The bed learned the wrong lesson

Here is the part that turns a bad fortnight into a problem that lasts years, and it is learned rather than physical.

Beds pick up meaning. If you spend most of your time in bed asleep, the bed comes to mean sleep, and lying down starts the process off by itself. If you spend enough hours in bed awake, worrying, planning, scrolling, waiting, then the bed comes to mean being awake instead.

After a few months of that, something odd happens. You are falling asleep on the sofa at ten. You go up, get into bed, and are instantly alert. People take this as proof that something is deeply wrong with them. It is not. It is a room doing what rooms do.