What Is Keeping Me Up At Night?*

When you’re a child the last thing you want to be spending half your day doing is sleeping.. but as an adult it can often feel like a rare commodity. I don’t actually remember the last time I got the recommended 8 hours sleep and I have been known to run on as a little as an hour. I’m not alone in this, beds.net have been conducting research on the sleeping habits of us Brits and it turns out a lot of us aren’t getting those precious 8 hours sleep for various reasons. According to the research, people who live in London struggle the most with broken sleep, so at least I don’t have to deal with that!

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So what personally keeps me up at night? Here are the top 5 reasons I’m not sleeping;

I’m Worrying
I’m a big worrier. I have been since I was a child but back then I’d go crawl into my mum’s bed and she’d reassure me. These days I’m the mum and I often have a little worrier crawling into my bed. I worry about my mortality a lot, I also worry about being a good mum, or about making ends week. I even worry about sleeping in and LM being late for school. I wish it was something I could just stop doing but it’s all consuming.

My Bed Is Uncomfortable
My bed is old. Like 14 years old. But it feels like such a luxury to buy a new mattress when I want to focus on making my kid happy. So I just make do. Sometimes I can find that rare sweet spot and get comfortable straight away, other nights I’m rocking and rolling for all hours. I know I need to invest in something new but right now spending my hard earned cash on my kid seems a better use of my money.

I’m Stressed
Sometimes I’m not worrying, sometimes I’m just stressed. These nights I find myself wide awake making mental lists of things I need to do, doing calculations for money and thinking about the never ending housework that never gets done because parenting and working come first.

The Cat Is Running Riot
So, it’s not all stress and worries, sometimes it’s just my cat being a bit of a prat at 3am. She’s a house cat and I guess she has a lot of pent up energy that she decides to use up at 3am a couple of times a week. She runs up and down the stairs, skids into my room, scratches at LM’s bedroom door, wrestles the bathroom mat. It’s been so bad that I have had to shut her downstairs in the lounge just so I can get some shut eye!

I Just Can’t Switch Off
However the most common reason I can’t sleep at night is simply because I cannot switch off. I have anxiety and it often means that my brain works overtime. It’s not even always for a negative reason. The only way I can sleep is to distract my brain by having the TV playing with the volume down low and the brightness turned down, it stops my brain from thinking and allows me to drift off to sleep. Which is great, until it goes into sleep mode..

I’ve sort of accepted I’ll never be a great sleeper, that I’m doomed to feeling tired and relying on coffee. That’s just part of my adult life. But hey! At least I’m not part of the 2.4% of people who can’t sleep because they’re being tormented by ghosts. I guess it could be worse.