Stefanie Preissner

On sleeplessness

Is it just me, or do other people’s brains wait until very late at night to start to replay all of the things they could or should have done differently in their lives? I’ll be on the verge of sleep, just on the precipice of a comatose state of oblivion, when the seed of a question will start bubbling into my consciousness.

The ripples of the question unsettle me enough to prevent me from dozing off, and I find myself at 1am, wide awake, sitting up, wondering why I happily spend €12 on lunch, but spending €12 on a taxi is an indulgence I cannot justify.

It’s not just my finances that keep me awake at night, although, more often than sometimes, I trawl back through each of my contactless purchases in my mind. I’m like Ebenezer Scrooge crossed with a Kardashian. I tap my way through the world, living my best life, while at the same time begrudging myself every cent, and feeling guilty for feeling joy through spending.

Why does €50 in Lidl trigger a totally different response to €50 in Starbucks? It’s the same amount of money, but the level of shame is incomparable.

Other times, that post-midnight, pre-dawn period fills me with a sense of untapped potential and ambition. I come up with solutions to problems that seem gargantuan in daylight. Recently, while lying awake and worrying about whether the impending winter would send me into a vitamin D-deficient depression, I came up with the idea of fixing a daylight lamp to the wall next to my writing desk. That way, whenever I was working, my left-hand side would be bathed in faux daylight.

I was satisfied with my clever solution and expected that, having addressed the worry that kept me awake, I would drift back to sleep. This was not the case. I got up at 3:30am and started hammering a nail into the wall, hanging my daylight lamp so it would be ready for the morning when I would be too tired to start work.

Sleepless nights are when I come up with some of the wittiest, sharpest and most brilliant comebacks for conversations that will never happen.

To protect my sleepless self, I should really put some kind of block on using the internet in the middle of the night. Nothing good has ever come from using Google at 3am.

My pattern looks like this: I can’t sleep, so I lie awake running imagined scenarios over in my head like a rejected reel of a Jeremy Beadle show. Then, I started to get frustrated that I can’t turn off my mind. My frustration leads to restlessness and some new awareness of a muscle ache I hadn’t noticed. The ache turns to a pain when given enough attention, so it’s on to Google to type in ‘sleeplessness, restlessness, neck pain, anxiety’ into the little white box.

This usually presents me with a diagnosis for fibromyalgia and a warning that I should get checked out for heart failure if I notice any swelling in my ankles. At this point, I usually get out of bed and go to make a cup of tea.

I’d bet anyone €1m that the kettle takes longer to boil and is louder at 3:30am than during the day. I’m actually writing this article while waiting for the kettle to boil — it’s 2:17am, and I only started writing because I had exhausted other avenues of thought. I lay awake wondering how many times I’ve been captured in the back of someone’s holiday photographs. I’ve given deep consideration to what my exit route would be if a fire engulfed my house.

I have imagined who would attend my funeral. I’ve dissected every embarrassing moment I’ve ever had, and re-lived it in three-dimensional technicolor. I’ve played out every level of the TV show The Cube in my head and rehearsed my responses to Phillip Schofield. This is how I’ve passed the night, waiting for the sun to do it’s thing in Australia, Asia and Europe, before mercifully rising on Dublin and allowing me some reprieve from my racing mind.

Then, exhausted and anxious, armed with a new terminal diagnosis and an efficient emergency-exit route in case of a fire, I face the work day ahead with heavy eyelids.

I sit at my desk and flick on a light so bright it’d power a small jeep. At least the left-hand-side of me won’t be depressed or deficient in Vitamin D, anyway — that’s something.

“Why does €50 in Lidl trigger a totally different response to €50 in Starbucks?”