Two hours before bed time

I suffered a lot from insomnia during my days at Princeton. There were tons of reasons for me not to sleep: I probably could review the readings for tomorrow's discussion, or ran a few more regressions to make sure the impact is significant, or watch a few episodes of the Simpsons as a reward to my hard-working day. Usually it took 2 hours for me to fall asleep after I decided to do so. These two hours, full of my struggle over whether to study a little bit more, or enjoy a real relax, have witnessed the end of my days. In the end, I just lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling and lamenting the loss of every precious minute.

Things got better when I was on vacation. No homework, no papers. I felt comfortable killing my time in fictions and games, and no more worries about new variables or spill over effects. Insomnia seemed to be away, though it was always immediately back after my return to campus. Plunging myself into hypothetical theories and too-good-to-be-true models, I was overwhelmed by all sorts of stuff, and my brain just got too excited to rest at night. I talked to a psychologist at school, who very nicely spent an hour with me, but wasn't very helpful indeed. Later I resorted to pod-casts and got quite obsessed with some radio dramas. Two hours are about half of the length of most dramas I was listening to, so the result was I always knew what happened in the first half, but lost consciousness soon after that, and never figured out what happened in the end.

Now I don't need to worry about jobs, but new pressure comes into existence. And insomnia seemed to relapse. I keep telling myself that I shouldn't be over worried, and things will work out. But you know if you don't move on, nothing will happen. So the quiet night becomes the best timing for me to think over the "move-on plan." During the first 30 minutes, all the routine reflections come to mind: what did I do today and what's missing; then I start to think about the plan for tomorrow, this is when all the crazy stuff come to my mind. After a while, I realize that I'm not gonna to remember all these by tomorrow, and soon start to struggle over whether I should get up and write all these done. Obviously I need a spreadsheet to figure out the cost and benefit of leaving the warm bed and grab a paper, and my little brain is not able to handle all these. Bang! An hour has passed. OK, enough random thoughts, I shouldn't be too ambitious, and be more realistic! Maybe four hours on work, two hours on reading and another two hours on games. But more details have to be though through the allocation of game time. My deliberation always ends in chaos and I finally fall of asleep out of exhaustion.

These two hours are always painful as it's filled with the guilt of wasting time on bed. But every trivial idea that I developed during this time is always deep in memory. I am so focused, and I could think well without any distraction, like laptop or i-phone. I still remember one night when I was tossing and turning, I got up and painted one of my favorite cartoons. And at another night, I thought through a outline of a term paper on bed, and then I realized I might be overloaded, and external pressures - no matter I realized it or not -  could crush myself. When people are challenging their limits and exploring potentials, it could be exciting. And insomnia is just an insignificant physical protest.