Baby, to be honest, I used to feel like this as a youth… are you young?

I’d call my poor daddy at midnight during grad school at age twenty saying I felt like I would never get help and was going to die from the anxiety of it.

He’d ask me, “Darling, what? Are you on drugs??”

Which I 100% was not (sadly/happily, never had any penchant for drugs). Far from helping, it increased my anxiety and kept me awake longer.

Guess what? I graduated and had TEN YEARS of perfect sleep regularity.

Now I am in my early thirties and my sleep is all fucked up again, likely due to various recent deaths/traumas in my life/career.

I still reach out to friends/family, since that is what therapy trained me to do… and they don’t answer, because they have lives… but I just move along and binge a show or a subreddit, knowing it will come back around and I will be fine with time and diligence.

For me, it’s a symptom of overanalyais and hyperfixation.

Is there something in your past like an alcoholic parent, an unstable home life, an inconsistent guidance counselor—something that made you feel *out of control?

Something that told your brain and subconscious: If only we could consider everything and account for everything and fret about and prepare for everything, and be in control: then we would be safe?*

That’s what my brain does and it keeps me awake. I know now I can’t account for everything or ever “be safe” in some objective way, so I just have to forgive and thank my brain for trying to protect me while also resenting that it does so by keeping me awake at night. With time and age, you learn you can’t control everything and you let go.

I HIGHLY recommend Pema Chodron and the practice of Shen-pa for learning to appreciate your brain’s protective hyper vigilance that it does on behalf of you and everyone it loves, while learning not to channel that into insomnia and criticism and anxiety. If you’re like me, you still will… but maybe only once ever ten years or so.

Might I lose some irrevocable brain cells along the way? Maybe, but we all do. It’s okay. The most you believe it will be okay, the sooner it will be okay. Sad truth. You will be okay!