I’ve been there.
I’ve just got off the phone with my boyfriend. It’s close to midnight. I’m feeling at ease, cheerful, content.
But it hasn’t always been this way.
Before I met Salah, I’ve had countless nights where the world has felt heavy and intimidating. The downward spiral starts and darkness infiltrates my blood, spilling into my positivity and engulfing it. I am by no means a depressive person, so to lose control over my mind like this feels terrifying. I know I will wake up the next day reeling, so I’m desperate to fix it immediately, to go to sleep in a sound manner.
I have a psychiatrist, but he’s not available late on a Friday night.
I live near my parents and have often ‘solved’ the problem by talking with them. However, there comes a point where the issue goes in circles and I must learn to find my own way back to the surface.
So, what to do?
How can I fight my own mind when I live inside it?
There is plenty of cliché advice out there. “Count sheep”, “don’t think too much”, “put down your phone”. I’m no farmer (despite my name meaning farmer in ancient Greek) and, on my one attempt to count sheep, found my mind wandering constantly, which meant they all escaped the pasture. No use …
As for screen time, paradoxically, I’ve found it’s the only thing that works consistently for me to fall asleep.
Breathing exercises? Calm music? Think happy thoughts? When you’re having an anxiety attack of sorts, what you need is action taken now. Not something you have to wait for, get out earphones for, or try to overcome with positivity that could just risk being polluted by the already-established negativity of the situation. You need an instant remedy, a jolt of understanding, a word of comfort.
It just rarely happens to materialise at midnight.
Anxiety is distressing. Your body goes into fight, flight or freeze mode; either attacking, running or stiffening up, or all three at once. Attacking your own mind, running from the discomfort, freezing physically on the spot, unable to function. This is possibly passable at night, but what about when you’re expected to perform at work? Concentrate in school? Socialise? This all contributes to the fraught urgency of fixing the problem, but adds more pressure in an already tense situation – and so the vicious cycle persists.
I take medicine daily, otherwise I would have 200+ voices in my head. I suffer from paranoid schizophrenia, which I was diagnosed with at 18 years old following a seven-month-long hospital stay. I’m 31 today and have heard voices all my life. So, I know what it means to feel distressed, especially with anxiety on top and a side of unfulfilled ambitions. Not a good cocktail for sleeplessness at midnight!
However, today, I continue to move forward in my recovery. I have had two books published about my life with the illness, one in Danish (“Georgias Stemmer”) and one in English (“Voices Off: Talking About Schizophrenia”). I am an artist and illustrator with four books under my belt and am working on a fifth. Having my creative outlets has helped me tremendously, especially writing, when I was most ill. I went to ceramics with my Danish grandfather for 11 years, and have recently taken up working with clay again, following his death in 2024.
My trademark ceramic piece is a little white mouse …
So, perhaps the “word of comfort” I mentioned before should simply be: mouse. A grounding technique that brings me back to calm. I can write and write and write, but sometimes the most effective remedy is a quick, sharp, vivid reminder of reality – that things have been good before, and they will return to normal again, even after a horrible spell of unease. I can return to staring at my phone without fear, listening to music without apprehension, and breathing without feeling like anxiety is punishing me for it.
Night can be a very lonely place. Let’s make it safer.