The Sunday Night Insomnia
11:47 PM. Sunday.
I’m lying on my back, phone face-down on the carpet because I don’t trust myself anymore. The ceiling has this hairline crack I’ve been staring at for what feels like an hour. Maybe two. My eyes burn. Not sleepy-burn — that slow heavy feeling — more like crying-burn except I haven’t cried in weeks.
This is the thing nobody warned me about.
Sunday night insomnia doesn’t feel like normal can’t-sleep. Regular insomnia is your brain being rude. You lie down, your thoughts scatter like loose marbles — work stuff, an old embarrassing memory from 2019, the song you heard at the grocery store — and you can’t grab a single one. Annoying but kind of charming in a stupid way.
Sunday night insomnia hits different.
It feels like waiting. Like your chest knows Monday is loading. Like your body decided to be useful for once and pre-panic for you so you’d wake up already exhausted, perfectly on schedule to fail the week.
I rolled over at 11:52. Grabbed the blanket. Pulled it up to my chin. Closed my eyes. Did the breathing thing. Four-seven-eight, in for four, hold for seven, out for eight. My yoga teacher in 2019 swore by it. I hated that woman. She was right, though — the breathing does slow your heart down. My brain doesn’t care.
Because my brain is already at work.
Did I send that email? Who was the email to? What did I promise in my last one-on-one with my manager? Why does my Slack have 14 unread threads and why does every red dot feel like a personal accusation? Did I miss a deadline? Was that notification this morning a passive-aggressive DM I’m only now thinking of?
I check my phone. 11:58 PM.
I put it back on the carpet. Face-down. Like that fixes anything.
But it doesn’t fix anything.
I read somewhere — maybe TikTok, maybe a Substack — that sunday night insomnia is actually called “anticipatory anxiety” in psychology textbooks. Big word. Fancy word. Doesn’t change the fact that my stomach is doing this slow clench thing right now, like someone’s gently squeezing it from the inside, and I haven’t even eaten anything weird today. Just toast. With peanut butter. And a banana. And one of those tiny overpriced bottles of green tea I keep buying because the label says “calm.” Spoiler: it doesn’t calm anything. It tastes like grass somebody cried into.
Why am I so tired? Why am I not sleeping?
I don’t know. I have a bed. I have sheets. I have a fancy mattress my mom helped me pick out three years ago, the kind with the pocket coils I keep explaining to my dad on the phone. I’m 31. I have a job. I have a 401k. I have plants that are still alive. By every measurable standard, I should be functioning.
I am not functioning.
Sunday nights I am basically a phone at 3% battery making all kinds of desperate choices about what to close in the background. Sleep? Background app. Joy? Already closed. Sunday afternoon nap I told myself I’d take? Yeah, I closed that one at 4 PM by scrolling through Instagram for two hours instead.
You want to know what I scrolled? Job listings. Apartments in Lisbon. That one Reddit thread about a guy who lives in his van and posts pictures of mountains. No captions. Just mountains and a dog named Kevin.
I want Kevin’s life.
I want a dog named Kevin and mountains and the kind of quiet that doesn’t have a Monday attached to it.
But that’s not where I am. I’m here, in my one-bedroom in Brooklyn, with the radiator clanking, a half-empty water bottle on the nightstand, the same three thoughts stuck in a queue:
- I should be sleeping.
- I’m not sleeping.
- Why am I not sleeping?
A loop. A stupid little 3-step loop and my brain won’t let me off it. Almost like my brain enjoys being the bouncer at a club I never asked to enter.
I got up at 12:14 AM. Walked to the kitchen. Stood there. Realized I forgot why I got up. Stood there longer. Drank a glass of water anyway because every health article I’ve ever read said dehydration can mess with sleep, so I figured, why not, I’ll fight one battle tonight. Lost the war, winning the skirmish.
Walked back. Phone still on the carpet. Did not pick it up. That was growth. Or maybe just exhaustion from even thinking about picking it up.
Got back into bed. 12:19 AM.
Same crack in the ceiling. Same staring. New feelings attached to it.
I thought about calling my mom. Picked up the phone to call my mom. Put it back down because what am I gonna say? “Hi mom, I can’t sleep, it’s Sunday, my brain is doing the thing again.” She’s gonna say “maybe try melatonin” and then “have you tried not drinking coffee after noon” and then “are you exercising enough” and then I’ll feel like a 31-year-old who can’t manage his own circadian rhythm.
I love her so much. I do not want to be managed right now.
I want to be unconscious.
I want to be one of those people on Instagram who posts “Sunday reset 🌿” with a matcha latte and a candle and a clean apartment. Where are these people? Who are they? Do they also have a crack in their ceiling or do they have repair-people? Is there a service for that? A therapist who’s actually a contractor?
I’m spiraling. I know I’m spiraling. I’m aware of my own spiral and that, somehow, makes it worse. Meta-anxiety about my anxiety, which is just anxiety wearing a little hat.
Okay. New approach.
I close my eyes. I picture a beach. The water is blue. There’s a hammock — wait, can you have a hammock on a beach? Probably. There are palm trees. There’s no email. There’s no Slack. There’s no red dot. There’s just —
My phone vibrates on the carpet.
It’s 12:31 AM. Who is texting me at 12:31 AM on a Sunday?
I know the rule. The rule everyone says. “Don’t check your phone at night.” I have read this rule. Listened to a podcast about this rule. Nodded at this rule.
I checked the phone.
It was a Calendly reminder. TUESDAY’S 2 PM STANDUP HAS BEEN CONFIRMED.
TUESDAY.
It’s SUNDAY NIGHT and I am being NOTIFIED about TUESDAY’S MEETING.
I hate my life.
No wait, I don’t. I love my life. I have a job. I have friends. I went to dinner with my friend Priya on Friday and we laughed about a guy at the laundromat who was folding his socks into perfect squares — and I mean PERFECT, like squares a geometry teacher would weep at. That was good. A real moment. I’m allowed to have those.
But the meeting notification sits on my screen like a tiny pink slab of accountability. It stares at me. I stare back. We have a standoff.
I turn the phone fully off. Hold the side button. Slide to power off. Black screen. No more notifications can reach me. I am unreachable. I am free.
I am free and it’s now 12:34 AM and I’m still awake.
So what’s the move?
Nothing’s the move. That’s the worst part. There’s no pill, no podcast, no YouTube video with rain sounds and a pan flute that can override a brain that decided Sunday is just a hallway to Monday.
I check the time again — yeah, I turned the phone back on, of course I did, I’m a liar to myself — and it’s 1:17 AM.
1:17 AM.
I have to be up at 6:45 to make the 7:20 train into the city. Five hours and twenty-eight minutes of sleep left if I fall asleep this second, and I’m already doing the math, and the math is angry.
I read somewhere — I read a lot of stuff at 1 AM because what else is my brain doing — that night owls have higher rates of executive dysfunction. Another article said morning people are basically lying. Another one said blue light blocking glasses help. I bought blue light blocking glasses. They’re in a drawer. I forgot they existed until this sentence.
I give up on the articles. I give up on TikTok remedies. I give up.
I just lie there.
I lie there and I let Sunday night be what it is. A long, slow, stupid slide into Monday. A night no one really warns you about when you’re younger. They warn you about failure. They warn you about heartbreak. They warn you about student loans. Nobody warns you about the specific dread of Sunday at 11 PM. Nobody puts that in the college brochure.
And I’m not tired anymore in the way that mattered. I’m tired in this hollow way. Like a battery drained past zero — the percentage still says 7% but the device is already dead and just hasn’t caught up to the math.
I rolled to my side. The pillow is cool on my cheek. That’s something. The radiator finally stopped clanking. That’s something. The apartment is so quiet I can hear my neighbor’s humidifier humming through the wall. That’s something.
Three somethings. Almost a strategy.
I closed my eyes. Did I sleep? I don’t know. I think I drifted somewhere between 1:40 and 2 AM. Not real sleep. Sleep-adjacent. Sleep-tier-but-not-first-class. The kind where you wake up at 6:47 AM and feel like you were never out.
Then Monday happens and you spill coffee on your shirt and the train is delayed and there’s a Slack thread now 38 messages deep and your manager says “got a sec?” and your whole body clenches because got-a-sec is never good.
This is the loop. The whole loop.
And I’m writing this at 2:14 AM because the only thing more useless than trying to sleep on a Sunday night is screaming into a group chat about it, so I’m screaming into this instead. Whoever finds this on the internet at 2:30 AM on a Tuesday, I’m sorry. I’m also glad you’re here. That’s the whole thing about sunday night insomnia — it’s lonely, but it has the worst kind of company.
My eyes are heavy now. Like, actually heavy. For real. Not the weird fake heavy from earlier.
It’s 2:23 AM.
If I fall asleep right now, I get four hours and twenty-two minutes.
I’ll take it.
I’ll take whatever I can get.
[“Insomnia”, “Personal Essay”, “Sunday Night Anxiety”, “Mental Load”, “Late Night Vent”