The Winter My Head Would Not Switch Off At Two In The Morning

The nursery, and the year it nearly went under

I have run a small plant nursery on the edge of town for going on nine years. It is the kind of place where people wander in on a Saturday looking for one tomato seedling and leave with a boot full of herbs and a fern they did not plan on. I am good with living things. I can look at a leaf and tell you whether the problem is too much water or too little light. What I turned out to be very bad at, for one particular winter, was looking after the one nervous system that actually belonged to me.

That winter the business nearly folded. A wet season had rotted a whole batch of stock, a big landscaping client vanished owing me money, and I spent most of my waking hours doing sums in my head that never came out right. The days I could manage. It was the nights that undid me. I would fall asleep quickly enough out of pure exhaustion, then snap awake at two in the morning as if someone had flicked a switch, and my brain would begin its shift.

It was not dramatic worrying. It was worse than that, in a way, because it was so ordinary and so tireless. The exact wording of an email I should have sent. The face of the client who did not pay. A conversation with my mother from fifteen years ago. On and on, the same loop, until the birds started and I gave up and went to open the polytunnels with sand behind my eyes.

The things people told me to try

Everyone has advice for a tired woman. Cut the caffeine. I did. Cut the screens. I did that too, and lay in the dark instead, which was somehow worse. A customer who does reiki offered to balance me. A neighbour lent me a weighted blanket that made me feel pleasantly buried but did nothing to close the tap in my skull. My sister sent me a meditation app with a man whispering about clouds, and I lay there resenting the man and his clouds.

Some of it helped a little around the edges. None of it reached the actual problem, which I slowly came to understand was a habit. My brain had learned a pattern, practised it every single night, and gotten frighteningly good at it. I know habits. I spend my days training climbing roses onto frames they would never choose on their own. But I could not seem to train the thing between my own ears.

I got to a low point where I was functioning on fumes and starting to snap at the one part timer I could still afford to keep. That was the thing that scared me, honestly. Not the money. The person I was becoming while tired.

A conversation over a flat of seedlings

The turn came from a regular, a retired physiotherapist who came in most weeks for something small and stayed to talk. She caught me one morning clearly running on nothing, and instead of the usual advice she told me about a stretch of her own life when her sleep had broken after a surgery, and how she had eventually gone and done a kind of training where sensors read her brain activity while she learned, session by session, to steady it. She used the word neurofeedback and said it plainly, without any drama, the way she might mention a knee exercise.

What caught me was her honesty. She said it was not magic, that it took time, and that it was closer to physiotherapy than to anything mystical. That framing landed with me. I trust slow, unglamorous processes. My whole livelihood is built on them.

So I did what I do with any plant problem I do not understand. I went and read properly, ignored the corners of the internet that promised miracles, and eventually booked an assessment to try neurofeedback therapy with someone who was careful with her words. She told me straight that results vary from person to person and did not once use the word cure. After a winter of clouds apps and reiki offers, that plainness felt like cool water on a hot day.

The unglamorous middle where it actually worked

I will be honest that the sessions themselves are not exciting to describe. You sit in a chair. Small sensors are placed on your scalp. A screen responds when your brain does the thing you are aiming for, and you learn to let that happen rather than force it. Forcing, it turned out, was the entire problem. My instinct was to grip, to try hard, to sort myself out by effort. The training kept teaching me the opposite, which was to loosen and allow, the same lesson I give customers who overwater everything they love.

The change did not arrive like a sunrise. It arrived as an absence. Somewhere around the sixth week I noticed one morning that I could not remember lying awake the night before, because there had been nothing to remember. I had simply slept through. I stood in the kitchen with the kettle in my hand and felt suspicious, the way you keep pressing a spot where a pain used to live to check it has really gone.

The practical bits I did not expect

Two things surprised me. The first was how much of it came down to showing up consistently rather than doing anything intense. This was repetition, not revelation. The progress lived in the boring middle, the weeks where nothing dramatic seemed to happen and then quietly everything had.

The second was learning that arrangements can be shaped around a person's actual life. I live close enough to travel easily, but I met people in the waiting room who came long distances, and I got curious about the versions of neurofeedback at home for people whose work or family made regular trips difficult. It made me realise this was not a rigid one size fits all thing but something that bent around real schedules, which mattered to me as someone who cannot exactly close a nursery for an afternoon whenever I please.

I also stopped being shy about asking questions. I asked what the sensors were reading, why we aimed at what we aimed at, what a session was really training. A good neurofeedback therapist answers all of that in plain language instead of hiding behind clever words. The one I worked with treated my endless questions as normal, and that ordinary respect did as much for me as anything else, because it let me trust the process enough to stop fighting it.

What grew back

The nursery survived, in case you are wondering. I clawed the client debt back in part, replanted the rotted stock, and had a decent spring. But that is not really the story. Plenty of businesses have close calls and recover.

The story is that I got my nights back, and with them a different relationship to my own attention. I had spent nine years telling anxious gardeners that you cannot fix a struggling plant by hovering over it and worrying harder, that sometimes you have to step back and let it find its own footing. It took one bad winter and a chat over a flat of seedlings to learn that the same was true of my own head.

The committee that used to convene at two in the morning has mostly disbanded. On the rare night it reconvenes, usually before a big delivery, it no longer runs the place. And when a tired customer tells me their brain will not switch off, I do not offer them clouds or crystals. I just tell them plainly what happened to me, the way it was told to me, and let them decide for themselves.