I haven’t slept well in months. Not dramatically poorly. Just that low-grade insomnia where you sleep enough to function but never enough to feel rested.
Everyone has advice. Routines, supplements, meditation apps, sleep hygiene protocols. I’ve tried most of them. Some help, marginally. None solve it.
Because the problem isn’t sleep. The problem is I’m trying to sleep while still being the person who created the conditions that prevent it.
Sleep is surrender. That’s what makes it difficult.
You have to let go. Stop controlling. Trust that consciousness will return. For several hours, you become powerless, unproductive, absent from the world.
For people like me, people who’ve spent decades believing our value lies in constant effort, sleep feels like failure.
The Romans had a god of sleep: Somnus. Brother to Death. They understood the kinship. Every night we practice dying. We let ourselves disappear, trusting we’ll return.
That trust doesn’t come easily to everyone.
I think about hunter-gatherers, sleeping in shifts, always half-alert for predators. The inability to fully rest was survival. Maybe some of us carry that forward, the genetic echo of necessary vigilance.
Or maybe that’s just a story I tell myself to justify being bad at something as basic as sleep.
The scientific literature is clear: sleep deprivation destroys you slowly. Cognitive decline, emotional dysregulation, physical deterioration. It’s not sustainable.
And yet, here I am. Sustaining it. Badly, but persistently.
There’s a meditation practice where you observe yourself falling asleep. You lie there, maintaining awareness as consciousness begins to dissolve. The edge between waking and sleeping, that liminal space where you’re both and neither.
I can’t do it. Every time I get close, some part of me panics and pulls back. Like standing at the edge of a cliff, unable to jump even though you know there’s water below.
My grandmother used to say sleep will come when you stop chasing it. Like happiness, like love, like most things worth having. They arrive when you stop demanding they do.
But how do you stop demanding sleep when you’re desperate for it?
The philosopher Alan Watts talked about the “backwards law”: the idea that the more you pursue something, the more it eludes you. Trying to fall asleep keeps you awake. Trying to be happy makes you miserable. Trying to relax creates tension.
So what’s the alternative? Give up? Stop caring whether you sleep?
I tried that too. Radical acceptance. If I don’t sleep, I don’t sleep. Let it be what it is.
It helped, surprisingly. Not with sleeping, but with the anxiety about not sleeping. Which is different, but significant.
Maybe that’s the real issue. Not the sleeplessness itself, but the story I tell about it. The catastrophising. The sense that I’m failing at something I should be able to do without effort.
Children sleep easily because they haven’t learned to be afraid of disappearing. They let go without hesitation, trusting the world will still be there when they wake.
Somewhere along the way, I lost that trust. Or maybe I never had it. Maybe I’ve always been the child who fights bedtime, who resists the letting go.
Last night I slept six hours. Not enough, but more than usual. I don’t know why. Nothing changed in my routine. I just… let go, for once.
This morning I feel almost human. Which is enough.
Maybe sleep, like everything else worth having, comes not from trying harder but from learning to try less. From practising surrender until it stops feeling like defeat.
I’m still learning. Still spending too many nights staring at the ceiling, mind racing through the same familiar loops.
But occasionally, now, I fall. And for a few hours, I disappear. And when I return, the world is still here.
That’s something.