As far back as I can remember, I have always woken up at night around 3 AM. 3 AM seems to be the “witching hour” for my OCD and anxiety. This is the time that my mind is filled with intrusive thoughts, ruminations over life situations I can’t control, and every past life mistake I have made. No matter what I do, I have a hard time falling back asleep during this time. I just lay there being tortured by my own OCD and anxiety. Then I saw something the other day that made so much sense to me. People that have OCD and anxiety tend to wake up at night between 2-4 AM due to the high cortisol levels in our bodies. Finally, I understood why this happens to me.

Thinking back, I am realizing that my 3 AM wake ups really started to get worse for me during college, specifically once I got into my teaching program. I would get so much anxiety at night over my lesson plans and student teaching. I would wake up thinking about all the pressure I felt to be a perfect student teacher that it made me hate what I was doing. Every morning, I would dread getting up to go to complete my observation hours. Nothing I did would stop my anxiety surrounding student teaching or waking up with anxiety at night.

When I got my job as a middle school teacher, the night waking continued. I would wake up almost every night at 3 AM with horrible anxiety about me being a bad teacher. I would have nightmares where students would be talking in my classroom, and I couldn’t get them to stop. It was making me miserable. I was a great teacher, but I put so much pressure on myself to be ‘perfect’ that I set myself up for failure. My OCD was making me feel like I had a huge weight on my body that I could not lift. It made me hate my job.

Fast forward to my postpartum OCD, the 3 AM witching hour turned into an all night witching hour. I could not sleep at all because I was terrified of becoming a murderer. I was afraid to sleep because I didn’t want to wake up and sleep walk to my daughter’s room to hurt her. If I did sleep some, I would wake up 3 AM, which was around the time Caia would eat. I would have to give myself a pep talk to go to her room because I was so scared of hurting her. The crushing anxiety I felt from my intrusive thoughts tortured me.

I finally started to get relief from my 3 AM anxiety when I started Lexapro and therapy. The OCD and anxiety I was dealing with was not something I could control on my own. Before I started therapy, I didn’t even know I was ruminating or experiencing intrusive thoughts at night. I was able to learn strategies that would help me sleep better and not let my OCD and anxiety ruin my nights. Of course, I still deal with intrusive thoughts, rumination, and obsessions, but they don’t ruin my sleeping nearly as much as they have in the past. Being able to sleep peacefully was worth what I went through.