Do you ever get in bed to go to sleep and end up laying there for hours? It's like for the first time that day your brain comes alive. As you lay in bed trying to rest yourself, your thoughts spill out of every spot they've been hiding in and run through your head. They are racing around trying to get you to think about that certain topic first.

That happens to me every night - to an extreme.

I lay in bed for over three hours thinking about everything. It's like every wrong decision I have ever made or any embarrassing sentence I've said or action I've done jumps into my mind. As the hour's pass, I toss and turn in my bed, not able to shut down my brain. Then, I begin to feel suffocated. It feels like every thought from my head piles up on my chest. All of the events that have happened or ones that I think of randomly at that moment feel like weight crushing my lungs. The frustrating part is that all of these thoughts are meant to hurt me. Rather than thinking about something happy like going to brunch, I think of stuff that will make me feel bad about myself. I think about everything I do wrong and all the people I'll let down if I do something or say something different.

With rapid breaths, short huffs of air escape my mouth as I try to breathe out the pain. Through my painful breathing, I begin to cry. There is no control over it. Tears just start streaming down my face. I feel like my bed is trapping me in.

All I want to do is close my eyes and sleep. I want to sleep away all the pain I am in and thoughts I make myself think. I want to be able to get in bed and fall asleep within 10 minutes rather than staying up for over three hours thinking the same thoughts I was thinking the night before and putting myself through the same painful, torturous cycle. It's like I know what comes next in my nighttime routine, but it never gets less painful and I don't know how to fix it.

It's exhausting to the point where I just lay in my bed hopeless thinking it is never going to get better and no one can fix me. I start to feel like I am a lost cause, then I fall asleep. I somehow fix my breathing, stop the tears, turn off the racing thoughts, and go to sleep. I wake up, go about my day, lay in bed at night and the cycle begins again.