The Night I Could Not Reach

I was often woken at four or five in the morning to join the adults at work, my small body pulled from rest before it had any chance to finish. On other nights, hunger kept me awake, the cramping in my stomach impossible to sleep through. On others still, it was physical pain. And on many, many nights, it was something harder to name: the fear, the stress, the anxiety, the emotions that a child carrying too much simply could not set down long enough to rest. A restorative night of sleep, the kind that most people take for granted, was, for years, almost entirely foreign to me.

I share this not for sympathy, but because it gave me an early and unusually intimate understanding of something our society works very hard to ignore that sleep is not a luxury, not an indulgence, not wasted time. It is one of the most fundamental requirements of a human life. And we are, collectively, in the midst of forgetting this.

How we learned to disrespect sleep

We live in a culture that has come to treat sleep almost with contempt. We speak with a strange pride about the nights we skipped to finish a project, as though exhaustion were a badge of dedication. We celebrate the hustle that runs on too little rest. And in countless quieter ways, sleep is the first thing we sacrifice when life makes its demands.

There are the sleepless nights of new parents, surviving on fragments of rest. There are the worries that keep us staring at the ceiling, the financial pressures that steal our nights, the racing minds that will not quiet. There is the understandable human desire, after long hours of work, to reclaim some life for ourselves, so we stay up, we go out, we take from sleep the hours we feel we are owed elsewhere. All of this is deeply human, and none of it is a moral failing.

But here is what we tend to forget, and what I want to state plainly: when you lose a night of sleep, it is, in a real sense, simply lost. We tell ourselves we will catch up later, recover it on the weekend, make it up somehow. But sleep does not work like a bank account that can be easily reconciled. The restorative processes that should have happened during that missed night largely do not happen at all. The night is gone, and with it the repair, the consolidation, the regulation that it was meant to provide. This understanding alone, if we truly absorbed it, might change how we treat our rest.

What happens when we sleep

So, what is it, exactly, that we lose? What is the body doing during those hours that seem, from the outside, like simple inactivity?

Far from being a passive state, sleep is one of the most active and essential processes the body undertakes. During sleep, the body is engaged in profound work of repair and restoration. Tissues are repaired, the immune system is strengthened, and the body’s systems are recalibrated. The brain, far from switching off, is intensely busy: consolidating memories, processing the experiences of the day, and clearing metabolic waste that accumulates during waking hours through what researchers have identified as the brain’s glymphatic system, a kind of nightly cleaning process essential to long-term brain health.

And crucially for the work we do here, sleep is when the nervous system regulates and the emotional life is processed. During certain stages of sleep, particularly the dreaming phase, the brain works through the emotional residue of our experiences, helping us metabolize and integrate what we have lived. This is why a difficult situation often feels more manageable after a good night’s sleep, and more overwhelming after a poor one. Sleep is, in a very real sense, the nervous system’s nightly return to balance, the period in which the activation of the day is discharged, and the system is restored to equilibrium. Without it, we carry the previous day’s activation into the next, accumulating a charge that has nowhere to go.

This is why sleep connects so directly to everything else. It shapes our emotional regulation, our capacity to handle stress, our mood, our cognition, our decision-making. And it shapes, significantly, how we eat. Research has consistently shown that sleep deprivation disrupts the hormones that regulate hunger and fullness, driving increased appetite, particularly for high-calorie, high-sugar foods, and undermining our ability to make nourishing choices. The exhausted body reaches for quick energy. Sleep and nutrition, two of the six pillars, are intimately linked, as all the pillars are.

The consequences of chronic sleep loss

When the loss of sleep becomes not occasional but chronic, the consequences accumulate, and they are serious.

The research here is extensive and unambiguous. Chronic sleep deprivation is associated with a markedly increased risk of a wide range of health conditions, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, weakened immune function, and significant impacts on mental health, including heightened risk of anxiety and depression. Sleep is so fundamental to health that its chronic disruption undermines nearly every system in the body. This is not a marginal concern. It is one of the most significant and most overlooked determinants of our long-term wellbeing.

And there are the immediate, daily costs as well: impaired concentration and memory, diminished emotional regulation that leaves us more reactive and less resilient, reduced capacity for the empathy and presence that our relationships require. The chronically sleep-deprived person is not only at greater long-term risk; they are, in the present, a diminished version of themselves, less able to think clearly, feel steadily, or connect genuinely. So much of what we attribute to character or circumstance, our irritability, our difficulty coping, our struggles to be present, may in fact be, at least in part, the simple consequence of insufficient rest.

The screens that steal our nights

We cannot talk honestly about sleep in the modern world without talking about technology, because few things have reshaped our relationship with rest as profoundly as the glowing screens we now carry everywhere.

The challenge operates on several levels. There is the simple matter of time: the hours of scrolling that quietly consume the space that sleep should occupy, the “just one more video” that stretches the night thinner and thinner. But the problem runs deeper than lost time. The light emitted by our screens, particularly the blue light of phones and tablets, interferes directly with the body’s production of melatonin, the hormone that signals to the body that it is time to sleep. By using these devices late into the evening, we are sending our brains a biological signal that it is still daytime, disrupting the natural rhythms that should be preparing us for rest.

And there is a third dimension, perhaps the most insidious. The content we consume on these devices is engineered to be stimulating, to capture and hold our attention, to activate us. We scroll through a stream of information, comparison, outrage, and novelty, and then we wonder why we cannot quiet our minds enough to sleep. We have spent the hours before bed actively arousing the very nervous system we then expect to settle on command. You ask how you can sleep after hours of scrolling, and the honest answer is that the scrolling itself is much of what is keeping you awake, on every level: stealing your time, suppressing your sleep hormones, and activating a nervous system that needs to be winding down.

The phenomenon of insomnia

For some, the difficulty with sleep goes beyond habit and becomes something more persistent and distressing: insomnia, the chronic inability to fall asleep or stay asleep, despite the opportunity and the desire to do so.

Insomnia is far more common than we often acknowledge, and it deserves to be understood with compassion rather than frustration. Frequently, it is rooted in precisely the things we have been discussing: a chronically activated nervous system that cannot find its way to the state of safety and calm that sleep requires. For those of us with histories of stress, trauma, or anxiety, as I know intimately, the nervous system may have learned to remain on guard, scanning for threat, unable to fully release into the vulnerability that sleep demands. Sleep, after all, requires a profound surrender, a letting go of vigilance, and for a nervous system that learned long ago that vigilance was necessary for survival, that surrender can feel genuinely unsafe.

This understanding matters, because it reframes insomnia not as a personal failing or a simple bad habit, but often as a nervous system that has not yet learned, or has forgotten, how to feel safe enough to rest. And this points toward where genuine help lies: not only in the practical adjustments of sleep hygiene, but in the deeper work of helping the nervous system find its way back to safety and regulation. This is precisely the territory of the regulating phase of our work, where we support the nervous system to create safety, release stored activation, and build the internal stability from which rest becomes possible. For many people, better sleep is not ultimately a matter of willpower or discipline, but of helping a dysregulated system learn, perhaps for the first time, that it is safe to let go.

Toward a more restful relationship with sleep

The good news is that our relationship with sleep can be repaired, and there is much within our reach. The practices of good sleep hygiene, the things I worked to learn for myself after so many years of disrupted rest, are genuinely powerful: a consistent rhythm of sleep and waking that honors the body’s natural cycles; a deliberate winding-down period that signals to the nervous system that the day is ending; the removal of screens from the hours and the space dedicated to rest; a sleeping environment that is dark, quiet, and cool; and an honest reckoning with the stimulants and habits that undermine our nights.

But beneath all the practical guidance lies something more fundamental: the recognition that sleep is sacred, that it is not wasted time but one of the most essential and restorative processes of a human life, and that protecting it is an act of profound self-care. To honor our sleep is to honor the body’s nightly return to balance, the repair and regulation that make everything else possible. And for those whose sleep is disrupted by a nervous system that has not yet learned to feel safe, there is genuine hope in the deeper work of regulation, the patient restoration of the inner safety from which rest can finally come.

I know, from the inside, what it is to lie awake through the night, unable to reach the rest the body desperately needs. And I know, too, that this can change. That the nervous system can learn safety. That sleep, once foreign, can become a reliable refuge. This is some of the most foundational healing available to us, because everything else, our nutrition, our emotional regulation, our relationships, our capacity to be present and alive, rests upon it.

A reflection to carry with you

Consider your own relationship with sleep, honestly and without judgment. Do you treat it as essential, or as the first thing to be sacrificed? What keeps you from the rest your body needs, the screens, the worries, the racing mind, the nervous system that will not quiet?

And consider this, gently: what might it mean to begin treating your sleep as sacred? To protect it, honor it, and create the conditions, both practical and deeper, in which genuine rest becomes possible?

The night you sleep well is a gift to every part of your life. And learning to reclaim that rest, even after years of losing it, is one of the most caring things you can do for yourself.

We would be happy to help you find your way back to rest.

This article touches on sleep difficulties and their roots in stress and the nervous system. If you are struggling significantly with sleep, it can be a sensitive area connected to deeper wellbeing, and reaching out for personalized support, whether from us or from a qualified professional, is a worthwhile and caring step.