Insomnia: A Guide To, and Consolation For, the Restless Early Hours - Hardcover

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Chapter 3. Anxiety

We had managed to keep it, more or less, under control: using the busyness and reassuring familiarity of the working day to stop us from panicking. But now that there is nothing practical left to do, now that the world is eerie in its silence, the bank of anxieties hits us with new intensity.

If this were discovered, we could lose our job and our entire hard-won reputation; we might not be able to pay the mortgage or the rent; we might have to make a humiliating relocation; our partner might have an affair or leave us. Maybe the very stupid thing we did will be broadcast to the world; our worst moments will be made public – acquaintances will look on us with anger and contempt; our attempts at self-defence will backfire; we’ll never work again; our partner will forever be bitter and harsh. Our children will hate us. We’ll be ruined and disgraced.

These thoughts don’t come to us as theoretical possibilities or things that we suppose could possibly happen: at 3 a.m. they are what we have coming to us. After twenty minutes of ever-mounting tension, they build to a terrible high point of crisis: we are doomed, we have been moronic, our stupidity knows no bounds, our life is ghastly and pointless. It’s unbearable. In desperation, we get out of bed and start to pace the room. Should we kill ourselves now? This isn’t melodrama, just a sensible next step. Maybe we should go for a drive in the deserted streets? Or would we just be tempted to drive headlong off a bridge?

We are like this for another half an hour, a portion of a private hell that no one will guess at when they see our normal, steady face in the morning. We are crying, clutching our head in our hands, banging our fists on the pillow, kneeling on the floor in a position of imploring prayer to a God we no longer believe in.

But then, just as it feels as if getting rid of ourselves is the only possible solution, another idea comes to mind. It doesn’t deny any of the ghastly eventualities. It doesn’t try to comfort us by telling us that everything will be OK. Instead, it looks at what will happen after the very worst has come to pass. It looks at the charred, wrecked landscape and asks us to see that a life of sorts could still be possible among the ruins. It’s true: there will be utter humiliation, everyone will mock, we’ll lose the job; we won’t have the money we were counting on. But, actually and rather remarkably, the sun will rise once more. We’ll lose a leg, so to speak, but we will hobble on. We will be capable of living on far different terms from the ones we’re currently used to. Millions of people do every day. It’s not ideal but it can – almost – be all right.

After the disaster, there will be other things that come our way that we haven’t thought of yet: new friendships, new ambitions, new satisfactions – less worldly, less materialistic, but genuine and properly rewarding. We can’t tell how life will turn out exactly. We’ll adjust, we’ll manage. We’ll find new reasons to be hopeful. There will – though it seems implausible now – be other days.

The way to reduce anxiety lies not in telling ourselves that the worst won’t happen, but in exploring how even if the worst were to occur, we could find a way through. We need to make ourselves at home with the most horrific scenarios – and in so doing, we’ll grasp that we’re far less vulnerable to calamity than the spectres of the night insist.