Insomnia sucks. For reasons that I’m not going to go into right now, I’ve suffered from anxiety-induced insomnia for a few years. I know when it started, and I know the cause, but it is currently outside of my power to fix the problem. When I do put the solution into play, I’ll tell you everything if I feel like it.
In the mean time, just know that I think it sucks. I strongly advise you to sleep as much as you can, but I also know that it’s really hard to do that in our society. We seem to value at least two things above our own health: working to make money, and entertainment. With respect to our health, these to things lie in shades of gray and are unbalanced.
We work so that we can make money, but we are also working to make someone else even more money. Because our actions earn money for someone else, they will encourage us to work hard and set up a reward system to keep us at it. This has a Pavlovian response so that we associate working harder with greater rewards, regardless of the cost.
I’m not trying — in this article, at least — to argue that we are all over-worked. I bring this up because it puts our value of work above our value of sleep. The same can be said of entertainment. Our lives are stressful, and fun these days is super fun, so we are more than happy to sacrifice sleep for entertainment.
I know this because I have to deal with it. I’ve lost out on sleep for these reasons and more. I’ve tried lots of things to help me sleep, but they all fail in the end. I’ve even tried barely sleeping, then working out hard, just to get a good night’s sleep the next night. I just end up awake and more tired.
I lay there each night, trying to relax…trying to rest. I lie to myself and say that I’m resting because I’m not moving. But that still isn’t sleep. Sometimes I wake up intensely, realizing that I had been sleeping for a bit, like I was betraying something or someone for those few minutes of shut-eye.
I just realized that I don’t really have a point for this post. I’m OK with that.
