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When the world is asleep, we stay up battling what they can’t see.

Sleep is a trial to death.

We’ve all heard this phrase — but have we also noticed people sleeping too much, or not at all? Maybe sleep really is a rehearsal for death. Sometimes it’s slow and peaceful; sometimes, it’s restless and cruel.

I’ve noticed something: when someone has too much on their mind, they just can’t sleep. Their thoughts run wild, chasing and consuming them. It hijacks their ability to rest, to heal — and suddenly, their energy is gone, their days feel unbearable, and they can't function.

When we try to talk about this, people often brush it off. “It’s the phones,” they say. “Technology. Overstimulation.” And yes, that’s part of it. We do get hooked. We do mess with our dopamine.

But there’s more to the story.

People forget that teenagers carry heavy, invisible loads. And when we talk about stress, we’re told we’re ungrateful — that we don’t understand “real problems.”

What they don’t see is this: not all struggles look the same. Some of us are silently breaking under pressure — from competition, from family, from trying to keep it all together. There’s no blueprint for what we feel.

And when there’s no safe space to express it? Sleep becomes the only time we feel free enough to cry, to process, to just be.

But that’s the tragedy — we’ve started calling this exhaustion normal.

It’s not normal. We’re just conditioned to believe it is.