The Sunday Night Insomnia

I remember the first time it really happened.

October, 2019, my kitchen in Brooklyn. The clock on the microwave said 1:47 AM. I was sitting on the cold tile floor in my underwear eating leftover pad thai out of the carton with a fork. Sunday night. My alarm was set for 6:30. I’d been lying in bed since 11.

That was the night Sunday night insomnia became a thing.

Before that I had this idea of insomnia being romantic. Like Audrey Hepburn staring out rain-streaked windows with a cigarette, writing poetry by candlelight. Yeah, no. That’s not what it is. Real insomnia is sitting on your kitchen floor in your boxers at 1:47 AM eating cold noodles because your body is too tired to make a sandwich but too wired to lie down again. And specifically, weirdly, only on Sunday nights.

Why Sundays? Why only Sundays?

I asked my therapist this once. She looked at me like I’d asked her why water is wet. She said, “Your brain knows Monday is coming. It’s pre-grieving.”

Pre-grieving. Like that’s not the most depressing phrase anyone has ever handed me about my own behavior.

Here’s what Sunday night insomnia actually looks like if you’re new to the club (welcome, I’m sorry, it sucks here):

Your eyes are scratchy and heavy. You went to bed at a reasonable hour, maybe even 11. You did the whole sleep hygiene thing — phone in another room, herbal tea, the right pillow, the right temperature. You’re tired in that bone-deep way. You yawned fourteen times brushing your teeth. You think tonight will be different.

You lie down.

Your stomach does this weird flip. Not nausea exactly. More like the moment right before a rollercoaster drops. And then your brain goes, “Oh! We’re thinking about Monday now! Let’s review every email you might get tomorrow! Let’s replay that one thing you said in a meeting three weeks ago that you thought was fine but actually maybe wasn’t! Let’s think about how you’re going to handle Q4 deliverables when you haven’t even started Q3!”

That’s the thing. Sunday night insomnia isn’t really about sleep. It’s about Monday wearing a sleep costume.

It’s the Sunday scaries plus an inability to shut your brain off. The scaries alone are awful enough — most of us know that low-grade dread when you realize the weekend is almost over. But Sunday night insomnia is the scaries’ bigger, meaner older brother. It’s the scaries with insomnia strapped to its back like a jetpack.

My friend Sam calls it “executive function jet lag.” I used that phrase for a while too because it sounded smarter than “I might throw my phone across the room.”

When did it become a regular thing for me?

Honestly? Pandemic. Spring 2020. I was working from home, my apartment was my office, my bed was my office, my kitchen was my office. There was no separation between “Sunday” and “Monday.” They bled into each other. I’d close my laptop at 6 PM on Sunday feeling kind of accomplished — made a real meal, did laundry, called my mom. Then I’d open it again at 9 PM because I had this itch that something would slip through the cracks if I didn’t.

By Tuesday I was wrecked. By Wednesday I was bargaining with myself about whether 4 PM coffee was a bad idea (it was, and yet). By Friday I was a husk. Then Monday rolled around again. And again. The Sunday night insomnia just kind of… embedded itself in me like a splinter you can’t reach.

I’m not going to tell you how I fixed it. Because I haven’t.

I have tricks. They work sometimes. Chamomile tea that I’m not convinced isn’t just hot water my brain has decided to believe in. Magnesium glycinate pills that run me about $18 a month at the CVS on Flatbush and that I forget to take half the time. The 4-7-8 breathing thing — inhale 4 seconds, hold 7, exhale 8 — except I usually give up before getting to the third cycle, so I genuinely cannot tell you if that one works.

I’m writing this at 2:14 AM on a Sunday night that has technically become Monday morning. My laptop is on my chest. There’s a half-eaten cup of yogurt on my nightstand. I can hear my neighbor’s TV through the wall — sounds like a rerun of Seinfeld. There’s that familiar slight sound of laughter through drywall.

I did all the things I’m supposed to do today.

Woke up at 9. Made coffee. Went for a walk in the park behind my building — 40 minutes, headphones in, listened to a podcast about the Roman Empire that I cannot remember a single fact from now. Made dinner — salmon, rice, frozen broccoli, the sad kind. Watched three episodes of a show I won’t name because it’s embarrassing. (It’s Emily in Paris, I have no defense for this, the show is what it is.) Called my sister. We talked for 47 minutes about her dog who has some kind of skin condition and now has to wear a cone.

Today was, by any reasonable standard, a good Sunday.

And here I am.

The thing I can’t explain to people is that it’s not really thoughts. I don’t have a running monologue of worries. I don’t have a to-do list churning. It’s more like a frequency. Like my brain is tuned to a station I can’t change and that station is just… static, but heavy static. Static with weight to it.

That’s when my chest does the thing. It gets tight, not pain-tight, just aware-tight. Like my body knows Monday is coming and my muscles are bracing for impact in advance. My jaw clenches. I clench my jaw when I sleep and didn’t even know it until my dentist told me in 2022, then charged me $480 for a night guard I now wear every night. I make fists under the covers like I’m fighting someone in my dreams.

I read somewhere that this kind of Sunday night insomnia is sometimes called “anticipatory anxiety” and that it’s super common in people whose jobs require them to be “on” all week — customer service, teachers, anyone in tech, anyone whose brain is basically rented out to their employer from 9 to 5 (or 9 to 9, or 9 to whenever the fuck the Slack notification stops).

I am in tech. My brain is, indeed, rented out.

Last Sunday I tried something different. I called in sick Monday morning. Just to test it. Just to see what happens if I break the cycle. I sat on my couch in my pajamas at 10:30 AM on a Monday and felt… nothing. Not relief. Not freedom. Just this low-grade hollowness, like I’d cheated on a test and the teacher hadn’t noticed yet. By 2 PM I was checking my work email “just in case.” By 5 I had responded to three different Slack threads and replied to two clients.

I took the day off and I still couldn’t take the day off.

Is this just my personality? Do I have a personality flaw? Is this a character issue? My dad was a Sunday-night-insomnia guy too. He read the paper at 1 AM most Sunday nights when I was a kid, and I remember thinking he was just a night owl, didn’t realize he was also bracing for Monday the same way I am now.

It’s probably hereditary. Or contagious. Or just the shape a brain takes when it’s lived through 2026 and has a job and an inbox and a 401(k) and a landlord.

I want to tell you it gets better. That’s the blog-post ending people seem to want — “I tried X and now I sleep like a baby on Sundays, here’s the link!” But I won’t lie. Last Sunday I slept maybe 4 hours. The Sunday before that, 5. I’ve been averaging about 5 and a half hours of sleep on Sunday nights for what feels like years now. My Apple Watch has a graph for it. The graph looks like an EKG from a very tired patient.

I do sleep fine Monday through Friday. My body just crashes from the work week. Saturday is recovery sleep — long, glorious, 10-hour Saturday sleep, the kind where you wake up at 1 PM and don’t feel guilty. And then Sunday rolls around and I can feel it coming by 8 PM. I get this specific kind of tired that’s not tired, that’s alert-tired. Eyes burning but brain doing laps around a track. Legs restless. Mind restless. Heart racing a tiny bit for no reason at all.

My partner says I should try meditation. My mom says I should try melatonin. My coworker says I should try THC gummies, “the 5mg ones, not the 10mg, you’ll be fine.” My doctor says I should try therapy. (Already in therapy, thanks, that’s how I learned the phrase “pre-grieving” in the first place.)

I don’t have a fix for you. I really, really wish I did. If I had one I wouldn’t be writing this at 2 AM, I’d be asleep and quoting it like a pastor quotes scripture.

What I do have is this — a weird, tired solidarity with anyone else who is sitting in their kitchen at 1:47 AM eating leftovers, or standing in their bathroom brushing their teeth at midnight because they can’t quite bring themselves to get in bed yet, or scrolling on their phone with the brightness turned all the way down because they know it’s making it worse but it’s the only thing that silences the static for 30 seconds at a time.

Sunday night insomnia is the loneliest crowd in the world. We’re all awake at the same time, all staring at different ceilings in different time zones, all feeling the same weight, and none of us are texting each other about it.

I started a group chat in 2023 just for this. Four friends. We call it the “Sunday Night Sad Club” — yes that’s really what we call it, no we’re not okay. We don’t actually message most Sundays. Sometimes one of us will drop a single eyes emoji at midnight. Sometimes just “👁️”. Sometimes just the word “hi.” Sometimes nothing. But knowing the chat exists is, weirdly, sometimes enough on a 2 AM night.

Other nights it isn’t.

It’s 2:47 AM now. I should probably try to sleep. My alarm is set for 7. There’s a 9 AM standup I’m already composing replies to in my head. There’s a deck due Tuesday I haven’t started. There’s a dentist appointment Wednesday that I’ve been punting since May.

I won’t sleep. Probably 4 hours, maybe 4 and a half. I’ll drag myself out of bed, drink too much coffee, perform being functional, do the whole thing again six days later.

The Sunday Night Sad Club will be quiet in the chat tonight. Or maybe someone will finally drop the message we’ve all been wanting to type:

“why is this still happening”

I have no answer. I just have this: I’m here. You’re here. The ceiling is the same color as last Sunday.

Goodnight. Or good morning. Whatever this is.