Joy Keeps Sleep Away

My wife didn’t sleep at all throughout the night; she left for work in the morning surrounded by papers, not from her bed. She had spent the night refining work related to a new job assignment, then carried her completed tasks to her workplace, awaiting the results. The outcome was stronger than she had expected, followed by a torrent of praise and intangible rewards. When she returned home, she carried the exhaustion of a sleepless night alongside the full enthusiasm of success. We waited for a long “sleeping meal” to compensate for it; yet sleep itself failed to arrive. Her body was depleted, but her mind remained stationed on the podium of recognition. Sleep had abandoned her eyes, replaced by the euphoria of achievement. We usually associate insomnia with anxiety, fear, and failure, forgetting that boisterous joy can awaken the body just as bad news does. Not all positive emotions are calming; some are highly arousing, causing the mind to replay scenes, words, and faces, and anticipating what follows success. At the gate of sleep, the innocence of the feeling or the beauty of its cause is insufficient; what matters is how much wakefulness it sustains. Thus, the defeated may fall asleep from sheer exhaustion, while the victor stays awake from excessive jubilation. This is not merely a family impression. A study by Taverne and colleagues, published in the Journal of Sleep Research in 2016, found that enthusiasm and other highly arousing positive emotions were associated with delayed sleep onset in a sample of adolescents. While their sample cannot be generalized to everyone, it reveals that positive feelings do not guarantee a calming effect. Furthermore, a review by Bonnet and Arand in Sleep Medicine Reviews, along with a more recent review by Dressleh and Riemann in the Journal of Sleep Research, elucidate the concept of “hyperarousal”: the persistence of elevated cognitive, emotional, and physical activity when the sleep system should be taking control of the body. Therefore, it is more accurate to describe what happened as hyperarousal following achievement, rather than overactivity. I propose here the concept of the “achievement closure gap”: the distance between the completion of a task in the external world and the body’s conviction that it has ended. The work may be submitted, the result announced, and well-wishers depart, while the nervous system remains at the workplace, guarding a completed success. Here, the Quran offers etiquette for managing the meaning of achievement: when Solomon (peace be upon him) saw the throne established before him, he said, “This is from the favor of my Lord to test me whether I will be grateful or ungrateful.” Ibn Kathir interpreted this as a divine blessing and a test of gratitude. Solomon did not deny the magnitude of the achievement, but he immediately shifted it from self-inflation to God’s favor and the responsibility of gratitude. To close this gap, I propose “achievement closure rituals,” not as a medical protocol, but as a practical practice consisting of four steps: declaring the end with a clear sentence; clearing residual task elements by writing down what will be completed tomorrow; cutting off supply by closing messages, praise, and screens; and then lowering the body’s rhythm with dim lighting and slow breathing, culminating the success with gratitude. Gratitude here is not merely a rhetorical ornament; it shifts the mind from chasing applause to internalizing the blessing. Achievement does not end when it is submitted, but only when our bodies cease guarding it. Perhaps we sometimes fail to sleep not because we are not tired, but because our bodies have not yet received the news that the task is over.