I can sleep again. My first reaction to this is relief. I am no longer exhausted all the time. I am slightly less out of it. I wake up before the time when I aim to start leaving my house and it becomes feasible to think about walking to work, or working out in the morning. I no longer feel like I have been hit by a bus for the first twenty minutes of my morning. I have become a functional human being again.
Once the relief and tiredness fades I settle into a new routine. I start to get ready for bed around 10:30 p.m. instead of 2:30 a.m. My life starts to feel crammed. There is not enough time for everything anymore. I am letting things slide. I read less. I am behind on TV shows and movies. There are now at least four fewer hours in my day. It’s amazing how much less you accomplish when you get a healthy amount of sleep. That’s the thing with insomnia, parts of it suck (lying in bed completely exhausted by yet unable to fall asleep, feeling tired all the time) but parts of it are nice (watching an entire TV series in a week to the amazement of your well-rested friends). You miss that feeling of having time to kill, what else do you do after everyone else has gone to sleep? But then again I wouldn’t trade all the time in the world for the joys of a good nights sleep.