English had a specific word for pre-dawn anxious wakefulness

Forsyth opens with uhtceare, an Old English compound describing the particular flavor of anxiety that strikes when you wake before dawn and cannot get back to sleep, mind churning over worries that feel enormous in the dark and often shrink by daylight. He points out that this is an extremely common human experience with no modern single-word equivalent; we have to describe it in a full sentence, which is clumsier and somehow less validating than having a dedicated term. The existence of the word suggests earlier English speakers found this experience common and distinct enough to deserve its own name, a kind of linguistic evidence that some struggles are timeless rather than modern inventions of an anxious age. Takeaway: naming a feeling precisely can make it feel less isolating, even centuries after the word was coined.