It’s 3 AM. I can’t sleep.
The room is dark. The air conditioner hums. Outside, a car passes. Inside my head, a horror movie plays.
This happens every night. The moment I lie down, my brain becomes a filmmaker. A very creative, very cruel filmmaker who specializes in disaster.
The presentation tomorrow? In my mind, I am already standing there, forgetting every word. People are laughing. My boss is shaking his head. My career is ending in slow motion.
The headache I had today? By 3 AM, it has become a tumor. I am already planning my funeral. Wondering who will come. Who will cry. Who will forget me in a year.
My friend didn’t reply to my message. At noon, this meant nothing. At 3 AM, it means our friendship is over. She hates me. Everyone hates me. I have done something unforgivable that I cannot remember.
This is what night does. It takes small things and makes them enormous. It takes possibilities and makes them certainties. It takes peace and murders it.
Why does this happen?
I think our brains are old. Very old. Thousands of years old. They were built for a different world. A world with lions and snakes and enemies hiding in darkness.
In that world, worrying at night made sense. If you didn’t scan for danger, you died. The anxious ancestors survived. The calm ones got eaten.
Now the lions are gone. But the brain still scans. It looks for threats everywhere. In emails. In text messages. In the way someone looked at you during a meeting. The machinery built for survival now runs on nothing. It creates enemies because it needs enemies. It manufactures danger because danger is its purpose.
Lying down makes it worse. Something about being horizontal. Something about being still. The body says: rest now. The brain says: absolutely not.
I think the brain hates surrender. Sleep is a small death. Consciousness disappears for hours. The mind doesn’t trust this. So it fights. It creates urgency. It invents crises that demand attention. Anything to stay awake. Anything to avoid the darkness.
The scenarios follow patterns. Health disasters. Relationship failures. Money problems. Career collapse. The brain cycles through them like a playlist. Each one gets the same treatment. The same urgency. The same emotional weight.
A real problem and an imaginary problem feel exactly the same at 3 AM. The body doesn’t know the difference. Heart racing. Palms sweating. Stomach tight. All because of thoughts. Just thoughts. Pictures in the mind that don’t exist anywhere else.
I read somewhere that the body responds to imagination as if it were real. If you imagine eating a lemon, you salivate. If you imagine falling, your muscles tense. If you imagine disaster, your body prepares for disaster. Real stress from unreal events.
This seems like poor design. But evolution doesn’t care about our comfort. It cares about survival. False alarms are better than missed threats. So we have brains that alarm constantly, about everything, at maximum volume.
Morning always fixes this. Always. The sun comes up and the disasters fade. The tumor becomes a headache again. The ruined friendship becomes a busy friend who forgot to reply. The career collapse becomes just another Wednesday.
I look back at my 3 AM thoughts and feel foolish. How did that seem so real? How did I believe so completely in things that weren’t true?
But by night, I forget. The cycle starts again. The theater opens. The horror movies play. Memory cannot seem to learn from its own false alarms.
Sometimes I think this worrying is a kind of prayer. A superstition. If I imagine the worst, maybe it won’t happen. If I prepare for disaster, maybe disaster will stay away. We torture ourselves as an offering to fate. Please, we whisper, I have already suffered enough in my imagination. Don’t make me suffer in reality too.
It doesn’t work, of course. The things we worry about rarely happen. The things that happen are rarely what we worried about. We prepare for the wrong disasters. The real ones arrive unannounced, from directions we never imagined.
The cruel part is this: we could survive most of what we fear. Humans are strong. We adapt. We endure. We find ways through impossible things. The actual experience of problems is usually more bearable than the anticipation.
But at 3 AM, this wisdom disappears. The mind insists that this time is different. This problem is unsolvable. This disaster is unsurvivable. The imagination creates monsters bigger than reality could ever produce.
I have tried many things. Deep breathing. Counting sheep. Meditation apps with calm voices telling me to relax. Sometimes they work. Mostly they don’t. The brain is stubborn. It has been worrying for thousands of years. It doesn’t stop easily.
What helps most is morning. Just waiting. Knowing that the sun will rise and the thoughts will change. The night feels eternal, but it isn’t. Every 3 AM eventually becomes 7 AM. Every horror movie ends.
There’s something else too. A small truth I sometimes remember in the dark. Right now, this exact moment, nothing is wrong. The disasters are scheduled for tomorrow. Or next week. Or someday. But not now. Now I am lying in a safe bed, in a quiet room, and nothing bad is actually happening.
The future is imagination. The past is memory. Only now is real. And now, usually, is fine.
This doesn’t stop the thoughts. But sometimes it creates a small space between me and them. A gap where I can watch the horror movie instead of being in it. The disasters still play, but I am in the audience now, not on the screen.
The air conditioner hums. A car passes outside. My brain offers another catastrophe. I watch it. I don’t believe it. I wait for morning.
This is the best I can do. Not stopping the theater. Just knowing it’s a theater. Just remembering that the monsters aren’t real. Just surviving until dawn.
The night is long. But it always ends.
Tomorrow, in daylight, I will laugh at tonight’s fears. Then tomorrow night, I will fear them again. This is the cycle. This is being human.
We are old brains in a new world, scanning for dangers that don’t exist, preparing for disasters that won’t come, suffering in advance for futures that never arrive.
Foolish, perhaps. But also somehow beautiful. This anxious machinery kept our ancestors alive long enough to become us.
I try to thank it sometimes. The worried brain. The midnight theater. Even as it tortures me, it’s trying to protect me. Doing its ancient job in a world that no longer needs it.
Poor brain. Working so hard. Scaring me so badly. All because it loves me and doesn’t know how else to show it.
4 AM now. Still awake. But somehow, strangely, a little more at peace.
Morning is coming. It always does.