What IS it about 4 AM?

I am fortunate to sleep through most nights. But on some occasions, usually in response to the siren call of my bladder, I suddenly find myself awake. Sometimes it is The Fiancé getting up to answer the call of his bladder that wakes me. Most nights I turn over and fall back asleep. But every so often I find myself tossing and turning during this darkest and coldest part of the night. And once that happens, I know I will be awake for at least an hour, if not two.

This is the time when all the unbidden thoughts, worries and anxiety suppressed during my waking hours pounce on me like a housecat on an unassuming rubber mouse minding its own business – I am just lying there, not moving or making noise. My defenses are down. I am fighting to get back to sleep, but my brain will simply not shut off. The incomplete tasks and things yet to be tackled come piling up on me like the snow at the end of the driveway after the plow has gone through.  Somehow I always seem to be the one underneath the pile, the one getting crushed, but there is no safe refuge to which to run. I have to see it through – dig myself out, as it were.

My heart rate accelerates. I begin to feel too hot under the covers. I pull the sheets off me and within minutes I am too cold. I worry that all these nocturnal aerobics are keeping The Fiancé awake. Certainly, there have been nights when the reverse has happened – sometimes leading to empathy, more often to annoyance. So I can only hope he is sleeping. I listen for a reassuring snore.

Meanwhile, I gnaw on intractable problems and looming deadlines. Then there are the things I don’t enjoy doing that I have been procrastinating on for too long and I still don’t really want to face – except here in the dark, of course. The night takes no prisoners.

If it is a morning where I have to get up early with the alarm, I start adding another layer of anxiety about not getting enough sleep and the anticipation of feeling sub-par all the next day. At this point I begin to hyperventilate.

I have now reached the stage where I almost begin to wish for the days when I was so busy single-parenting and working full-time that I fell into bed exhausted each night and slept the sleep of the near-dead. Almost. But those were hard challenging times and I never got enough sleep except on the one day of the week on which I could sleep in. Never mind – I’ll take this.

But this worry and anxiety are not without a longer-term upside. It is in the depths of these sleepless hours that I often find the elusive solution to a problem I have been avoiding or chewing on for days. Sometimes a really good story idea pops into my head. Sometimes I finally decide that I absolutely must face the matter I have been avoiding for too long now. It’s usually when all this gnawing has led to some sort of resolution that I finally feel able to fall asleep again.

As I finally drift back to sleep, I almost think it was worth it – but please don’t let it happen again tomorrow night…