Name: Why You Aren't Sleeping (and How to Fix It)
Uploaded: 2025-08-05T18:28:17.000Z
Duration: 3 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

Sometimes, we are just thirsty or too hot but most often, our insomnia is psychological.

Adverbs of manner

It is the mind's revenge for all the efforts that we have, largely unbeknownst to us, been making not to have certain thoughts in the day. We are being woken up by a need to think about something that we have carefully been ignoring, probably thanks to our work or our social and family commitments. Having attempted to get our attention by more normal means in the clamour and busyness of the day, our deep minds are now trying to get us to have an appointment with certain insights and ideas in the quieter hours of the night. Our 3am awakenings are signs that we have repeatedly not been doing the sort of self-reflection we need to do in order to be at peace. We are not being lazy, we are not shunning our responsibilities out of willfulness. We are simply escaping, for very understandable reasons, from what are liable to be a range of difficult thoughts, perhaps about work, a relationship or our childhoods. If we are to regain sleep, we should begin to visit, with greater tenderness and imagination than we allow ourselves in the day, some of the bolted and locked rooms of our minds. In a spirit of gentle curiosity, we might dare to raise certain sorts of enquiry.

Reflexive pronouns

What am I truly, truly sad about at the moment? Who has hurt me? What needs to change? What is the real grief beneath the surface anxiety? What is my gut telling me I need to know now and to do next? These can be uncomfortable questions, no doubt, but we can use the night to help us to face them. Everyone else is asleep. It matters a little less now that we think in conventional ways. We can be a bit odd, fanciful, imaginative and kind. We can go a little mad between 3 and 4am and no one needs to know. We can write things down in a notebook and destroy the pages in the morning. What counts is that we give ourselves the chance to understand our shy and pained deep psyches a little better. They have been crying out for our attention and we have till now run away from our duty of care. Our mind's ultimate responsibility is always to our growth and self-understanding. They want us to sleep, of course. They understand as well as any expert that rest is important. But they have as a priority something even more important than energetic limbs and that is psychological insight. They need us to have felt what needs to be felt, to have been angry where we are in a rage, to be sad where we are grief-stricken. They are irrepressibly driven to try to align our surfaces with our depths. They are trying to send us, as it were, to the school of night not to be unkind but so that we can catch up on some very key lessons about who we really are that we have, until now, been too distracted or squeamish to attend. We will sleep better once we begin to ask ourselves these questions on a regular basis.