The Switch: How Unresolved Things Keep You Awake

In the book, I describe a week where I barely slept. Terminal insomnia. Waking up at 4am every night, unable to fall back asleep. After about a week of this, I poured a glass of whiskey. Within minutes of the first sip, I felt something physically shift. The buzzing stopped. The fight-or-flight hum that had been running in the background all week just turned off. I slept more that night than I had in days.

The alcohol worked. But it worked by numbing the system, not by fixing what was wrong.

Something similar happened this past weekend. I'd been sleeping badly again, about a week of fragmented nights. I had some unresolved things with someone close to me. Nothing dramatic. We weren't fighting. But there were things neither of us had said, and both of us knew it.

We had a call. It wasn't scheduled as a serious conversation. It was a regular catch-up. But we ended up talking through the things that had been sitting in both of our heads. The call shifted after that. It went from careful to casual. Good energy. Easy.

An hour later I was walking through the supermarket, and I felt the same switch I'd felt with the whiskey. The nervous system just let go. Not gradually. A distinct shift, like something clicking off.

Same mechanism. Same week of bad sleep. Same physical release. But this time, nothing was numbed. The cause was gone. The unresolved thing got resolved, and my nervous system stopped treating it as a threat.

I think this is what people miss about insomnia. You can optimize your sleep environment, take magnesium, do breathing exercises. Those things help. But if your nervous system is elevated because of something unresolved, a conversation you need to have, a decision you're avoiding, a relationship that's off, no supplement is going to override that signal.

Your body is doing exactly what it's designed to do. It's keeping you alert because it has detected something unfinished. The fix isn't better sleep hygiene. The fix is resolving the thing.

That can look like a lot of things. A phone call. Writing it down before bed. Sending the email you've been drafting in your head for three days. The format doesn't matter. What matters is that your nervous system gets the signal: the danger is gone. You can rest now.