In an act indicative of an anxious mind, 26-year-old Natalie Morey woke up in the middle of the night last Wednesday with the urgent need scroll through random posts on her phone for exactly 37 minutes before turning over and going back to sleep.
“I knew there was something I was forgetting to do,” Morey told reporters. “I was tossing and turning in a fitful sleep all night, until I finally woke up at 3 a.m. and was like, ‘Oh! I forgot to aimlessly scroll Instagram for a half hour!’ Once I realized that, I was fortunately able to take care of it and get back to bed.”
When asked if she had anything else going in her life that might’ve been making it difficult to sleep, Morey responded that she didn’t think so.
“No, it’s definitely the phone thing,” she said. “I mean, yeah, I’ve got a huge, potentially career-making presentation coming up later this week, but that wasn’t the cause of my latest bout of insomnia last night! No, that was 100% because I had forgotten I still needed to mindlessly thumb through random Reddit threads about people’s relationship issues from 2013 for the better part of an hour.”
“My presentation had absolutely nothing to do with it,” she pressed. “I’ve actually been sleeping better since my boss told me that a twenty slide PowerPoint would either make or break my career – it’s the only time I’m free from agonizing over it.”
However, Morey did admit that she has been having strange stress dreams lately.
“I keep waking up in the middle of the night from this recurring nightmare where I’m standing on the edge of a cliff and someone who looks weirdly like my boss comes up behind me and pushes me,” she said. “And right before I hit the ground, I wake up! Weird, right? I’m pretty sure this dream is my body’s way of telling me I need to quietly scroll through photos of other people’s kitchens on Pinterest until the sun comes up.”
At press time, Morey said she had developed strategies for sleeping soundly through the night, including: making sure to mindlessly scroll on her phone all day so she wouldn’t wake up with the need to do so in the night, and quitting her job as soon as possible so she could avoid dealing with that stressful presentation entirely.
