My insomnia is that I'll go to sleep, but wake up a couple hours later and not be able to get back to sleep.
Except it's not really that I can't; I woke up because I'm profoundly uneasy about life and my prospects, to the point where it doesn't feel like it's safe to be unconscious. Some kind of reptile-brain fear mechanism going haywire.
So I grab my tablet and watch some bullshit on youtube, which gets my mind off the immediate concern without coming even an inch closer to a resolution. The more frequently I evade the anxiety, the more particular I get about what kind of bullshit I must consoom to be mollified. Vtubers are so inane in their over-cutesy way that it makes me uncomfortably aware that I'm engaging in escapism, for example. But with enough browsing I'll tranquilize myself enough to go back to sleep. The more I do this, the more disconnected from reality I feel, but that doesn't seem to matter.
And if it sounds like I'm describing a terrible experience with too much detachment to be sincere, that's because I already got over this problem.
My solution ought to have been, in a word, mindfulness: I know when I wake up that putting a screen in my face is the last thing I need, and I ought to act on that understanding rather than on the baser impulse to indulge in escapism. Obviously. Even if I had just laid there doing breathing exercises and counting heartbeats for an hour, still unable to sleep well, I'd nonetheless have been on the other side of this anxiety episode in days rather than suffering multiple weeks that were total shit.