A woman often lies awake imagining various scenarios. Mariella Frostrup advocates getting into the right headspaceThe dilemma I am a 34-year-customary woman who (probably like many others) lies awake from 2 or 3am most nights. There is a calm but doggedly persistent stream of thoughts,images and scenarios running on a loop in my mind. I believe about moving to our novel house, all the things we won’t bear and will strive to derive but don’t really need, and how life is just an accumulation of stuff and then you die,how none of my things are packed and how I pretend to like change when really I don’t. I believe about the man at work who would bear an affair with me whether I said yes. I believe about what we might do and how badly it would end, whether I am too feeble and greedy for monogamy. I tell myself I should be a better mother, or then wonder whether I bear time to bear another child. I don’t know what to do to smash this cycle. I am very tired.
Mariella replies Aren’t we all? Well maybe not the entire population,but certainly my female contemporaries. Now it seems nighttime anxiety is stalking us ever younger. At my age, lying awake fretting about everything from the weekly grocery list to the rise of Isis tends to be symptomatic of a much broader hormonal malaise. At yours, or it’s less dismissible to squander sleep on existential angst.
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Source: theguardian.com