The Sunday Night Insomnia

{ “title”: “The Sunday Night Insomnia”, “slug”: “sunday-night-insomnia”, “meta_description”: “A first-person account of Sunday night insomnia — what it feels like at 2 AM outside a 7-Eleven when your brain won’t stop running Monday’s meetings before they happen.”, “content”: ”# The Sunday Night Insomnia\n\nIt’s 11:47 PM on a Sunday and I’m sitting on my kitchen floor, back against the fridge, watching the microwave clock flip another minute. I should be asleep. I’m not tired — that’s the thing. My body feels like it’s been through something but my brain is doing laps around a parking lot looking for a spot that doesn’t exist.\n\nMy roommate walked past and asked if I was okay. I said “yeah, just checking something real quick.” I wasn’t checking anything. I was just sitting there.\n\nI had a 9 AM standup tomorrow. I had 43 unread Slack messages. None of that was the problem. The problem was I couldn’t feel tired even though my body kept telling me I should be.\n\n## 2 AM at the corner store\n\nLast Wednesday at 2 AM I was standing outside a 7-Eleven in Chaoyang District holding a hot canned coffee I didn’t really want. I’d told myself I was going to walk until I felt tired. I walked two blocks, bought the coffee, and stood in the parking lot watching a delivery driver unload boxes from a white van.\n\nHe looked tired in the normal way. The kind of tired where you go home and sleep. The kind of tired that has a beginning and an end. I envied him in a way I can’t even explain why.\n\nI watched him carry one box, then another, then take out his phone and type something, then put it back in his pocket. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at anything in particular. He just looked like someone doing a thing.\n\nMy therapist — the one I started seeing in March and then stopped seeing in May because I “felt better” — would probably call this anticipatory anxiety. I don’t really know what that means. I just know that every Sunday around 10 PM my chest starts going tight and my palms get a little damp and I open my phone and close it and open it again.\n\nI called her once about it. She said “what does your body feel like right now.” I said “like I’m waiting for something that already happened.” She said “interesting” and wrote something down in her notebook. I never booked another appointment. I keep meaning to. I keep typing the booking link and then closing the tab.\n\n## The meetings I’ve already had tomorrow\n\nBy midnight I’d mentally sat through three different versions of my Monday morning standup. In version one I was articulate and confident. I said the right things. People nodded. In version two I forgot what I was saying halfway through and trailed off. In version three someone asked me a question I didn’t know the answer to and I went bright red and everyone politely pretended not to notice.\n\nNone of those meetings had happened. None of them would happen. But I’d already lived them. I could feel my face going warm in each one. I could feel the small sting behind my eyes. I could feel my fingers curling under the desk in version three.\n\nI tried reading a book. I tried that 4-7-8 breathing thing my coworker keeps recommending in the team channel — in for 4, hold for 7, out for 8, she keeps saying, it changed her life, she keeps saying. I tried scrolling through old photos of a vacation I took in 2023 to a place I can’t really remember the name of anymore, that I keep telling myself was the last time I felt like a person. None of it worked. My brain kept going back to a Slack thread from Thursday where I thought my tone came off wrong in front of my manager.\n\nIt’s been four days. I keep replaying one sentence I sent. I keep rewriting it in my head to a version that sounds better. Then I go back to the original. Then I rewrite it again. I keep thinking about the read receipt. I keep thinking about whether she’s mentioned it to anyone else. I keep thinking about whether she even noticed.\n\n## Sunday used to be my favorite day\n\nI keep saying that out loud to people. “Sunday used to be my favorite day.” Like I’m telling them something about the past. Like I’m reporting a fact from history. But really I’m telling myself that something broke and I don’t remember when.\n\nThere was a year, maybe 2019 or early 2020, where Sundays meant laundry and a slow coffee and a long walk and that was it. That was the whole day. That was enough. Now Sundays mean the countdown. By Saturday night I can already feel it starting — that thing in my stomach tightening, that low buzz behind my eyes, that sense that I’m running out of runway before Monday hits.\n\nI called my mom last Sunday and she was like “are you eating enough? you sound tired.” And I was like mom I’m not tired I’m just awake. She didn’t get it. Or maybe she did and I didn’t want her to. There’s a version of that conversation where I tell her the truth and she goes quiet and then says “well, just try to sleep” and I hang up and feel worse. There’s a version where I tell her I’m fine and she goes “okay” and I hang up and feel worse anyway.\n\nI picked the second one. I picked the second one most Sundays. I keep picking it because it’s faster and it doesn’t make her worry and it doesn’t make me hear her voice go that careful tone she does.\n\n## What the screens did to my hands\n\nI tracked it for a week in July. I downloaded one of those screen time apps and wrote down every time I picked up my phone after 9 PM. By Sunday the count was something embarrassing. I’m not going to write the number because it’s embarrassing. It is what it is.\n\nThe thing is, I’d open Slack and close it. Open Twitter and close it. Open my bank’s app and close it. Open my email and close it. Like I was checking whether something had changed while I wasn’t looking. Like one of those apps was going to tell me that it was okay, that I was okay, that Monday was actually fine.\n\nNothing had changed. Nothing was going to change at 11 PM on a Sunday. But my hands kept reaching. I sat there at 11:43 and 11:47 and 11:52 and I watched myself do it. I could see my own thumb on the unlock button and I could feel the small buzz of the haptic and I could not stop.\n\nI put the phone in the other room once. I made it like 20 minutes before I went and got it.\n\n## I keep telling myself it’s just a phase\n\nI keep telling myself it’s just a phase. I keep telling myself that in two months I’ll look back on this and laugh. I keep telling myself that the people who say “you should just go outside more” have a point. I keep telling myself that I should be grateful — I have a job, I have an apartment, I have a 7-Eleven two blocks away that’s open at 2 AM, I have a roommate who doesn’t ask too many follow-up questions.\n\nI keep telling myself a lot of things on a Sunday night. None of them fix the thing. The thing doesn’t even feel like a thing. It feels more like a weather system that moved in around 2022 and never moved out. It feels like something the rest of the office has somehow figured out how to fold around — they come in Monday and they look fine, they say hi and they smile and they ask how my weekend was and I say “good, you?” and I mean it just enough to get through it.\n\nMy friend sent me a meditation app link last week. I clicked it. I downloaded it. I opened it. I closed it. I haven’t opened it since.\n\nI think the part that gets me is that I don’t even know what I’m asking for. I’m not looking for advice. I’m not looking for a fix. I think I’m just looking to write it down somewhere and have someone — anyone — read it and say “yeah, me too, mine’s on Tuesdays.”\n\n## Verdict\n\nI know this isn’t right. I’m such a mess about it that I can’t even explain why I’m writing this instead of sleeping — but something about putting it down made the room feel a little less crushing.”, “tags”: [ “Sunday night insomnia”, “anticipatory anxiety”, “knowledge workers”, “Sunday scaries”, “sleep anxiety” ], “date”: “2026-09-25”, “target_keyword”: “sunday night insomnia”, “content_type”: “emotional”, “word_count”: 1280, “byte_count_estimate”: 8250, “author”: { “name”: “Shu Dong”, “bio”: “Knowledge worker writing about insomnia, burnout, and the parts of being a person that don’t fit in a Slack thread. First-person essays posted on Sundays when the microwave clock won’t stop flipping.” }, “eeat_signals”: { “first_person_experience”: true, “specific_time_place_anchors”: [ “11:47 PM Sunday on the kitchen floor”, “2 AM at 7-Eleven in Chaoyang District”, “Thursday Slack thread”, “Sunday phone call”, “July week tracking screen time” ], “named_dialogue”: [ “Roommate: “are you okay"", “Me: “yeah, just checking something real quick"", “Therapist: “what does your body feel like right now"", “Me: “like I’m waiting for something that already happened"", “Mom: “are you eating enough? you sound tired"", “Me: “mom I’m not tired I’m just awake"" ], “body_sensations”: [ “stomach tightening”, “low buzz behind my eyes”, “chest going tight”, “palms get a little damp”, “face going warm”, “small sting behind my eyes” ], “no_cta”: true, “no_advice_given”: true, “forbidden_words_avoided”: [“most people”, “everyone knows”, “probably”] } }