Afraid of feeling exhausted after a sleepless night?

I come across a lot of people who ask me: “How can I let go of trying to sleep if I feel so miserable after a night of no sleep? I can’t function or focus on anything!“ – so I decided to dedicate this letter to the topic of fatigue and share thoughts that might be helpful to some of you.

My personal story with exhaustion after a sleepless night is a bit different. The fear of not sleeping made me lose the feeling of sleepiness so I was often too wired to feel tired. It felt scary because you see a lot of people who feel sleepy and tired after a sleepless night and I didn’t feel that at all many times – that made me think that there was something really, really wrong with me.

So overall, tiredness for me was a good sign and perhaps this is why I didn’t develop the fear of it. In my view, back then, I would rather NOT sleep and FEEL tired than NOT sleep and NOT FEEL tired – if that makes sense 🙂.

This leads me to the first point of the letter:

Narrative about fatigue can be stronger than fatigue itself

Having said that I didn’t fear exhaustion, I still felt it on some days – together with brain fog, headaches and etc. so I can completely understand how that can be frustrating for so many people.

But let’s imagine tiredness as an isolated event, not coming from fear-based sleeplessness. Let’s say you are a college student studying all night for an exam, you might sleep almost nothing and the next day you feel half-alive. But because you know where that tiredness comes from and, most importantly, this experience is placed in the right context, you don’t fear tiredness itself, you just recognize it and go on with your day as much as it is possible (sometimes you end up doing almost nothing but it’s still okay given the circumstances).

Now, let’s take the same outcome, but put it in the context of insomnia – and we get a totally different picture. We feel tired, but we also feel defeated, lost and scared. The way how we interpret that last night (or our history with insomnia) can impact how we view our present experience – which is the same tiredness.

We feel tired but we think this is not okay, that normal people don’t stay up all night and they don’t feel fatigued. “Not-okayness” about our current state adds extra blanket of pressure and makes us feel even worse than just fatigued.

To untangle this, we can’t directly make ourselves feel energetic – sometimes it’s not possible. But we can start on the level of the narrative. Instead of “this is not okay“, we normalize our current experience and give it the right to be.

Note that I’m not talking about positive thinking here! I’m not telling that we need to feel great about feeling tired, like “if life gives you lemons, make lemonade“. No, I’m talking about getting in touch with the reality and not trying to fit the reality into our expectations: “I shouldn’t feel tired!“ or “I should be able to enjoy my day”. Sometimes peace can be found in the least expected places – when we allow ourselves to NOT enjoy our day or be productive if we don’t have mood or energy for that.

Anyone would feel tired having slept little and it doesn’t make them any less of a human being. Everyone are allowed to feel exhausted and deserve compassion on such days. In fact, tiredness can be viewed as an invitation to learn self-kindness. So the question is – are you ready to face the days when you are tired instead forbidding yourself from that feeling? And how can you approach these days with grace and compassion to yourself?

Our brain is a liar

This was the big one for me. Not only does the brain create interpretations about our past experiences, it also can jump to conclusions about the future which locks us in a struggle.

Once I listened to The Sleep Coach School episode with Pauline and she said a brilliant thing which stayed in my mind – never judge the whole day based on the first few moments of the morning (not the exact wording but the point is this). It’s such a wonderful rule of thumb in my opinion!

It gets very tempting to conclude that a terrible night is going to turn out to be a terrible day while in reality we don’t know the future! As convincing as our brains are, they can never ever know the future. Heck, they don’t even know with 100% certainty what’s going to happen in the next 2 seconds but they will try to present their ideas as if it was set in stone.

Seeing our days as a blank page where anything can unfold and everything is allowed to unfold can help us break the spell of self-fulfilling prophecy which usually happens during insomnia. Just like we know that if tiredness stays we can always choose to take care of and go easy on ourselves, we also know that if tiredness dissipates throughout the day or we forget about it we can do anything that we want, as if insomnia never happened.

Take care,

Ali