I Stopped Trying to Fix My Sleep

I think it happened on a Tuesday, around 2am.

I'd already done the things. The magnesium. The chamomile. The breathing pattern I'd saved from a video 3 weeks earlier. My phone was face down on the other side of the room. The window was open. The temperature was, supposedly, correct.

And I was still awake.

For years, sleep had been a problem to solve. Something I was failing at, quietly and consistently, while the rest of the world seemed to manage it without thinking. There was a version of me that woke at 6am in a tidy house, made coffee, read for 20 minutes, walked into the her day already rested. I'd seen her on the internet. I'd read her morning routine. I knew she existed somewhere.

I just couldn't get to her.

Every night had become an attempt. Every morning was a verdict. How long did it take you? How many times did you wake up? Did you remember any dreams? Did you, technically, sleep?

The trying was it's own exhaustion. Possibly the worst part of it.

So I stopped.

Not in a dramatic way. I didn't throw out the magnesium or unfollow the accounts or write a manifesto about it. I just, very quietly, gave up on the project. The project of becoming someone who slept properly. The project of having normal nights, fixing this thing that maybe wasn't going to be fixed. At least not on the timeline I'd been keeping.

What I noticed first was that the nights get softer.

Not shorter, the hours were still there. The waking at 3am, the laying in the dark with a mind that wouldn't settle, all of that was still there. But the second layer, they layer of frustration about being awake, started to thin out, because I wasn't keeping score anymore. There was nothing to fail at, I was just a person, awake, in a room, at a particular hour.

And that, it turned out, was survivable.

I started doing different things in the dark. Not strategies or protocols. Just things. I would listen to something slow on low volume. I would think about a memory I liked. Sometimes I would just lie there and notice the sound of the house, the soft tick of whatever was ticking, the occasional car passing somewhere out beyond the wall. The night stopped feeling like a place I was trapped in, it started feeling like a place I was, simply, present in.

Some nights I still slept badly and some nights I slept well. The difference between them mattered less that it used to.

I'm not telling you this because I think you should stop trying to fix your sleep. I don' know what you need. You might need to try harder or you might need to seek someone out to speak to. You might need to do all the things I did and find that they work for you in a way they didn't for me. This isn't advice, this is just what happened to me.

But I do think there's something worth saying about the trying itself. About how, for some of us, the effort to sleep correctly becomes it's own kind of insomnia. A vigilance about whether we're relaxed enough. A monitoring of our own rest, a small voice asking, every few minutes, if it's working yet.

That voice is not restful, it can't be. It's the opposite of restful.

What I gave up, I think, was that voice or at least I stopped feeling it. I let the nights be what they were. I let myself be a person who sometimes doesn't, who isn't required to perform rest, who isn't being graded.

It's been a quieter way to live.

The sleep, oddly, has started to come more often than it used to. Not always, no reliably. But more often, I think because I stopped reaching for it. I think because the room stopped being a stage and I think because there is something in the nervous system that knows when it's being watched and won' perform under those conditions.

I don't know if any of this is useful to you, I just wanted to say it, in case you needed to hear it from someone who has been awake at 2am, on a Tuesday, doing all the right things, and getting nowhere.

You're allowed to stop.