The Sunday Night Insomnia

11:47 PM. Sunday. My phone screen glows on the pillow next to me, the do-not-disturb icon glowing a tiny crescent moon that mocks me. I’ve been “going to sleep” for an hour and a half now, which really means I’ve been rotating between four positions, refreshing the same three apps, and pretending the dread in my chest is just a weird burp.

This isn’t new. I’ve been doing this every Sunday since I was maybe19. I’m27 now. That’s eight years of the exact same feeling, like clockwork, like my body decided to betray me once a week without asking.

But here’s the thing — sunday night insomnia isn’t even about being tired. I am tired. My eyes feel like sand. I yawned through half a Succession episode and made my partner laugh. I’m physically done. Mentally though? My brain is doing backflips.

It’s11:52 PM now. I just checked. I know checking makes it worse. I know.

My therapist (yes I see one, no it’s not a flex, my insurance covers it so why not) told me two years ago that this is anticipatory anxiety. The clinical term is “anticipatory anxiety tied to weekly transition points.” She said it like it was nothing, like she was reading a recipe for scrambled eggs. I wanted to throw a pillow at her through the Zoom window.

Because yeah. I get it. It’s anxiety. It’s about Monday coming. About work. About the email I didn’t send Friday. About the thing my manager said in the4 PM Slack that I’ve been re-reading all weekend like it’s a riddle. About whether my coworker hates me now. About the standup at 10. About the standup at 10 that I have to be alert and present for in 9 hours and 8 minutes.

But knowing that doesn’t make my chest stop doing that thing.

You know the thing I’m talking about right? That tight, hot, almost-nauseous pressure right behind your sternum? Like you swallowed a fist and it’s just sitting there, half-curled, waiting?

That.

Every Sunday.

Since forever.

I told my mom about it last Thanksgiving. She laughed, which is her version of “I love you but I think you’re being dramatic.” She was like “just go to bed earlier, honey.” And I was like mom, I went to bed at 9:30 last Sunday and I still didn’t fall asleep until 2. She did the thing where she sucks her teeth and changes the subject to my cousin’s new baby. Cool. Thanks mom.

Okay so. The physical stuff. Let me describe what this actually feels like in case anyone reading this has it and thinks they’re losing it.

My palms get sticky. Like, weirdly sticky. Not panic-attack sticky, more like I just ate a bag of chips sticky. My jaw clenches without me noticing — I’ll sometimes catch myself at like 1 AM realizing my back teeth are touching so hard my molars hurt. My shoulders creep up toward my ears by like two inches. I have this weird shallow breathing thing where I take these tiny little sips of air without fully exhaling.

And the thoughts. God, the thoughts.

It’s not even one big thing. It’s like47 tiny things, all shuffling, all wanting attention at once.

“Did I lock the door? — no I locked it. — but what if the deadbolt didn’t catch. — it caught. — but what if the landlord’s lock is broken. — it’s not. — but what if the AC unit falls out the window again like in 2022. — it won’t. — but what if—”

It’s like 4 AM brain but it’s 11:47 PM and there’s no escape route because I haven’t even fallen asleep yet to “wake up” from.

My partner sleeps like the dead. Like,9:30 PM head on pillow, lights out, not a peep. I’ve watched him. He doesn’t even read. He just closes his eyes and is GONE. The first six months we lived together I thought he was faking. He wasn’t. He’s just built different.

Some nights I watch him breathe and feel this jealous rage so intense it surprises me. Like, genuinely. I have felt actual fury toward a sleeping man. Is that insane? Probably. But it’s12:14 AM and I’m writing about it so.

He doesn’t even know I have these nights most of the time. I lie very still. I don’t move. I don’t reach for my phone. I just lie there, breathing in tiny sips, doing the math on how many hours of sleep I’ll get if I fall asleep right now (6.5), in 30 minutes (6), in an hour (5.5), in 90 minutes (5). The math never helps. The math makes it worse.

Last week I tried something stupid. I drank half a glass of red wine at 8 PM because I read somewhere that it helps you fall asleep. It did not help me fall asleep. It did, however, give me a low-grade headache and the worst dreams I’ve had in months. I dreamed I was late to a job interview I already had. The interviewer was my8th grade math teacher. She kept asking me what the derivative of x squared was and I just stood there, mouth open, useless.

So wine is out. Melatonin is out — that stuff makes me groggy until like 11 AM the next day and I have to be sharp at work. Magnesium glycinate did nothing. I tried a warm shower, a cold shower, no shower, two pillows, no pillow, the meditation app, no meditation app, white noise, brown noise, the sound of rain, the sound of a pub in Edinburgh.

Nothing. Eight years and nothing.

Here’s the part I don’t usually tell people because it makes me sound unhinged.

Sometimes — not always, but sometimes — I cry. Just a little. Not sobbing. Just this quiet leaking thing where tears slide down the sides of my face into my ears and I have to wipe them with the corner of the pillowcase so I don’t get the pillow wet. And the crying isn’t even about anything. It’s not about work. It’s not about my life. It’s just this pressure valve releasing because the body can only hold so much dread before it leaks out somewhere.

And then I feel embarrassed, even though no one is awake to see it. And then I feel angry at myself for being embarrassed. And then I feel tired. And then it’s1:30 AM and I still haven’t slept.

This past Sunday was a bad one. It was a bad one because I had a real thing to dread, not just the general ambient dread. I had a presentation on Monday morning at 9. I’d been prepping all weekend. The deck was done. The talking points were done. I’d practiced twice out loud in the bathroom mirror like a psychopath. I was ready. I knew I was ready.

And still.

12:30 AM. Lying there. Running through slide 4 in my head even though I’ve literally said the words out loud 14 times. Slide 4 was a chart. A bar chart. About churn. The data was solid. I’d triple-checked it. And yet my brain kept going back to it like a tongue finding a chipped tooth.

Slide 4.

But here’s the weird counterpoint nobody talks about — and I want to be honest about this part because it would be easy to just write a misery monologue. The weird thing is: the presentation went fine. It went completely fine. My manager said “great work” at the end and I said thanks and walked to the bathroom and cried in a stall for two minutes from relief. Not sadness. Relief. The pure, animal relief of a thing being over.

That’s the cycle. Dread. Insomnia. The thing happens. The thing is fine. Dread again next Sunday.

I’ve started to wonder if the dread is actually about Monday at all. Or if it’s about the dread itself. Like, I’m dreading the dread. My own anticipation of feeling bad is the thing I’m feeling bad about. Try to think about that one for a second. It’s turtles all the way down.

My partner did wake up last Tuesday night. I wasn’t crying or anything. I was just sitting up in bed, scrolling through my phone at like 2:40 AM, fully dressed in my work outfit for some reason — I’d gotten up to “make tea” at 1:30 and just never gotten back into bed or undressed. He looked at me, half-asleep, and said, “Babe. Are you okay?”

And I said, “Yeah. Just can’t sleep.”

And he said, “Come here.”

And I put the phone down and laid my head on his chest and he stroked my hair for maybe four minutes before he was out again, breathing deep, completely gone. And I just lay there, awake, listening to his heart, feeling simultaneously so loved and so alone it’s hard to explain.

It’s 1:08 AM now. I’m still up. I have a meeting at 10. I will be tired tomorrow. I will drink too much coffee. I will be slightly off — that5% off that no one can name but everyone can feel. I will forget a word mid-sentence around2 PM. I will yawn through my 3 PM. I will come home and crash on the couch at 6:30 and not move until bed.

And then Wednesday will be fine. Wednesday I sleep like a normal person. Wednesday is my treat. The one day a week my brain lets me rest.

Until Thursday night, when it starts the countdown again.

I don’t have a thing to tell you to fix this. I don’t have a TikTok hack or a supplement or a sleep story that does it for me. I’ve tried most things. Nothing works for me every time.

But if you’re reading this at 12:47 AM on a Sunday, lying on your back, holding your phone above your face with one tired arm, scrolling through some random blog post written by a stranger — hi. I see you. Your jaw is probably clenched. Your palms are probably sticky. You’re doing the math on sleep hours.

I’m doing the math too.

Maybe we’ll fall asleep in 20 minutes. Maybe in 2 hours. Maybe we’ll just lie here together, separately, until the light changes.

I don’t know. I just wanted to write it down somewhere so it wasn’t only inside me.