Exhausted All Day And Awake At Night

At four in the afternoon you could have slept standing up.

You know the feeling exactly. Your eyes were heavy in a way that was almost pleasant, and your face felt loose, and if somebody had offered you a bed at that moment you would have gone under in under a minute.

You did not have a bed at that moment. You had the rest of the day.

And now it is half past midnight, and you are lying in an actual bed, in the dark, having done everything correctly, and your eyes are as clear as they were at nine in the morning.

Not anxious. Not thinking about anything in particular. Just on.

Your body has been like this for months and you have started calling it names. That is what I want to talk about, because I think it is the part doing the most damage.

Somewhere in the last while you stopped describing this as something that is happening and started describing it as something you are doing. You say you cannot switch off. You say your body will not cooperate. You say, in the middle of the night, some version of: what is wrong with me.

And underneath that language is an accusation, and the accusation is aimed at your own body, and it is that your body is being disobedient.

I want to take that off you first, before anything practical, because nothing practical works while it is in the room.

I am not going to suggest a cause.

Not caffeine, not your phone, not the hour you eat, not stress, not anything you have or have not done. I do not know why your body is doing this and neither, I suspect, does anybody who has told you confidently that they do.

What I know is that you did not choose it. Nobody lies in the dark at half past midnight because they have decided to.

All the night make I my bed to swim

There is a psalm about a body in the night, and what is remarkable about it is that nobody in it is being corrected.

I am weary with my groaning; all the night make I my bed to swim; I water my couch with my tears. (Psalm 6:6, King James Version)

I am weary with my groaning. All the night.

Read that as a description of a body rather than a mood, because that is what it is. Weary is physical. All the night is a duration, and it is the whole of it. The bed is soaked. This is a man lying in the dark in a state his body has arrived at, hour after hour, and saying so.

And here is what is not in that verse.

There is no diagnosis. Nobody arrives to explain what he did wrong. There is no instruction to calm down, no suggestion that a person with more faith would be asleep, and no rebuke of any kind anywhere near him.

The complaint is simply allowed to stand, in the middle of scripture, at full volume, without correction.

That is worth stopping on, because you have almost certainly not been allowed that. Somewhere along the way somebody suggested you try a warm drink, and somebody else asked whether you had considered your screen habits, and every one of those suggestions carried the same small message underneath: this is yours, you are producing it, adjust yourself.

The psalm does not do that. It records a body awake all night and lets it be a real thing that is happening to a real person.

Your body is doing something to you rather than being done by you, and a night like this has never once been a rebuke. Psalm 6:6 records a man awake the whole night through with no correction attached anywhere, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody lying in the dark with clear eyes.

Your body is not disobeying you

Here is the practical half, and it is a change of category rather than a technique.

You are treating your body as a subordinate that is refusing an instruction.

That is genuinely what the language means when you say it will not cooperate. There is a you giving the order, and a body ignoring it, and a growing resentment between the two of you at around one in the morning.

But your body is not receiving instructions from you about this. It never has. Sleep is not under your control and has never been under anybody's control, which is why nobody in the history of the world has ever fallen asleep by deciding to.

You can decide to lie down. You cannot decide to sleep, any more than you can decide to be hungry.

So there is no disobedience available here. There is no order being refused, because there is no order. There is a body doing what it is currently doing, for reasons that are largely not visible to you, and a mind lying next to it getting angrier and angrier at something that cannot hear it.

And that anger is not free. Every minute you spend furious at your own chest is a minute of alertness you have added on top, and this is the one part of the night you genuinely are contributing to, not by being awake, but by fighting.

So stop fighting. Not as a technique to get to sleep. Stop fighting because there is nobody to fight.

You are able to stop treating a wakeful body as a subordinate, and your body has never once received an order about this from anybody. The written word lets a man's sleepless night stand without one word of correction, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has stopped being angry at her own chest.

Get up, stand somewhere else, come back

So here is the one movement, and it is deliberately not a strategy for sleeping.

Get up for five minutes, stand somewhere else in the house, then go back.

When you have been lying there long enough to know how this night is going, and you will know, get up.

Go into another room. The kitchen, the landing, wherever. Stand. Do not sit down and do not lie down anywhere else and do not switch on anything with a screen. A lamp is fine.

And stand there for about five minutes, doing more or less nothing. Look out of a window if there is one. Have a glass of water if you want one.

Then go back to bed.

Now here is what this is for, and it is not what it looks like.

This is not a trick to make you sleepy. It might not do that at all, and if you do it expecting that, it becomes one more thing that failed and one more piece of evidence against your body.

It is for ending the fight.

Lying in that bed getting angrier, you and your body are locked together in one room with nothing else in it, and the longer it goes on the more the bed itself becomes the place where you lose. Getting up breaks the lock. You stand somewhere neutral for five minutes, in a different room, where nothing is being contested, and then you return to that bed as somebody arriving rather than somebody who has been losing there for two hours.

And that is all it is. Five minutes, standing, somewhere else, and back. Nothing to record, nothing to time exactly, and no requirement that anything happen afterwards.

You are able to break the lock and come back to that bed as somebody arriving, and lying there fighting has never once been the price of it. Psalm 6:6 puts a whole night on the record with no rebuke, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing in a kitchen at one in the morning.