Braindead mornings

Not bed rotting, not being That Girl, but some secret third thing.

I’m going through a period of — how best to put it? — just not sleeping. Every night for the past few weeks, I’ll jerk awake for at least an hour sometime between 1 and 5 a.m, if not far longer. This is objectively the most infuriating time to not be able to sleep. The only options for how to fill the time that make sense to me are to devour a book in one sitting, or question every decision I’ve ever made. (Starting my day at 4 a.m. is not an option, because I’m not a sociopath.)

Insomnia doesn’t feel like the right word. To me, that sounds like losing your appetite, as if sleep was something you could simply stop craving for a while. But I’m ravenous for it. Sleep is my sacred time, when I get a break from my overstimulated brain. If I could sleep for three days straight, My Year of Rest and Relaxation-style, I would. It’s tempting to use this as an excuse to try some fun new tinctures or something — and trust, that is happening, I’ve spent plenty of time with my good friend Gaia Herbs lately. What’s harder to accept is that this might just be something I’m going through, rooted in bigger-picture stressors that can’t be dissolved in a haze of magnesium and lavender.

This is how braindead mornings found me. I’ve always been into the idea of a morning ritual. At some points in my life I’ve kept up an impeccable morning routine, complete with writing my morning pages in bubbly cursive every day, without fail. The TikTok girls would be so proud.

Right now, though, all I need is an anchor. Something to hold onto in the hurricane of my emotional landscape. There’s simply no way I’m waking up eager to face the day — not these days, and not most days, frankly. When I hold myself to that expectation, I end up contemplating the void until the day is shot. The only thing I can count on right now is my brain simply being offline for the first few hours after I wake up. So I’m embracing it. On braindead mornings I am simply a body, a dumb meat sack held together with electric currents and a prayer.¹ I’ve joked before that if I were 20% dumber, I’d be 40% happier. This is my chance to test that out.

There’s only one rule for braindead mornings: while you’re brain’s booting up, you’ve gotta do something for your mind, body, and spirit. Define those terms however you want, and give yourself a menu of options for each. (If you get really good, you can use it as a chance to trick yourself into running errands or cleaning your house before your brain knows it’s awake.) This satisfies the corner of my mind that craves structure, without ticking off the part that chafes against endless repetition. And so much of treating yourself well feels mind-numbingly the same – like really? I just have to keep doing all of this every day, forever? Well, yes. That’s part of the whole deal with being alive. But maybe you don’t have to do the exact same things every day to call it a routine.

On some days, my braindead mornings include booking a hot yoga class (a body-spirit twofer) and leaving my phone in a random location I’ll almost definitely forget and freak out about later. This is half by accident², half intentionally tricking myself into not falling into a scroll hole (something for my mind: check). Today, running on a cool 5 hours of sleep, it looked like swaddling myself like a baby in my winter robe³ for the world’s most pitiful stretching session. I then sat on my porch to do a quick single-page brain dump in my journal and pull some tarot cards for a personal issue that has me spiraling.

If anyone knows how to greet the day with the appropriate attitude, it’s my dog.

To be quite honest (and I’m probably being too honest), I really did not want to do any of that today. I wanted to wallow in self-pity and wait till the last possible moment to drag myself out of bed. There are plenty of days when I do just that. I’m doing my best to look at those days as part of the natural ebbs and flows of being a person, rather than days I broke my streak of Having A Perfect Morning.

None of this is revelatory stuff—it feels kind of dumb to even give this a name. Ironically, the end result on most days looks pretty similar to the That Girl routines that terrorize my TikTok feed whenever I cave and re-download the app. The key difference is the framing of it: I’m not doing this to be my best self. She’s nowhere to be found. I’m just trying to have something resembling a good day. So far, I can report that it’s working.

1. Most of the time, my ideal corporeal form would be a brain in a jar. I’d like to be seen as smart, capable, creative, but with no physical form whatsoever. Being socialized as a woman will do that to you sometimes!

2. Maybe the litany of “you might have ADHD” TikToks were right all along.

3. At the ripe old age of 28, I’ve somehow become the kind of person with a rotating cast of robes. For winter, I have a fancy Hill House one that I wouldn’t recommend, as it started pilling almost instantly. Once it’s too hot for that, I switch to a silky hot pink situation (vintage Victoria’s Secret gold label — IYKYK).