#oneaday Day 528: Autumn plague

Andie and I were ill all over the weekend. Nothing serious — and thankfully not COVID, which we were both concerned it might have been — but the kind of cold that is just enough to be moderately debilitating and make you want to stay in bed for a good 75% of the day.

I think we're both over the worst, but we've both been left exceedingly exhausted, as neither of us have slept very well for the past two or three nights. Hopefully tonight will allow me to get a decent rest, as tomorrow I have to do a long drive for the monthly trip into the office — though it should (should!) be moderately less stressful as I'm driving down in the daytime in order to attend in the afternoon, and then I have the following day off work completely.

With all that in mind, a proportion of today has been spent napping, and I suspect an early night will follow. I genuinely couldn't keep my eyes open by the end of the morning's work, and so my lunch break was spent not eating and watching some TV, but just napping. It was nice.

A middle-of-the-day nap is not something I really started doing until a few years ago, and I'm aware that it can mess up your sleep schedule and all that business. But sometimes it's just nice to allow yourself that moment of peace and quiet, to shut down for a bit and attempt to replenish your depleted energy reserves. It doesn't always work, of course — sometimes waking up after a nice nap leaves you just wanting to nap a bit more — but at others, it can be just what you need to refresh yourself a bit. A power nap, or whatever.

For some reason, I find it much easier to fall asleep for a nap in the daytime than I do at night-time. Part of this is the mind's tendency to ruminate on things last thing at night, but I'm not exactly immune to that in the daytime, either. And yet still I find it much easier to nod off in the middle of the day than at night-time.

Perhaps part of this is down to the fact that from university onwards, I was a bit of a night owl. I have particularly fond memories of being up late one evening pootling about on the Internet, receiving a message from a friend of mine who said that they were going to the beach, and heading off for a thoroughly pleasant evening of night-time beach foolishness with said friend and some other mutual acquaintances.

There was also the period around 2010 or so where I was Going Through A Difficult Time, shall we say, and as part of that process I completely ruined my body clock to such a degree that I was going to bed at 5AM and not waking up until 12 hours later. Not my proudest moment, but also I think the support I was receiving at that time is what helped me get through that particularly difficult period, as incompatible as it may have temporarily made me with a "normal" existence.

Maybe I just like sleeping. I do like sleeping. Regardless, I'm going to sleep relatively early this evening in the hope that I feel a bit more human tomorrow, because right now I feel like a sentient pool of sludge.

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#oneaday Day 403: Falling asleep to Let's Plays

Not for the first time, I find myself reassured by an article from Aftermath, this time on the subject of falling asleep to Let's Plays, which is something my wife and I do on the daily. Nightly. Whatever.

Anyway, I knew that falling asleep to some sort of "noise" was becoming increasingly widespread for various reasons — not least of which being the huge ball of anxiety pretty much all of us appear to be carrying around inside our respective heads at all times these days — but I wasn't sure how common specifically using Let's Plays was. I especially wasn't sure about the use of Game Grumps, one of our shows of choice.

But, according to the article, it seems that it's not only common (right down to using Game Grumps!) but that there might actually be a certain amount of value to it. And that's an actual neurologist saying that.

I never used to "need" noise to get to sleep, and I'm not sure I really do now. But my wife Andie finds it difficult to deal with complete silence, particularly in the dead of night, and so we've both fallen into the habit of having something playing when we are ready to go to sleep. Most of the time, it is either the aforementioned Game Grumps — or my own videos, which, as it turns out, are pleasantly relaxing to listen to.

In fact, I'll be honest here — and I'm aware that this may well make me sound much more narcissistic than I actually am — I find my own videos to be the absolute best thing to help me get to sleep. I think it's because I'm already so familiar with all of them — both from having made them, and from having listened to each of them many times each at this point — that they strike a good balance between making enough noise to distract me from Thinking Bad Thoughts, and from not engaging me enough to want to pay attention to them. The trouble I occasionally have with Game Grumps is that I enjoy listening to them so much — particularly if it's a series I haven't watched or listened to before — that I end up paying attention to them rather than concentrating on getting to sleep.

I don't know if I'm a textbook "insomniac" as such, but I've always found it difficult to get to sleep. I get stuck in a sort of loop where I lie down and close my eyes, then my brain suddenly pipes up and goes "you don't actually know how to make yourself go to sleep, do you?" I then spend ages thinking "I really want to go to sleep, I wish I could go to sleep right now", but the act of thinking those things means that my brain is not shutting down and actually going to sleep. This can go on for hours at a time, particularly if the room is silent.

And that's where the Let's Plays help. If there's some noise on, my brain can latch onto that, and it doesn't get caught in that self-destructive cycle. It has to be the right kind of noise, though; I've found that music doesn't tend to work, and neither does simple, straightforward white noise (and/or its variously "coloured" relatives). But talking does, particularly if it's about something I find relaxing, familiar and comforting.

And so that's how we typically fall asleep: either to Danny from Game Grumps playing King's Quest IV or Space Quest for the umpteenth time… or to me playing old Atari games (including, on occasion, King's Quest and Space Quest games).

I'm reassured to learn that this isn't "a weird thing that we do"; it's a thing that seemingly is quite widespread.

Now, I just need to decide what's on the playlist for tonight…

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2343: No Sleep

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I like sleeping. It is pleasant. Sometimes I like it a bit too much and do it for too long.

I also find sleeping one of the most frustrating things in the world, particularly as it's something you have to do.

Why do I find something so pleasant and relaxing so frustrating, though? Well, it's because I don't really know how to do it.

I'm serious! To be honest, I doubt anyone really knows how they fall asleep; it's a biological function so it just sort of happens. And yet, paradoxically, it's the awareness that I don't know how to make myself actually fall asleep that often keeps me awake at night.

The main trouble I have is anxiety-related. When I'm in a situation where there are no other sources of stimulation (sound, light, pictures, conversation) my brain doesn't think "ooh, nice, a bit of quiet, let's shut down for a bit rather than processing all this multi-sensory information". No; instead, my brain — and indeed, I imagine, the brain of anyone who suffers with anxiety — decides that yes, now would be a really good time to think about each and every one of the things that have upset you, made you sad, made you angry, frustrated you or that are worrying you.

Sometimes these thoughts come one at a time, one leading into another through a twisted chain of logic that doesn't make any sort of rational sense — but then anxiety is irrational for the most part, anyway.

Sometimes they come all at once and collapse in a big heap, worries and anxieties from disparate sources all intermingling into one horrible mess that quickens the breathing, sets the pulse to racing and makes the body feel for all intents and purposes that now might be a good time to run away.

From what, though? Sadly, you can't outrun your own brain, so quite where the physiological reaction comes from I can't be sure, but it's certainly unpleasant. More to the point, this then feeds into the growing anxiety I have that I want to get to sleep and shut all these unwelcome thoughts out, but I can't. And then the cycle begins anew until I either finally fall asleep out of sheer exhaustion or decide to get up and do something until I can't keep my eyes open any longer, as happened last night, when for reasons beyond my ken I was unable to get even close to sleep before 6am, which is not particularly conducive to a productive and/or healthy lifestyle.

I have certain thoughts that I always come back to when I'm feeling anxious, and I can't avoid them. These tend to be experiences that I found traumatic or unpleasant. Objectively speaking, they weren't necessarily actually traumatic in the sense of, say, injury or bereavement, but they're experiences that I had to go through that I didn't want to go through.

By far the most common is a twisted memory of the day I got forced out of my (admittedly horrible and shit, albeit quite well-paid) job at energy company SSE last February. I had endured a considerable period of workplace bullying from my immediate team leader and overall line manager, and they eventually managed to shove me out of the door after a complete mockery of a meeting in which I was invited to plead my case futilely while no-one paid any attention whatsoever. The meeting concluded with me shouting "Fuck you!" in the face of the line manager who had given me the most grief, followed by me storming out, more angry than I think I've ever been in my life.

The memory is twisted, though; when I flash back to it in the depths of anxiety-induced insomnia, that's not what happens. I don't stop with releasing the tension by shouting. Sometimes I throw the phone on the table at someone. Sometimes I fling my chair across the room. Sometimes I pick up the table and throw it at the people sitting across from me with stern yet smug expressions on their faces. Sometimes I slam the door so hard when I leave the cramped meeting room that it falls off its hinges. And sometimes I deliberately vandalise the rest of the offices on the way out in an attempt to somehow release the rage that has been boiling inside me; to give it physical form; to get it out of me.

I can't quite tell if these thoughts are things I wish I'd done on that horrible day or things that I worry I might have done if I'd taken the safeties off a bit more. I suppose it doesn't really matter either way; you can't go back and do things differently, however much you might like to, so the brain takes solace in fantasy. In its own way, the traumatic images are cathartic, but at the same time they induce such a state of heightened tension and anxiety in my whole body that, if I allow my thought process to get into that meeting room at all, I know that I'm not going to be able to calm down for a good few hours unless I have something — anything — to quickly and immediately distract me from it. In other words, if I allow my anxious thoughts to run away with me and end up, as they inevitably do if I leave them unchecked, in that horrible situation, I know I'm not going to be getting any sleep.

Because even if I successfully banish the most unpleasant of the thoughts, my brain is still keenly aware that I don't know how to shut it down properly. Oh for an "off" switch.

2192: Things That Stopped Me From Sleeping Last Night

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I didn't get to sleep until nearly 5am this morning due to a fairly bad anxiety attack. Here, in roughly chronological order, is a probably non-exhaustive list of things that this anxiety attack caused me to worry about.

Whether I'll get a new job in time to make the next mortgage payment
Whether I'll get a new job at all
Whether it's possible to support myself financially through non-conventional means such as Patreon or its ilk
Whether I'm a good person
Whether our pet rat Clover is all right
Whether or not I should be upset over the fact I was blocked without warning or discussion on Twitter by someone I had previously got on very well with on the grounds that I had said "ignorant nonsense"
Whether or not I had really said "ignorant nonsense", or whether this person was an idiot
Whether or not I had genuinely upset this person, regardless of whether or not they were an idiot
Whether it mattered if I had genuinely upset this person if they were going to just cut all ties with me without even attempting to talk about whatever the issue was
Whether I should have gone to sleep earlier
Whether it's worth getting up in the morning
Whether I should apply for jobs in the same field I've just been looking into, or whether I should be looking elsewhere
Whether I should train in a new field
How I could possibly afford to train in a new field
What it would be like to work in a new field
Whether I'd gained weight this week after having a Chinese takeaway and fish and chips rather than sticking to Slimming World (got weighed this evening — I hadn't, in fact I had lost a pound)
Whether I'll get a new job at all (again)
Wouldn't it be nice to win the lottery?
What am I going to do when I come to the end of the period I'm leasing my car? Is it in good enough condition for me to just give it back? Can I just give it back?
Whether I've made a lifetime's worth of irreversible mistakes
Whether I can get my life back on track
What it would be like to put a gun to your head
Whether I would have the courage to pull the trigger
Whether I want to pull the trigger
Whether I was ever going to get to sleep
Whether I was ever going to get to sleep ever again
Why I can fall asleep in seconds in the morning, but not at night
Whether I should feel bad for liking Jeremy Clarkson
How much Lily Rank grinding I had left to do in Hyperdimension Neptunia U
Whether the meandering course that my friendships and relationships have taken over the years is the "right" path
Whether there is a right path for interpersonal relationships
Why my friend who had once been attacked by a dogpile of politically-correct nutcases on Twitter now appeared to be one of those politically-correct nutcases
Whether or not I should go back to Final Fantasy XIV
Whether I'd know if someone broke into the house
Whether someone who broke into the house would steal my massive TV, or just something small
Whether someone who broke into the house would come into our room and kill us

Anxiety sucks, because everything seems like a massive deal. Some of the things I was worrying about are important, but some of them are not. Last night, everything felt terrifying and disturbing. Last night, everything stopped me from sleeping. I would rather that did not happen again tonight.

2083: Insomnia

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I find it really difficult to get to sleep. I think I always have to a certain degree, but I feel like I've become a lot more conscious (no pun intended) of it in the last year or two.

My issue, I think, is that I don't really know how to make myself fall asleep. I can lie down in bed, get comfortable, close my eyes and everything, but actually getting my body to go "It's now safe to turn off your computer" proves somewhat difficult; many is the night I find myself lying awake until 2 or 3am attempting to drift off and failing miserably, even as my wife Andie succumbs to slumberland in a matter of seconds next to me.

The fact that I don't really know how to make myself fall asleep is coupled with the fact that night-time, when it's dark and quiet and oddly lonely (even if you're sleeping next to someone), is the time when my brain generally decides that now would be a great time to start thinking about all the things I don't really want to think about.

I have anxiety issues, and these manifest most clearly during the night. The exact circumstances vary from night to night, but at present the most commonly recurring one is thinking back to my last day at my previous job and remembering how awful the people there made me feel, then contemplating what might have happened if I had allowed myself to fly off the handle at those people who had made my life a misery. So vivid are the images and the feelings that these thoughts give me that they make me feel even more anxious — and, naturally, the more I try not to think about them, the more the images loop around and around in my mind.

Ultimately, I do get to sleep every night, but given how long it generally takes, I often find myself pretty tired in the morning and disinclined to get up at a "normal" time unless I absolutely have to; oddly enough, I find it really easy to fall asleep in the morning after having woken up once, and one side-effect of this that I find intoxicatingly addictive in many ways is the fact that the dreams I have during these morning sleeps are far more vivid than any I might have during the night. It's rare that these dreams feed off my anxiety, either; generally, they are interesting, or strange, or exciting rather than scary, unpleasant or upsetting. I look forward to days when I can have a guilt-free lie-in and enjoy these experiences, but I do wish I could get my sleep patterns back to being a little bit more "normal".

Still, at least they're not quite as fucked up as they were five years ago when my first wife and I had split up; my body clock ballsed up so much during that stressful period that I couldn't get to sleep before about 5am, and I would sleep through until about 5pm without waking up at all, making it somewhat embarrassing when I'd go into the local shop to get provisions and the cashier would ask how my day had been. I guess I should be thankful for that, at least.

Tonight, it may be 3am but I have been enjoying an evening of pleasant company with my regular gaming buddies, so I haven't yet gone to bed. I feel I may not have too much difficulty drifting off tonight, for once, but we shall see, I guess!

#oneaday Day 709: Reasonable Hour

I'm thinking this through this time, writing my entry for today before getting involved in anything which I might want to continue doing until the wee small hours of the morning, as has happened for the last two nights straight. Oddly enough, despite waking relatively "early" (for the holiday season, anyway) I didn't feel too bad as the world came back into focus after only a few hours' sleep.

I have a curious relationship with sleep. I like sleeping, but I also find it an enormous waste of time. I suffer from some degree of insomnia for the vast majority of the time, meaning I often find it very difficult to actually drift off to sleep once I'm lying in bed with my head on the pillow. It's not anything specific keeping me awake, generally — I can and will always nod off eventually, even if there's someone drilling a hole in the road outside or snoring thunderously in the same room as me. But sleep is one of those things that the harder you try to grab hold of, the more elusive it is. The more aware you are of the fact that you "should" be going to sleep, the less likely you are to actually fall asleep.

I say "you". I mean "me", because I know not everyone is like this. Several people I know have the uncanny ability to close their eyes, rest their head and be in the land of Nod (not the Command & Conquer variety) almost immediately, whatever happens to be going on around them. In the case of some friends, it became something of a "party trick", albeit a usually involuntary one. Mercifully, however, my friends have never been the type to deface a sleeping person by shaving off eyebrows or beards — or indeed adding any adornments with marker pens. The closest we have come to defiling a sleeping figure came at my friend Ben's Halloween party when he fell asleep rather early in the evening, still in most of his wizard costume (sans beard, sadly). Other friends Woody (dressed as Death) and Mike (dressed as Gay Satan) posed with the recumbent Ben for some photographs that remain, to date, some of my favourite "visual memories" of that particular group of friends.

But I digress. I find it very difficult to get to sleep, particularly if I get into bed at what your parents call a "reasonable hour". I find my mind wandering — not necessarily in an anxious way, though if I am anxious about anything, lying in the dark trying to get to sleep is inevitably the time that every anxiety and neurosis comes out to play — and this makes it terribly difficult to clear out all those extraneous, unnecessary thoughts which it's impossible to act on while lying in bed. While your brain is full of such garbage, it's a challenge to convince your body that now is the time for rest. Inevitably, I'll find myself attempting to do something distracting. It could be playing with my phone, it could be reading a book by the light of my phone, or in extreme cases, getting up altogether and doing something other than lying staring at the inside of my eyelids.

One thing I've noticed since I was younger is that it's more difficult to "focus" at the time when I'm trying to get to sleep than it used to be. When I was younger, I found it very easy to slip into imaginative fantasy, half dreaming, half actively imagining and directing my thoughts, picturing myself on grand adventures. Frequently, these mental excursions would lead to slumber and some colourful dreams, so I often found it a good way to see myself through the night.

I've tried doing the same thing in recent years, however, and I find it enormously difficult to concentrate on the sense of "narrative" inherent in these brain-fuelled adventures. I don't generally have a problem concentrating while I'm awake — I'm quite happy to sit staring at something I'm working on or playing with for hours at a time, but as soon as it comes to trying to concentrate on getting to sleep? My brain seems to release the floodgates of all the thoughts that I've been storing in my own internal "deal with later" pile.

You know when it's not difficult to get to sleep, though? In the morning. On many occasions I've been woken up by my alarm (or indeed by Andie getting out of bed to go to work) and have promptly fallen back asleep almost immediately — for hours at a time on many occasions. The interesting thing about these morning "extra" sleeps is that they almost always feature incredibly vivid dreams, and since they occur during short sleeps just before I get up and switch my brain into "daytime" gear, I can usually remember at least a few details from them for most of the rest of the day. It's during morning slumbers I've had bizarre and diverse imaginary encounters such as being utterly convinced that it would be impossible to have sex with someone if I didn't have the right sheet music with me; or finding myself in my parents' dining room with a male voice choir literally singing for my supper.

Sleep, then, is good — some might call it necessary. I just wish it was more a case of flipping a "standby" switch rather than spending all that time and effort trying to power down for the evening — time which I would rather spend doing something much more fun!

#oneaday Day 89: Tick

Time zones are a big pain in the arse. Particularly when you find yourself inadvertently operating on one that you don't live in. I've had a pretty ballsed-up body clock for quite a while now, but it sort of doesn't matter.

It started towards the end of my time in Southampton last year, when I made a new friend online who happened to live in the mountains in the States. We frequently talked until stupid o'clock in the morning which meant that I'd go to bed as the sun was rising and often not wake up until the afternoon of the next day. Like, late afternoon. The kind of late afternoon that made staggering into the local shop and having the man with the smelly armpits behind the counter asking "how my day had been" to be a little embarrassing. Of course, there were extenuating circumstances at the time that meant I wasn't particularly concerned with social niceties and a sense of "normality" because frankly, at the time, my life was anything but "normal".

But anyway.

(The fact I was also doing some writing work based on Eastern time shifts probably didn't help matters. The closest approximation to a "working day" that I had started at about 7pm and ran until 11 at night. But I digress.)

A trip to the States over the holiday period last year offered the opportunity to live like a normal human being for a while. There was also the fact that at roughly 7am (or sometimes before) I'd be woken up by either a large dog wanting a cuddle or children watching television. I don't begrudge them those things, particularly as I was sleeping in their lounge, but it did mean that I could wake up at a "normal" time.

Currently, it's not quite as bad as it has been. I still stay awake quite late—despite trying to get to sleep early in many cases—and find myself able to get up anywhere between 10AM and 12PM GMT. Oddly enough, this is only the case when I'm at "home". When I'm staying with someone else, whether it's sleeping on a floor, couch or hotel room bed, it's absolutely no problem to wake up at a normal time—and go to sleep at a normal time, for that matter. It's curious.

Still, I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I'm essentially operating on Pacific time for much of my waking existence. This isn't so bad, of course, as the work I'm currently doing is based around Pacific time and I have a lot of friends in the States with whom I can chat via Twitter and various IM systems. (There's also the fact that some of those people clearly never sleep at all, but that's an entirely different issue altogether.)

So if you need me, don't ever worry about it being "a bad time" because chances are, I'll be awake somewhere, somehow, sometime.

#oneaday, Day 127: Good Morning, Sleepyhead

Pro-tip: Colouring in things with a mouse is a pain in the arse. Don't start it, because then you'll have to finish it. Good morning! Well, it's nearly 2AM after all. That traditional blogging time, you know.

So I've been by myself for some time now after a long time having someone beside me almost constantly. And the thing that's struck me the most is how one's perception of time changes. Or maybe it's not the perception of time, it's the brain associating certain activities with certain memories and wanting to distance itself from them. Or, to simplify matters, it's about the messed-up sleepytime routine of the lonely man.

Take going to bed. I've found it quite difficult to make myself go to bed at a reasonable hour. I never was particularly good at it at the best of times, but if the occasion demanded it, I could be in bed before midnight. Before 11PM, even. But now? Staying up late isn't particularly unusual. This isn't some attempt to take full advantage of my new-found and not-particularly-enjoyable freedom. It's simply that going to bed means spending time alone in a dark room. Which, as anyone who has ever suffered through depression, stress, or any sort of crisis (all three of which I'm suffering right now) will tell you, is a sure-fire way to get one's brain thinking about things you don't really want to think about. So my body convinces itself that it's not tired and doesn't want to go to bed yet. So I don't. Eventually I will collapse into bed and sleep, but it's only once I really can't go on any longer.

The side-effect to this is, of course, that it's sometimes a bit difficult to wake up in the morning. But not only that. Having grown accustomed to waking up alongside someone else and having that presence there to spur you on to face the day, whatever it might entail, it's a shock to the system to suddenly have to do all that yourself. I can wake up early, sure. But getting out of bed? More difficult. When it feels like there's not much to get up for – and certainly no-one waiting for me to get up – it becomes easy to just lie there staring into space or worse, fall asleep again. This is, of course, enormously impractical and could probably be rectified by going to bed a bit earlier, but because of the aforementioned reasons, that's difficult too. Vicious cycle, you see.

It's not as if I don't keep myself busy, though. If I stay up late, it's not just to stare at a wall or sit there in floods of tears, though both of those have happened at least once recently. No, I find something to do. I find someone to chat to. I write something. I draw something. I play a game. I harass people on Twitter. Anything to avoid having to sit in that dark room trying to get to sleep, failing and hearing that little tap-tap-tap of the unpleasant thoughts come a-knockin' on my brain. It's a distraction, though, not a substitute.

So the moral of this story, then, is don't be alone. It sucks.