The Sunday Night Insomnia

It’s 1:47 AM on a Monday. Not Monday morning, not Monday afternoon — Monday in that weird gray zone where technically Sunday is over but your brain didn’t get the memo.

I should be asleep. My alarm is set for 7:15. That’s five hours and twenty-eight minutes away. I’m watching the minutes tick down like they’re personal enemies of mine. The ceiling fan is doing its little wobble thing — you know the one, where it sounds like a helicopter trying to take off in your bedroom? That’s been my white noise for the last three hours.

And I can’t sleep.

Sunday night. Every single freaking Sunday night.

Last week was worse. I was lying there at like 11:30, scrolling through my phone like a normal person, and my mom texted: “did you set your alarm?” Yes mom. Yes I did. “you always stay up too late on sundays.” Mom. MOM. I’m 32. But she has a point, kind of, because here I am again at almost 2 AM staring at the same crack in the ceiling I’ve memorized the shape of.

Actually wait, let me back up.

How did I get here?

It started maybe six months ago. Or maybe longer, I don’t know, it kind of crept in. I’d notice on Sunday nights that I’d feel kind of… wired? Like someone had slipped espresso into my water bottle without telling me. My body would be in bed but my brain would be sprinting laps around the block. By Tuesday I’d be running on four hours of sleep and two cups of black coffee and wondering why I felt like garbage.

But this past Sunday? This past Sunday was different.

It was around 8 PM. I was on the couch with my cat Mochi (yes, like the rice, my sister named her and I lost the naming argument in 2021). I had just finished meal prepping for the week — chicken, rice, broccoli, the whole sad single-person assembly line — and I sat down to watch something. Anything. I clicked through Netflix for like twenty minutes without actually picking anything. you know that thing where you have a thousand options and none of them feel right?

That’s when it hit me.

The dread.

It was like this wave that rolled up from my stomach into my chest. My shoulders tensed up. My jaw did that clenching thing I do when I’m stressed but trying not to look stressed. Mochi looked up at me like “what’s your problem, human?” and I just sat there.

I knew what was coming.

Tomorrow was Monday. Work. Slack messages. The standup at 9 AM where I’d have to say “yesterday I worked on the migration, today I’ll continue the migration” for the ninety-fifth week in a row. The commute on the 6 train that’s been packed since they canceled half the express service. The emails. The meetings about meetings.

And I couldn’t sleep knowing it was all about to start again.

That’s what Sunday night insomnia actually is, by the way. It’s not about caffeine. It’s not about screens. It’s your body refusing to shut down because it knows what Monday is going to bring.

I tried everything that night.

I put the phone away at 9:30. Read a book for twenty minutes — some novel my friend lent me about a chef in Paris, which, ironic, because Paris sounds way more relaxing than my actual life. I turned the AC down to 68. I did that 4-7-8 breathing thing everyone swears by (in for 4, hold for 7, out for 8 — and yes I timed it, no it didn’t help).

By 10:45 I was still wide awake.

By 11:30 I was actively mad at myself for not being asleep yet.

By 12:15 I was reading Reddit threads about people with the same problem. (Don’t recommend. The rabbit hole is DEEP.) Someone said “I just drink warm milk” and got 400 upvotes and I wanted to scream into a pillow. Warm milk. WARM MILK. Like that’s going to fix the fact that my brain decided to replay every awkward moment from 2008 at midnight on a Sunday.

By 1 AM I was making a snack. Like a child. Peanut butter on toast at 1 AM. Standing in my kitchen in the dark because if I turned the overhead light on I’d really wake myself up. Mochi sat on the counter judging me the entire time.

“You too?” I asked her.

She blinked slowly. Which in cat body language means “I tolerate you but you’re being weird.”

By 1:47 I was back in bed, staring at the crack.

And that’s where I am now.

Here’s the thing about Sunday night insomnia that no one talks about. It’s not just tiredness. It’s not just “oh I had too much coffee.” It’s a specific kind of lonely, anxious, dread-soaked feeling that sits on your chest like a brick made of all the things you didn’t do this weekend and all the things you’re going to have to pretend to care about this week.

I think about all the people I know who have this. My coworker Priya, who I once saw yawning in a 10 AM meeting and she mouthed “sunday nights” at me and I nodded like “I KNOW.” My friend Marcus who posted a meme last week about it that got like 400 likes. My sister who calls me at 11 PM every Sunday and goes “so… how are you feeling about tomorrow” like she’s my therapist and not the person who introduced me to this curse by making me anxious about everything since I was six.

We don’t talk about it though. Not really.

We just lie there. Sunday after Sunday. Counting the hours until Monday crushes us.

And then we wake up Monday and act like everything’s normal. We drink our coffee. We smile in the standup. We type “sounds good!” in Slack. We pretend we got eight hours. We pretend the dread isn’t real. We pretend we didn’t spend half the night bargaining with our own brain like “please, just let me sleep, please, I’ll do anything, just let me close my eyes for four hours.”

It’s 2:14 now.

My alarm is in five hours.

Mochi is asleep at my feet. The ceiling fan is still wobbling. The crack in the ceiling is still there.

And I’m still here.

I know I’m not the only one awake right now. Thousands of us, all staring at our own versions of the crack, all running the same anxious loop, all wondering why our bodies decided that Sunday night was the time to remember every email we forgot to send and every awkward thing we said at that party three weeks ago.

But knowing I’m not alone doesn’t actually help me sleep.

Funny how that works.

I’m going to try one more thing. Hot shower. Maybe that’ll reset something. Maybe my brain will get the message.

I get up. Mochi stretches when I move. The shower is lukewarm because I never remember to set the water heater right. I come back to bed with wet hair and the pillow is cold for ten minutes and that ends up being the best ten minutes of my whole night.

I fall asleep around 3:30. Maybe 4.

The alarm goes off at 7:15. I press snooze twice, which gives me 18 minutes to brush my teeth, find a shirt that doesn’t smell, and pretend to be a functional adult.

I text my mom “slept great!” because I don’t want to explain it again.

And next Sunday? Same fan. Same crack. Same Mochi. Same dread.

3:02 AM now. The shower’s calling.

[“Sunday anxiety”, “Sleep struggles”, “Pre-work dread”, “Late-night thoughts”, “Insomnia venting”]