It is 2:45 in the morning, and I am wide awake.
I have been trying to sleep for long enough to have tried every position and long enough to do the sleep math. If I fall asleep this minute, I can still get five hours, now four and a half, now four… which is a calculation that has never lulled anyone to sleep. I lay there talking to myself. ‘Sleep. You need to sleep. You have a full day tomorrow. You don’t function well without enough sleep.’
The more I begged sleep to come, the more awake I became. My body was exhausted, but my mind was racing, until I decided it was enough and got out of bed and started writing.
Things You Can’t Force
There are some things that the more you want them, the more they evade you. Trying to look natural in a photo, trying to have Kavanah in Shemoneh Esrei, trying to relax when someone tells you to relax. And the most annoying one: the name on the tip of your tongue. You can picture her face, you went to camp with her, you recently schmoozed with her at a mutual friend’s wedding, and the name will not come to you. You rack your brains for hours and nothing. Later that evening, in the middle of a shower, the name pops into your mind. Only because you had stopped thinking about it.
There is a dating equivalent, and it’s the worry I hear from my clients more than any other.
What am I supposed to talk about?
What if we sit there and I have nothing to say?
What if I run out of topics to discuss?
You would think these are boring people with no jobs, no family, and nothing interesting ever happening to them, which would warrant this fear. But everyone has stories. Everyone has a whole life behind them, yet when they go on a date, they go completely blank. It’s something you do all the time without thinking. It’s the worrying about it that ruins it.
The Rehearsal
One client told me she gets ready for a date the way she gets ready for college finals. With lots of notes and a list of topics to memorize. She said it like it was a joke. It wasn’t a joke. She doesn’t just make a list. She runs through the whole date in her head.
He’ll ask about work, and she has an answer prepared. He’ll ask about her family, and she will tell him about the time they went on vacation, and she got lost. He will inquire about seminary, and she has the Tzfas story. She goes over the conversation a dozen times before he rings the bell, and it goes beautifully every time, because she’s playing both parts.
And then the date happens, and it turns out he has his own topics. She sits across from him listening to him talk about his job and his brother and a trip he took last summer, except she isn’t really listening, because half of her is still looking for a way back to the topics she prepared, and the other half is worrying about what happens when he stops talking. It’ll be her turn, and she’ll have nothing to say.
He finishes talking, looks at her expectantly, and her mind is completely blank. Her whole rehearsal was worth nothing. Worse than nothing, actually, because she didn’t go blank in spite of the preparation. She went blank because of it. The harder she tried to remember what she planned to say, the less of it she could remember. Same as what happened to me tonight. The more I worried about not sleeping, the less I slept.
You Know How to Do This
She is not bad at conversation. She can talk to her best friend for hours, and not one word of it is planned. She goes to a wedding and talks the whole seudah to a woman she has never met in her life. She waves to a neighbor on the way to her car, and forty minutes later they are still schmoozing. She wasn’t thinking about any of those conversations. She was just having them.
The worrying is what gets in the way. Anything you normally do stops working the second you start stressing about it.
Parallel parking with your mother in the car. Something you do easily every day, now you can’t.
Someone reading over your shoulder while you type. Suddenly you can’t write a sentence, and you do this all day long.
Getting up to give a speech that has to go well. The more it matters, the more anxious you get about how it’s landing, and the worse it comes out.
She has been talking to people since she was three. The date didn’t take that ability away. What’s different about a date is that she’s worrying about it the entire time.
Where the Attention Goes
I can’t tell her to stop worrying about it. That’s the trying-to-relax problem all over again, and it has never worked on anybody.
Viktor Frankl had a name for this: hyperintention. The harder we chase something, the more it slips away. His solution was what he called dereflection. Instead of trying to stop worrying, give your attention somewhere else to go. You can’t be fully present and trapped in your own head at the same time.
That’s what happened to her. He was giving her plenty of opportunity for conversation. He told her about his job, his brother, and a trip he took last summer, yet she barely heard any of it because she was in her head the whole time, trying to come up with something to say. It wasn’t that nothing came to her. The name of the song she’d been trying to think of all week came to her, right in the middle of his story about the trip, but she couldn’t exactly share that with him.
This is what I tell my clients. If you’re listening instead of worrying, the next thing to say is in their last sentence.
As for me, it is now half past three. I am going back to bed and will try absolutely nothing to fall asleep, and I’ll let you know tomorrow how it goes.
