pun intended) of it in the last year or two.

My issue, I think, is that I don’t really know how to make myself fall asleep. I can lie down in bed, get comfortable, close my eyes and everything, but actually getting my body to go “It’s now safe to turn off your computer” proves somewhat difficult; many is the night I find myself lying awake until 2 or 3am attempting to drift off and failing miserably, even as my wife Andie succumbs to slumberland in a matter of seconds next to me.

The fact that I don’t really know how to make myself fall asleep is coupled with the fact that night-time, when it’s dark and quiet and oddly lonely (even if you’re sleeping next to someone), is the time when my brain generally decides that now would be a great time to start thinking about all the things I don’t really want to think about.

I have anxiety issues, and these manifest most clearly during the night. The exact circumstances vary from night to night, but at present the most commonly recurring one is thinking back to my last day at my previous job and remembering how awful the people there made me feel, then contemplating what might have happened if I had allowed myself to fly off the handle at those people who had made my life a misery. So vivid are the images and the feelings that these thoughts give me that they make me feel even more anxious — and, naturally, the more I try not to think about them, the more the images loop around and around in my mind.

Ultimately, I do get to sleep every night, but given how long it generally takes, I often find myself pretty tired in the morning and disinclined to get up at a “normal” time unless I absolutely have to; oddly enough, I find it really easy to fall asleep in the morning after having woken up once, and one side-effect of this that I find intoxicatingly addictive in many ways is the fact that the dreams I have during these morning sleeps are far more vivid than any I might have during the night. It’s rare that these dreams feed off my anxiety, either; generally, they are interesting, or strange, or exciting rather than scary, unpleasant or upsetting. I look forward to days when I can have a guilt-free lie-in and enjoy these experiences, but I do wish I could get my sleep patterns back to being a little bit more “normal”.

Still, at least they’re not quite as fucked up as they were five years ago when my first wife and I had split up; my body clock ballsed up so much during that stressful period that I couldn’t get to sleep before about 5am, and I would sleep through until about 5pm without waking up at all, making it somewhat embarrassing when I’d go into the local shop to get provisions and the cashier would ask how my day had been. I guess I should be thankful for that, at least.

Tonight, it may be 3am but I have been enjoying an evening of pleasant company with my regular gaming buddies, so I haven’t yet gone to bed. I feel I may not have too much difficulty drifting off tonight, for once, but we shall see, I guess!