My Brain Doesn't Come With an Off-Switch

I have insomnia.

...sometimes.

This is a side affect of an overactive brain. 

Yes, people, it's because my brain won't shut down at night like normal brains do. When I lay down at night, instead of thinking peaceful thoughts that lull me to sleep, my brain thinks about 

that email I forgot to send this morning,

and the text I didn't send because I was busy writing my paper...

my paper

MY PAPER!

And suddenly my brain is wide awake and buzzing with potential thesis statements, arguments, and sources. I am constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing sentences, mulling them over in my mind, latching hold of some and discarding others.

An hour goes by like this, until I realize that this is the normal time for people to be asleep and I am not sleeping. I shove my paper aside.

... And it comes crawling back.

I count sheep. One sheep, two sheep, three sheep, four thesis statements, five arguments... oh wait...

Desperate times call for desperate measures. It is time for me to unleash

THE LAVENDER OIL!

Lavender oil is a wonderful invention. You see, I hate medicine. I really hate medicine. I hate medicine so much that I would rather suffer through a week of sinus infection than go to the clinic for an hour and take an antibiotic. So I don't take any sleep-aide drugs. 

That, and I work with drugs and I know all of the nasty side effects that come with taking sleep-aides.

So obviously I use lavender, because that couldn't possibly have side effects, right? 

Wrong, anything that is foreign to the body that is subsequently absorbed by the body will have some kind of effect on the body. It's just that I prefer the mild side effects of lavender to those of a drug. 

The sorriest thing about using lavender is that it, well, doesn't always work. It will help me relax, and sometimes it's enough to let me fall asleep. But sometimes...

I lay down, smelling sweetly of lavender, and think relaxing, breathing. In, out, in, out...

And I begin to parcel out minute details about my story.

Normally I do not mind thinking about my story. My story is very complicated; there are a lot of details to sort through and I haven't gotten through half of them. 

But not at 11pm at night. Not when I have a ten-hour shift the next day that starts at 6am (for those of you who, like me, can't math, that means setting my alarm for 5am). 

And yet I find myself sifting through costumes, hair color, eye color, specific dialogue. Every so often I encounter a particularly clever plot twist, and I will jump up and turn the light on to write it down (usually when I read my notes the next day I wonder why I sacrificed sleep for such lame ideas). 

At this point I am thoroughly awake and quite frustrated that I am not asleep. 

It is time for me to bring out the big guns. 

Ruth's Big Guns: Books. Specifically, very thick, very slow, very dry books.

Generally I read for thirty to forty-five minutes and I'm exhausted, especially if I read something theological or factual after 11:30pm. 

But then there are those times when I decide that it's the best idea in the world to read War and Peace, and it has the opposite effect on my brain than I intended. 

And sometimes it really doesn't matter. I could be yawning when I put the book down, but when the light is off my brain switches to Full Alert Mode and I am suddenly wide awake. In these extreme cases (which rarely happen but twice a year), I make a Last-Ditch Effort. 

Ruth's Last-Ditch Effort: Watch movies until her brain has reached the point of maximum exhaustion and falls asleep.

This really works, guys.

Seriously.