Sleepless with a busy brain

Sometimes, at like 12 am, I lie in bed like yeah! I'm gonna sleep early today and be fully rested tomorrow! And then end up lying in bed for 2 hours staring at the ceiling while my brain comes up with every possible scenario for every possible situation in the world. It's so stupid, like why can't my brain just slow down enough for me to fall asleep!?

I always read before bed, and I read a lot of sci-fi/dystopian and that doesn't help with my insomnia because then I just lie in bed, wide awake, coming up with theories of what will happen next or what would I do if I were in the book's world, like: What would happen if I lived in a dystopian world or during an apocalyptic event? Would I survive? What would I do? What would I bring? What if I don't have enough time to pack my stuff? What if I'm the last person on Earth? Are there really aliens out there? There has to be aliens are there. Is our world going to get so screwed up that it will end up like the dystopia in the book? What faction would I pick if I lived in the Divergent world? And the chain of questions and theories is never ending!

I finished The Infinite Sea by Rick Yancey about a week ago, and I kid you not, I stayed up all night just thinking about what would happen in the third book and going through what happened in the first and second books of the series. At the time I was like it's fine! I'll let my mind wander a bit tonight and I won't do it again tomorrow night. But then the next two nights, no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't fall asleep because I kept thinking about The Infinite Sea. And then I felt so dead during the day because I was so sleep-deprived and I still couldn't stop thinking about the book. It's like I had a book hangover or something.

It's not like I take long naps during the day and that's the reason why I can't sleep at night, and sometimes it's not even because I read a book before bed and my mind is still in the book's world; I just have trouble falling asleep! My mind won't let me sleep. I'm no doctor or anything, but I'm 90% sure I have insomnia.

And I have this, I don't know what to call it... A pet peeve? Or just a plain old problem... But I ABSOLUTELY hate it when I'm the last one to fall asleep. I don't know why, but it's like my brain thinks it's some kind of competition, and whoever falls asleep last loses. I'm always the last one to fall asleep and it kills me because I make myself think I lost a race or competition. I feel the need to always fall asleep before my mom or brother (not my dad because he sleeps at 10 and that's way too early for me) because I don't want them to win the race of who's going to fall asleep the fastest. To make matters worst, the harder I try to fall asleep, the more awake I am. I guess I just have the urge to treat everything like a competition, even who falls asleep first!

Sometimes I wonder why my mind gotta be so ugh all the time; it needs the rest but it doesn't want it!

I don't know what to do with myself...