REMains: A Body Without Rest
What months of sleep loss taught me about listening to my body
I. Prelude to Collapse
There’s something dissolving about sleeplessness. It doesn’t hit like a storm—not all at once. It arrives slowly, like mist through a cracked window. A trickle of unrest that eventually becomes a flood. And when it comes, it doesn’t simply take rest. It takes memory, identity, even shape. Sleep doesn’t just escape. It evades, deceives, mocks.
The body begins its descent quickly after the first night. At 24 hours without sleep, irritation creeps in. Your temper shortens, your focus splinters. Your emotions take on sharp edges. By 36 hours, the body feels as if it’s been drinking for a week. Motor skills begin to dull. Your sense of time smears. At 48, the mind becomes a liar. It starts showing you phantoms, slipping you into microdreams while you’re still awake. And strangely, your body gives you a jolt—a “second wind,” not from health, but from panic. It floods you with adrenaline, trying to buy more hours. You begin planning your collapse like a ceremony. You curate the place, the hour. You daydream about surrender like it’s a lover you abandoned but desperately want back.
At 60 hours, the world falls out of sequence. You lose track of hours, then days. Your spatial awareness falters. The walls bend. Light stutters. Time dilates. The body becomes something you wear, not something you are. Systems begin to shut down. And the mind? It improvises. It tries to stitch together reason with loose thread and wet paper.
72 hours. Now we enter legend. Three days without REM, and you’re in mythic territory. Your limbs move with ghost-weight. Your speech slurs. Breathing is conscious. The world comes to you through fog. You see the floor beneath you and believe you’re floating above it. The senses blur, overlap, deceive. You aren’t thinking. You’re watching thoughts fall apart. And still—you walk. You speak. You answer emails. You smile. Like an echo performing a body.
84 hours. Four days. Three sleep cycles missed. Here, the mind doesn’t break with drama. It just stops registering reality. You become a painting of yourself. Existence becomes intolerable. The body revolts. You can no longer demand. It either shuts down or freezes in place, waiting for collapse. You don’t choose when you black out. The body decides.
Why the crash course? Because if I don’t tell you what this does to a body, to a mind, the rest of what I’m about to say won’t land. This isn’t a sleep story. It’s a war log.
II. Month One
It began quietly, like a whisper. I started noticing small disruptions—nights where I would wake up at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, wide awake, heart pounding, but with no clear emotion behind it. I didn’t feel anxious. I wasn’t stewing over anything. I just couldn’t go back to sleep. I would lay there for hours, trying to will myself back into unconsciousness, trying to reset my system. Nothing worked. My body simply would not comply.
There was no obvious trigger. No trauma, no radical shift in schedule, no dramatic life event. I had just come back from a vacation that was psychologically challenging in some ways, but nothing I hadn’t endured before. If anything, the trip had been clarifying. Yet something in me had shifted, and I couldn’t pinpoint what it was. My circadian rhythm felt unhooked, like the gears had slipped and couldn’t find their teeth again.
I responded the only way I knew how: with ritual. I cut out screens. I made tea. I dimmed lights. I lit incense and lavender and candles like a desperate priest trying to summon a sleeping god. I even created a full bedtime sequence—wound down slowly, practiced gentle movement, bathed in silence. But none of it worked. The rituals became pageantry. I was performing sleep without the outcome.
By the end of the month, the problem had grown from a trickle to a flood. I was averaging four hours of sleep a night at best—and that was only on the nights I actually slept. I was no longer just tired. I was beginning to erode. Something foundational was shifting beneath my feet.
III. Month Two
The calendar turned. A new year, and with it, a new descent. My body took a nose-dive. The four-hour nights became two-hour stints, and then scattered, fractured scraps of rest. Two nights a week, I didn’t sleep at all. I mean that literally: zero hours. The nights stretched on like vast deserts, my eyes open, my brain burning, my body pacing like a caged thing.
By mid-January, I was averaging about twenty hours of sleep per week. For context, the average adult gets 56 hours. That’s a deficit of 36 hours every seven days. Imagine missing a part-time job worth of rest every single week—stacked, unpaid, accumulating. I wasn’t just tired. I was sleep-starved.
People noticed. They asked questions. They offered advice. The same rituals I had already tried were lovingly suggested again: magnesium, screen-free evenings, reading fiction, breathwork, no caffeine after noon, tart cherry juice. I smiled, nodded. I tried most of them again out of politeness. But deep down, I knew this wasn’t a behavioral issue. My body wasn’t resisting sleep because of bad habits. It was resisting because something inside had gone rogue.
Desperation entered the chat. I turned to pharmaceuticals. I sought out sleeping pills—light ones, then stronger ones. Some gave me brief relief. A ten-hour sleep here and there felt like diving into the ocean after months in the desert. But it never lasted. The next night, I would be right back to baseline. Awake. Buzzing. Hollow.
IV. Month Three
I caved. I went to urgent care. I asked for something stronger, something to shut down my system with precision. They looked at me with soft concern and handed me a card for a sleep clinic an hour outside of town.
I stalled. I wasn’t ready to admit it was serious. Instead, I went deeper into the toolbox. I layered in everything I could think of: melatonin, ashwagandha, valerian root, blackout curtains, binaural beats. I even tried guided meditation tracks narrated by calm voices telling me to sink. They might as well have been reading grocery lists.
My bedroom began to resemble an altar. There were jars of herbs, bottles of tinctures, weighted blankets, sleep masks, temperature-controlled fans, grounding mats, and softly humming diffusers. I turned into a monastic insomniac—religious in devotion, utterly forsaken in result.
By the end of the month, I was down to ten hours of sleep per week. Sometimes less. I was now catching 90-minute naps mid-afternoon just to keep my eyes from burning. I felt like I was living on borrowed time and fake caffeine. I wasn’t managing anything anymore. I was surviving my own biology.
V. Month Four
At this point, I started tracking my body like a lunar calendar. I noted every crash, every flicker of fatigue, every glimmer of possible rest. I knew when I might get lucky and when I wouldn’t. The sad part was, this brought a strange kind of relief. At least I could predict my demise.
Everything else suffered. My workouts slowed to a crawl. Lifting weights became an act of rage against gravity itself. My business—thankfully co-led by my best friend and mythic-tier support system—survived, but I was pulling half my weight. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t hold conversations. I was showing up to life with a paper mask over my face and hoping no one noticed the shadow inside.
The rituals stopped. I was done pretending candles could solve this. I drank caffeine in careful, calculated amounts—just enough to keep me upright but not enough to fry my remaining neurons. I ate healthy out of sheer pride, because I couldn’t let everything collapse. But even food lost its taste. I wasn’t hungry. I was just fueling the machine. I’d chew almonds at 2AM because it gave me something to do with my mouth.
When I finally called the sleep clinic, they told me the wait was weeks. I stared at the phone. I wasn’t surprised. I was just numb. Apparently, sleep was a luxury none of us could afford.
VI. Month Five
Acceptance settled in like dust. I knew how to map my collapse cycles. I could predict the days I would feel semi-human and the ones I would be a husk. I adjusted my work, my friendships, my everything around these cycles.
This was the month I stopped hoping. Not in a depressive way. Just in a realist way. I stopped fantasizing about sleep as a future gift and began treating it like a rare weather pattern. If it came, I bowed to it. If not, I kept walking.
Grief came quietly. I missed the man who could rest. I missed closing my eyes and slipping away into unconsciousness like it was a warm tide. I missed dreaming. I missed feeling like sleep was an intimate ritual instead of a calculated siege.
I didn’t cry. But I felt like I was living in black-and-white. I started whispering apologies to my body. I touched my chest before bed. I said thank you to my feet for holding me up. I was trying to stay soft inside a structure that was calcifying.
I stayed functional. Barely. But something was slipping. I could feel it.
VII. Month Six
This was the month things started to crystallize—and not in the comforting way. I went in for more tests: blood panels, an MRI. The sleep clinic bumped me to a neurologist for a more targeted consult.
Then came the phone call. “We need to schedule an in-person appointment. It’s best if we speak directly.” That sentence alone set off a full-body alarm. I didn’t sleep that night. My mind went into overdrive. I scoured every corner of the internet, read every worst-case scenario and some best-case ones too, but nothing could ground me. The not-knowing was its own form of torture. It reminded me of being a kid and hearing a parent say, “We’ll talk about this when your father gets home.” That slow dread. That hypervigilant purgatory.
When I finally arrived for the appointment, I was hoping to hear something treatable. Maybe something emotional. A stress root. Something I could unpack, maybe heal with enough therapy or time. But what I got instead was a far more visceral answer.
The scans revealed a non-functioning pituitary adenoma. A small tumor in my head, nestled inside the base of my brain. It wasn’t cancerous, but it was still affecting function—subtly, yet significantly. It was interrupting the messaging systems that help regulate sleep, mood, and metabolism.
But that wasn’t all. Sitting right next to it, like a neighbor leaning over a shared fence, was an aneurysm. Not massive. Not imminent. But close. Too close. A structural anomaly that had gone unnoticed until now, pressing up against the rhythms of my brain like a finger holding down a piano key.
The pairing of the two—tumor and aneurysm—wasn’t catastrophic in isolation. But together, they explained everything. The interrupted sleep. The fog. The body collapse. My system wasn’t malfunctioning out of laziness or anxiety. It was waging war against itself in silence.
The diagnosis didn’t bring peace, exactly. But it did bring shape. A contour to the madness. And in some strange way, that felt like a kind of mercy.
VIII. Month Seven
This month was marked not by collapse, but by contemplation. I had answers now—but no easy path forward. After consulting with a vascular surgeon, I learned that the options for treatment were limited, invasive, and prohibitively expensive. And worst of all, they required placing the most essential part of my identity—my mind—into the hands of strangers. There is a unique kind of grief that comes from realizing the core of who you are might be altered by necessity.
I didn't make any decisions quickly. I couldn't. I talked with friends, walked through worst-case scenarios, considered second opinions, mapped timelines. Every conversation became a weighing of fear and hope, risk and restoration. The emotional labor was relentless. I wasn't just grieving my sleep anymore. I was grieving certainty. Safety. Control.
IX. The Body Remembers
But somewhere in that emotional excavation, I began to see the deeper lesson: the body always knows. It had been trying to get my attention for months. It spoke in sleepless nights and nervous tension and fog. And I—with my overthinking, my analysis, my rituals and research—had tried to outsmart it. I spent so long trying to fix the body that I forgot to trust it. If I had slowed down sooner, if I had listened more deeply to the signals it sent, I might have seen the shape of this storm earlier.
That doesn't mean I blame myself. But it does mean I walk differently now. I don't see discomfort as an enemy to conquer. I see it as a messenger. And when it comes, I don't silence it with supplements. I sit with it. I ask questions. I listen.
There is a strange beauty in loving a body that doesn't always cooperate. In choosing to honor it even when it hurts you. I don't love my body because it's perfect. I love it because it's mine. Because it's carried me through things I didn't think I could endure. Because it still whispers, still signals, still tries.
If there's one thread running through all of this, it's resilience. Not the kind that roars, but the kind that wakes up after 84 hours of no sleep and still brushes its teeth. The kind that smiles at a friend when you're falling apart inside. The kind that holds both grief and gratitude in the same breath.
I don't know what will happen next. The treatments. The choices. The cost.
But I know this: “I am not broken. I am becoming.”
—Jeff