A woman often lies awake imagining various scenarios. Mariella Frostrup advocates getting into the right headspace
The dilemma I am a 34-year-old woman who (probably like many others) lies awake from 2 or 3am most nights. There is a calm but doggedly persistent stream of thoughts, images and scenarios running on a loop in my mind. I think about moving to our new house, all the things we won’t have and will strive to get but don’t really need, how life is just an accumulation of stuff and then you die, how none of my things are packed and how I pretend to like change when really I don’t. I think about the man at work who would have an affair with me if I said yes. I think about what we might do and how badly it would end, whether I am too weak and greedy for monogamy. I tell myself I should be a better mother, and then wonder if I have time to have another child. I don’t know what to do to break this cycle. I am very tired.
Mariella replies Aren’t we all? Well maybe not the entire population, but certainly my female contemporaries. Now it seems nighttime anxiety is stalking us ever younger. At my age, lying awake fretting about everything from the weekly grocery list to the rise of Isis tends to be symptomatic of a much broader hormonal malaise. At yours, it’s less dismissible to squander sleep on existential angst.
Lack of sleep is a debilitating health hazard, mental and physical, that requires addressing
Continue reading...