Sleepless in Seattle

When I can’t sleep, it isn’t that I can’t fall asleep to start with — it’s that I wake up either hot or revved-up or both. I tell myself the feeling is from a hormone, maybe cortisol, which will clear out in about twenty minutes, and until then I should relax my body by focusing on my breath. Of course, going back to sleep isn’t always that straightforward. What is it like for you, if you awaken in the night?

Sunday Jan. 17, 2021, 4 AM — I woke up two hours ago and am not sure I’ve been back to sleep since, so I got up. I woke up feeling hot and suddenly wondered if I had turned the thermostat up by 1-2 degrees as I sometimes do in the evening, and if that had prevented it from automatically lowering to its “sleep” phase. Once I thought of that, I was wide awake, feeling I had wrecked our night of sleep. But when I pushed off the covers, I was quite sure the room was cooling as usual (which was correct). And yet I laid awake for two hours. Various snippets of Bee Gees songs were going through my head at too loud a volume.

How I felt: nervous stomach, longing to be able to sleep all the way through a night without waking up, disappointment and a bit of feeling like a failure for being awake, feeling at the mercy of the loud songs going through my head, feeling very awake.

What is the nervous feeling? It seems only physical — a faster heart (a little), and just the slightest “butterflies” feeling. Not extreme. Is this anxiety, or just my metabolism speeding up for some other reason? Often I can calm that slightly sped-up feeling by observing and slowing my breath, but that’s a lot harder when the song in my head is too loud.

Any time I actually consider getting up and coming downstairs, I should do it, because the “decision” process wakes me up more.