Sleep is something I’ve virtually always had issues with. For starters, I’m a very light sleeper, often requiring almost total silence if I’m going to be able to get some rest at night. At worst, I can manage with white noise in the background. I’m very fussy about the setup of my bed. There’s a fine line for me between too much pillow and not enough (I seem to prefer one and a half pillows’ thickness).

Sleep is one of the most fundamentally important things for human beings in this day and age. We rely on sleep for our mental, emotional and physical health. Sleep is one of our primary needs in life, but I can just about never get enough of it.

I thought about a lot of the content for this post last night as I tried to sleep. I worried about the fact that I had originally intended to write a blog post about three days earlier, but it hadn’t actually happened. That other topic went out the window, but the stress and anxiety about the post only caught up with me the other night.

Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, I find that a lot of my concerns seem to pile up at the same time. I do my best to avoid some of these concerns during the day, if only so I can live and function normally. The big downside of this is that it catches up with me later. Every other day it makes the night that little bit restless.

Now, I’m sure you would say that this is not terribly healthy, and I am inclined to agree with you there. I don’t think it’s healthy for me either, but it’s something that kind of happens, kind of works for me, and I know from experience that there are worse alternatives.

The emotional battles of our lives come down to two main belligerents – our coping mechanisms, and our stressors. Humans are made to deal with a certain amount of stress and some stress can even be good for us. Long-term stress can wear us away, though, and it’s essential we have gaps within our stressful regimes to allow relaxation in.

We breakdown when our stressors exceed our coping mechanisms. That’s when things get tough and difficult. That’s when I struggle with sleep and the anxiety can be too much.

It’s what one might call a ‘storm in a teacup,’ but I think that mental issues should never be silent ones. They should never be invisible ones. There are too many things not quite right with the world for us to allow people to suffer in silence. Let yourself take a break, and let yourself be that little bit vulnerable.

So tell a loved one today. Let them know when you struggle, when you have bad days, when things don’t mesh for you, when everything’s not clicking, when you just feel down, when the world is against you. Chances are they understand. If they don’t, they can still be there to support you. You don’t need to understand everything to love.