14 Struggles Only Insomniacs Understand

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1. You may feel fatigued or even doze off momentarily at a reasonable hour, which appears to be a good sign. However, the moment you decide to officially call it a night and your head hits the pillow, you’ll instantaneously feel like a self-aware can of Red Bull, filled with Duracell batteries and 30,000 dubstep songs. Not right now, energized Skrillex brain, I need my rest.

2. There are baby step levels of strategically exiting technology as you try to gracefully fall into sleepiness that rarely to never work. Alright, I’ll get off my desktop and I’ll use my laptop in bed before sleep. Alright, I’ll get off my laptop and browse stuff on my phone before sleep. Alright, I’ll get off my phone and fall asleep… [45 minutes later] I said, ALRIGHT, I’LL GET OFF MY PHONE AND FALL ASLEEP… Alright fine, I’ll turn on my TV and hopefully I’ll fall asleep. (But you won’t though.)

3. The cruel souls at television networks will feel the need to air horror movie ads at every single opportunity, forcing you to hastily change the channel. It sucks when you want to enjoy Friends reruns but the Paranormal Activity 38 trailer is terrorizing you at every commercial break. This is a dilemma I’ve been enduring for a while now, as you see below:

4. Websites go down for maintenance. Many choose to make repairs at like 3am because surely nobody’s online shopping at Old Navy (I feel like this sentence could easily end right here) or visiting their local DMV’s website to renew their car’s registration in the wee hours of the night. Nobody but you, that is.

5. Late, late nighttime is when you’re likely to dive deep into little known nooks and crannies of the internet, discovering all types of interesting, hilarious, thought-provoking stuff — but because all of the ‘normal’ people are asleep, you’ll have nobody to share your findings with. Bummer.

6. Physically you’re exhausted but mentally you have all of the unwanted thoughts bouncing around in your head. Your body and brain are like two bickering children and you have no control of the situation, to the point where you’re unexplainably tired, wide awake and cusp-of-temper-tantrum-frustrated all at once.

7. Entirely too often, you find yourself lying in bed tossing and turning, in denial of the fact that you just aren’t visiting dreamland anytime soon. You’ll calculate how many hours until you’ve got to wake up, or debate whether you should waste this night in bed, staring at the ceiling or just get up and watch TV or something. Either way, you’ll succumb to your body’s refusal to sleep.

8. Restaurants will air commercials advertising steaks, chicken breasts, grilled salmon and other succulent, delicious looking foods that aren’t currently available. It’s torture, and frankly I’d rather see a 3am trailer for a movie about a bloodthirsty demon that kills insomniacs than an Outback Steakhouse ad antagonizing me with BBQ bacon wrapped shrimp.

9. Knowing that when you wake up at noonish tomorrow, it’ll feel like a large portion of your day was wasted – and perhaps it was if you weren’t productive with your restless night.

10. Often times, because you’re so drained but unable to sleep, you’ll begin hallucinating, seeing things out the corner of your eye, and debating whether or not your home is haunted. The horror movie trailers you saw earlier won’t do you any favors in these moments.

11. Lurking people’s social media pages — but it’s not necessarily romantic interests or people you particularly care about. There are no standards for what makes a Facebook profile worthy of loitering after 2am. Even ‘Mediocre Shannon’ who you haven’t seen since 2007 is worthy of a 10 minute click & scroll fest.

12. Figuring out how to define the time. Yes, after midnight it’s technically a new day, but it doesn’t feel like one until you go to sleep and wake up.

13. Your sleep habits aren’t reasonable in any time zone, so whether your friends and family are on the East or West Coast, they still don’t appreciate your too late at night/too early in the morning text messages.

14. Finally managing to doze off, only to be terrifyingly jolted awake by a blaring alarm clock moments later. The only thing harder than falling asleep is waking up.