#oneaday Day 187: Anxious mess

I’ve been an absolute ball of pent-up anxiety for… probably a few days this week, if I’m honest, but it’s been particularly bad today. As is often the case when I find myself getting panicky, there isn’t really a concrete root cause of it, but there are plenty of factors that haven’t helped.

I’m having one of those times where everything just feels a bit overwhelming, and I feel like I can never quite get “on top” of things. It’s not necessarily having too much to do or think about, more a disproportionate sense of how “important” everything is.

The rational part of my brain knows that nothing I’m presently fretting about is important or worth worrying over, but when your brain enters panic mode, none of that matters; it just builds and builds and builds until you feel ready to burst.

Like, right now I’m typing this on my phone and the inaccuracy of the keyboard is winding me up way more than it would do under normal circimstances.

I think being ill hasn’t helped matters. Part of what I’ve been worrying about is whether or not I would be better enough to attend tomorrow’s work Christmas activities. They should be fun, but they’re also filling me with a certain amount of trepidation and social anxiety, and worrying over whether or not I’d be well enough to attend has just been making me feel worse.

But I’m going to try and clear my mind, get some sleep, then go and enjoy myself tomorrow. I get to take a trip to London, then enjoy making cocktails, a nice dinner and then some evening drinking and socialising. And no worrying about travelling back late from London, as we have a hotel laid on for us. So that will be nice.

It will be nice. There’s no need to worry. Then at the weekend I get to go see my brother because he’s making one of his occasional trips across the pond back here, and see my parents for a bit (prior to seeing them again at Christmas!)

Everything will be fine. I just need to keep telling myself that. None of what I have just outlined is any reason to be uneasy, scared or anxious. So I just need to calm down, chill out, relax and sleep.

So let’s see if I can achieve at least one of those.

#oneaday Day 141: Progress report

It’s been nearly a week that I’ve been following the NHS 12-week “Weight Loss” app programme so far, which basically just means I’ve been counting calories for 6 days. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised by a few things. I’m yet to weigh myself to see if anything has happened as a result of this week as yet — I’ve set “Monday morning after the really long morning piss” as the weekly weigh-in — but as with most things like this, the programme is as much about getting yourself into decent habits as it is about making number go down.

The thing I’ve been most pleasantly surprised about is how possible it is to eat “normally” and enjoyably without breaking the calorie bank. In the last week, I don’t feel like I’ve really had to “give anything up”; when I’ve fancied some crisps, I’ve had some crisps, when I’ve fancied some chocolate, I’ve had some chocolate. The important thing is paying attention to those things and ensuring you don’t do them to excess, and being honest about counting them. As such, even though I’ve had crisps and chocolate and a few other bits and pieces most diets would probably count as “naughty” on some diet plans throughout the week, I’ve still come to the end of each day below the calorie allowance I have.

Now part of this is because I’m a big lad and thus need a few more calories than someone who is normal-sized, but I figure cutting back can be a gradual process. In thinking about what I’m eating and counting the calories, I’m already finding myself thinking “well, I can probably do without that and it will save me 250 calories”. For example, with lunch today I eschewed a bag of crisps and I didn’t really miss them. I suspect long-term I can retrain myself to think that lunchtime doesn’t have to involve a bag of crisps, and thus a bag of crisps can be mentally moved from “expected part of lunch” to “occasional treat”. That seems like a positive step, for sure.

This is a positive move. One of the reasons I have found myself struggling with more “plan-based” approaches in recent years is the feeling that I’m “giving things up” and “missing out” on them. When you specifically rule out certain things from your diet, it turns out that you really crave them. And while when I did Slimming World 10 years or so back I could handle that, this time around I’ve really struggled. And thus it was time to try something different.

As I say, so far it remains to be seen if what I’ve done this week has actually had any tangible effect or if I need to step my efforts up a bit, but from next week I’m planning to start being a little more active again.

Y’see, part of the reason I’m in the state I’m in is due to the COVID years. The whole lockdown thing, coupled with general laziness, caused me to gain a bunch of weight, stop doing any sort of exercise and even start feeling a bit uneasy about going outside generally. That’s not a good place in which to find yourself, so I need to start taking additional steps to sort that out, and getting back into a gym habit will be a good means of doing that.

The reason I haven’t done that this week alongside starting the calorie counting is I did my back in somehow while we were away on holiday, and it’s just starting now to feel like it’s a bit better. I didn’t want to agitate it with exercise, so I’ve been waiting until whatever the problem was appears to have “healed”, and I think it’s pretty much there. So from Monday, I’m going to make an effort to go to the gym at least three times throughout the week.

I think I talked about this elsewhere, but I also plan to not overwhelm myself by suddenly starting a long, intense exercise routine. I’m going to begin by just going and doing, say, 20-30 minutes walking on the treadmill. I have a bit of a mental block where I feel like “just” doing that is a waste of time, but when you’re in the state I’m in, it’s absolutely not. Ideally what I’d want to do is maybe one day 20-30 minutes on the treadmill, then the next day just do the strength training machines, then alternate back and forth between them. That way, over the course of the week, I can end up having done the “recommended” amount of exercise, and I’ll have also done a bit of both cardio and strength.

I don’t yet know if my mental wellbeing and willpower is quite up to that as yet, but it’s something to aim for at least. For now, I’m going to count “went to gym at least three times” next week as a success, and anything more than that is a happy bonus. And that will kick off on Monday, giving me tomorrow to relax a bit, make sure my back is in working order and mentally prepare myself for what’s ahead.

I want to beat this. I know it’s possible, and I know it’s going to be hard work. Right now I’m feeling oddly motivated, so I wanted to put pen to paper and actually express that. Whether I feel the same way on Monday remains to be seen, but these sorts of things always have to be one step at a time, slowly but surely.

And so here I am, taking those slow but sure steps. Here’s hoping they prove to be both worthwhile and sustainable.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

#oneaday Day 128: Imminent Holiday

As I may have mentioned once or twice recently, we’re going on holiday tomorrow. We’ll be away from Monday to Friday visiting Center Parcs in Elveden Forest, which has been a thoroughly nice place to have some time away on all the previous occasions we’ve visited.

My intentions for this holiday are to unplug almost completely. I will post on this blog daily because of the whole #oneaday thing, but outside of that, I intend to avoid any sort of attachment to the Internet whatsoever, except where absolutely necessary to research things. That means I am making the following promises to myself:

I will not worry about writing anything for MoeGamer or making any sort of video for YouTube.
I will not poke my head in on Discord channels that are likely to annoy me.
I will not look at Twitter at all.
I will minimise my use of Bluesky.

I haven’t really talked about the last one at all, but as you may have surmised from the sidebar, I have been dipping my toe back into social media with Bluesky recently. And for the most part, I’ve found it a thoroughly pleasant environment that feels very much like Twitter did in the early days. It’s very left-leaning, which can at times be a little insufferable, and wherever you look you’re very likely to run into either a particularly horny furry or someone proud of the fact they’re wearing a cage on their cock, but for the most part it has been a remarkably stress-free social media experience so far.

Part of the reason for this is that the platform is built to discourage “dunking”, whereas Twitter outright incentivises it these days. The main way Bluesky differs from Twitter is through its absolutely nuclear block function, which means that if someone quote-posts or replies to someone they have subsequently blocked, if you are following the person who made the quote-post or reply, the original post will appear as blocked to you also. This discourages people from going “looking for trouble” because you can’t even see the username of the blocked post. This can be frustrating at times if you missed the original context, but for the most part I think it’s a positive thing.

So anyway, as a result of all that, and the fact I have a few friendly faces there, I have been using Bluesky a bit recently, and thus, if I’m going to share anything about the holiday that isn’t on this blog, I’ll likely do so there. If you’re a Bluesky user and want to follow me, here.

But yes. Anyway, the main point of this post is to note that I will be disconnecting from the greater part of the Internet as much as humanly possible while I am away, because I need it. I need some time away where I just don’t put any unnecessary pressure on myself, or potentially put myself in situations where I might end up getting annoyed. I’m tempted to outright leave a few Discord servers to remove the temptation altogether, but probably won’t go that far.

This holiday is to rest, relax and genuinely get away from it all. My mental health has been in the toilet of late, and the Internet has played a big part in creating that situation. So instead I’m going to be among the trees, play some video games, go swimming and look at friendly deer. We might go and fire a crossbow (not at the deer) and play some pool, too. We haven’t decided yet. But it’s going to be nice.

Today, meanwhile, it’s last-minute packing and tidying up ahead of my mother-in-law coming to look after the cats — sorry burglars, the house will still be occupied while we’re away — and perhaps finishing off Silent Hill 2 later.

#oneaday Day 107: Tackling Loneliness

I’ve seen quite a few news reports and political manifestos over the course of the last few years that claim “we” as a society are supposedly doing something to “tackle loneliness”.

Okay. What? What are “we” doing to tackle loneliness? Because from where I’m sitting in this extremely lonely state of mind, I can see precisely fuck all going on. I am in a position where I feel like I need some sort of help in this regard, and I do not have a fucking clue where I might go to find it.

Oh, I can see lots of statistics and reports that confirm indeed, yes, people are feeling lonely. But no actual action taking place. Lots of big words like “we need to take a holistic life course approach” and other such shit, but no actual evidence of anything really being done.

Which, of course, begs the question: exactly what can be done? “Tackling loneliness” isn’t just a case of dumping a bunch of people in a room and telling them to talk to one another — though one of our local bus companies seems to think that branding their buses the “ChattyBus” and encouraging people to make “bus friends” is an approach that will have any effect whatsoever, clearly not understanding that the sort of people who will talk to you on a bus are generally not people you want in your immediate circle of friends.

There are volunteer services that exist in an attempt to “tackle loneliness”, but I feel like these would always feel very artificial. Someone is acting like your friend because it’s their job to act like your friend. I’m sure real social connections can and do come about as a result of initiatives like this, but judging by a quick scoot around the websites for ones in the general area, they are all very oversubscribed. Which, in itself, probably says something that isn’t all that good.

Mostly I just want my old friendships back. Friendships from before an age of social media, friendships from before the worldwide political stage became the perpetual firework show it seems to be these days, friendships from when we were all just happy to hang out and do something fun in one another’s company.

And it’s not as if I haven’t tried to maintain those friendships that used to be like that. But I always seem to be faced with resistance: resistance that seems to grow by the year. I have reached a point where I feel very much unwanted by a lot of people with whom I used to be very close, and it upsets me. Like, really upsets me. Keeps-me-awake-at-night upsets me.

And this feeling of being unwanted of course feeds into other mental health issues — including self-esteem and social anxiety. If the people who are supposedly some of my oldest friends don’t want me, how on Earth can I be expected to find the confidence to make new friends? How, even, do you make new friends in 2024? I just don’t know any more.

In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever known. I’ve told this story before, but I’ll tell it again, because it’s relevant.

On my first day at secondary school, I was pleased to discover I was in a class with several of the people I had known at primary school — including the person who was ostensibly my “best friend”. We had been put in a seating arrangement for morning registration, presumably in an attempt to get us to mingle a bit and get to know one another. I was sat next to a lad called Murray. I had absolutely no idea how to talk to him. I vividly remember turning around to my former “best friend”, who was sitting behind me, and urgently whispering to him “I don’t remember how to make friends”.

Because I didn’t. And I still don’t. Any friendships I found myself in tended to be ones of circumstance such as living together in the same flat at university, and I always felt like I existed on the periphery of larger friendship groups that these acquaintances had. I felt like I was “intruding”, like I wouldn’t be welcome if I tried to ingratiate myself with these people who “weren’t my friends”. Those people were their friends, not my friends, and what right did I have to attempt to call them my friends too?

It looks silly on paper, I’m sure, but that’s the reality of social anxiety. Legitimately one of my proudest moments of personal growth in my whole life is a time I was caught in a lift with a stranger I was on a music course with and I plucked up the courage to actually introduce myself. I felt enormously awkward and like a complete idiot at the time, but that one occasion actually became a genuine friendship — and several other friendships came about as a result of that initial contact.

But good Lord, did it ever feel like scaling Everest to get those words out of my mouth in the first place. And these days, I don’t exactly find myself stuck in a lift with people I might have something in common with all that often. So here I am, stuck typing this to myself at 11:15 on a Sunday night, wondering where it all went wrong and even if it’s possible to fix things at this point. Because the longer this goes on, the more I worry about what the end result of it all might be for me.

I’m lonely. That’s about it, really.

#oneaday Day 100: Do the Thing

As I reach 100 days of daily blogging for the second time around, this symbolically significant but practically unimportant milestone seems like a good place to reflect on the fine art of Doing the Thing, inspired by this video that I’ve seen floating across my YouTube feed a few times, and which I finally decided to have a look at.

For those disinclined to click on random video links — don’t worry, I am too under most circumstances — the summary of the video is simple. A lot of us, particularly as we get older, find ourselves with more limited amounts of free time and, paradoxically, we seem to spend an awful lot of that “free” time agonising over what we “should” be doing. The focus of the video is on picking a video game to play, but really the principle applies to anything where you have a choice to make.

Analysis paralysis is the enemy. It’s a peculiar form of anxiety where you get so overwhelmed by the possibilities that surround you that you find it impossible to decide to engage with just one of them on the grounds that it might be the “wrong” one.

The video maker uses the video game StarCraft II as an analogy. StarCraft II is a real-time strategy game, which means you control a bunch of little dudes and tanks and make them blow other little dudes and tanks up. Because it’s real-time, it’s rare you get the opportunity to stop and think, so the best StarCraft II players are those who make decisions quickly and decisively — to the tune of several hundred minor decisions per minute if we’re talking about professional-grade players.

The secret is not to worry if the choice you make is the “wrong” one. If you make a choice and subsequently discover there was a more “optimal” thing you could have done, who cares? You made the choice, now all you need to do is deal with the consequences of it. And for the vast majority of decisions that we make in our day to day lives — particularly when it comes to our leisure time — neither those decisions nor the consequences of them are particularly important.

Let’s take video games as the example again. Let’s say you have about an hour and a half of free time before you need to go and do something important — and that thing is important, but up until it is time to do the important thing, your time is completely yours. You have, at least, made the decision that you would like to play a video game. This is one of those decisions where both your options and the consequences are unimportant. If you chose to play a video game, great, you get to play a video game. If you chose to do something else, great, you get to do that instead.

The only really “wrong” choice in this scenario is not making the choice in the first place, as sitting by yourself getting stressed out over something as inconsequential as what form of entertainment you want to spent 90 minutes of your day engaging with is the height of absurdity if you stop to think about it. This is supposed to be your time to enjoy yourself, not to put pressure on yourself about something that is supposed to be relaxing and enjoyable.

Most people can successfully make that first decision: “I would like to play a video game”. The next step is, in many folks’ minds, the harder one: “I would like to play this specific video game”. And yet, really, that decision is just as inconsequential as the other one. No-one but you really cares what you’re going to spend the next 90 minutes doing, so, again, the only “wrong” choice is not making a decision in the first place. Because then you’ve just wasted your 90 minutes, when you could have been doing something that relaxes or invigorates you.

If you’re someone who does creative stuff online, I’m willing to bet you’re probably prone to that second point of analysis paralysis, because there’s that constant lingering thought in the back of your mind that you “should” do something that you can write an article or make a video about. But the thing we all need to get well and truly fixed in our mind is that deciding to Do the Thing is not the important part of the process; actually Doing the Thing is the important bit. And if you never get as far as even Starting the Thing, then you’re probably going to be annoyed with yourself, regardless of whether or not the Thing you decided on is “productive” or not.

I’m trying to be better about this. I think back to how I enjoyed games before social media, blogging, the Internet and YouTube, and I want to recapture that feeling. I want to be able to be decisive enough to say “tonight I am going to play Yakuza 5” and not spend the next 90 minutes second-guessing myself.

Because taking time to engage with something you enjoy — and to take care of yourself — is never time misspent. Time agonising over things you’re supposed to be enjoying absolutely is wasted time, however.

So, y’know, cut it out. Stop it. Stop it. And go enjoy something. Anything. I don’t care what. Just go and do it now.

#oneaday Day 48: Not So Great

Today was not so good. I spent a significant proportion of the evening having a fairly major panic attack. I thought I was just having a depressive episode, but when I realised I was shaking, my heart was racing and I was just generally feeling “afraid” to do anything, it became pretty clear what it actually was.

I decided to try and sleep it off, and while I don’t feel great now, I think the worst has passed, and in the meantime I certainly had what felt like some interesting dreams. They were the kind of dreams that evaporate as soon as you wake up properly so I unfortunately can’t say any more than that — aside from the phrase “it’s stunning, so long as you already have the suspension of disbelief required for modern VR”, for some reason — but they were certainly interesting.

This, of course, has pretty much taken up my entire evening and prevented me from doing anything more interesting, but sometimes you just have to try and take care of yourself the best way you know how. And when you’re suffering from some form of mental health breakdown, sometimes the best thing to do is just find a place or situation in which you feel comfortable, and ride the damn thing out. There’s a reason why so many folks make a connection between mental health episodes and “storms” of sort; the principle behind surviving them with minimal harm is very similar, albeit with one being physical and the other being mental.

Anyway, all that regrettably means I don’t have a lot of worthwhile things to say this evening. I’m hoping I feel better tomorrow — and I’m hoping the cat doesn’t keep me awake as much tonight as she did last night. I feel my struggles today may be related to this, though I can’t blame her or be mad at her; she wasn’t being malicious or deliberately trying to cause harm.

On that note, then, back to bed I go.

#oneaday Day 39: Breaking Point

Had a bit of a meltdown earlier. Thankfully, I managed to direct it inwards rather than at anyone else, and I successfully channelled its energy into tidying some of the shit up around the house. So that’s something, at least. Now I just feel kind of drained and empty.

I’d been building to something like this for a while, and I suspect I’m not out of this particular funk just yet, but heading along to Slimming World this evening and discovering I’d put a bunch of weight back on was just my mind’s breaking point. I was upset and angry at myself, more than anything, because I know that weight gain was entirely deserved — I’ve not been focusing on the things I’ve been eating as much as I should be if I want to see results, and I’ve gotten away with doing so for probably more weeks than I should have.

A situation like this is a good opportunity for a change, but the frustrating thing is that when such a thing occurs, I find myself wishing that I could correct the mistake immediately. But it doesn’t work like that; undoing bad habits takes time and effort, and you don’t necessarily see results right away. The important thing is to acknowledge that you fucked up, be at peace with the fact you fucked up, and then take steps to ensure that you do not fuck up again for at least a little while.

So I stopped at the shops on the way home and got some healthy eats that will see me through the next few days. We’re in a bit of an awkward position food-wise right now in that Andie is suffering some sort of mouth malady (likely an abscess under a root canal she had done a while back) and can’t really eat much. That means I’m generally having to sort shit out for myself, and if anyone has ever attempted to feed themselves well as an individual person, you’ll know that most things tend to be sold on the assumption that you are cooking for two.

That means you inevitably end up with too much stuff, which either means cooking too much stuff and having leftovers — not the end of the world — or using half the ingredients and risking the other half going off. I think we’ve all been successfully conditioned to (rightly) recognise that food waste is a bit of a sin, so I always feel a bit bad when I have to chuck stuff out, but it always feels a bit… constricting when you know you’re either going to be eating the same thing two days in a row, or having to come up with something creative to do with the other ingredients you have in the fridge.

Anyway, long story short: this upset in our normal routine has kind of disrupted me making an effort to watch what I eat. To be fair, I was already kind of falling off the wagon a bit before Andie’s troubles happened, but the situation just sort of compounded itself. But I know that is silly, so the stuff I picked up earlier should last a few days at least, and be suitable for individual portions or making an easy big batch of stuff that I can portion out and have the remainder as leftovers as required.

You may think I’m overthinking this and I probably am, but that is the nature of my autistic brain and its thought processes. I am now doing my best to not sit here stewing being pissed off at myself, so I think some well-earned video games are probably in order.

#oneaday Day 35: Lay Me Down to Sleep

I’m exhausted, physically and mentally. I think mostly mentally, but that in turn is making me feel physically exhausted. The world just seems to be such a frustratingly relentless parade of shit at the moment that just existing is tiring. So although it’s not even 10pm at the time of writing, I think I might just go to bed after this.

Unlike times gone by, I can thankfully say that it’s not really my life that has gone to shit as such, but I’m not sure that’s any great comfort. At least if there is something wrong in my life — and plenty of things are, don’t get me wrong — it’s possible to take action and do something about it.

But when you feel like the entire world is just collectively going insane, and there’s fuck all you can do about it? That’s exhausting. Whether it’s the constant enshittification of today’s services, the ever-increasing cost of living or the utterly stupid obsession with AI — all three of which are related to varying degrees, I’d say — it just feels like the world is moving in an unhealthy direction, and no matter how much you say “hang on a minute” there’s nothing that you, as one person, can do.

I won’t lie, I’m a little concerned for my pals in America right now, because they seem to be staring down a bit of a no-win situation when it comes to the upcoming presidential elections. On the one side, you have Trump, who is just an outright fucking maniac, and on the other, you have Biden, whose age is starting to make people question his suitability for the role. Given the choice, it seems like picking the old man is the sensible thing to do, but America never seems to make things that simple. After all, they already elected Trump into office once; while most people would probably agree that was a terrible idea, I have a strange feeling that it might happen again.

And while I feel a certain sense of solidarity with others online expressing similar concerns about the immediate and medium-term future, I also feel very alone. Ever since COVID hit, I’ve felt completely isolated aside from being with my wife, and it’s done a real number on my self-confidence and self-esteem. I feel like I could do with some sort of support network when I’m feeling like this, and I just don’t have one. Worse, I don’t really know how to go about putting one together — or indeed reassembling one that I maybe once had.

I always used to think that as you grew older and became more of an “adult” that things would fall into place and become more straightforward. And perhaps they did for previous generations. But for me, right now, each passing year just feels worse and worse, like a sense of comfort and stability is just slipping further and further away. The world has been a place that I don’t feel like I quite fit into for as long as I can remember. And in recent years, that feeling has only been becoming more and more pronounced with everything that’s been happening.

If only it was possible to just completely disconnect from the bad things in the world, and spend your time surrounded by people who care about you, and whom you care about too. I guess I should feel lucky that I have my wife and cats, at the very least; some people don’t even have that.

I’d apologise for the maudlin post, but I made it clear back when I started all this shenanigans again that it was going to be a form of “therapy” for me. And that means getting this stuff off my chest once in a while. I’m sure you understand. Perhaps you even feel the same way. I unfortunately cannot offer any advice or comfort if so, but know, at least, that you are not the only one feeling that way. Not, I suspect, by a long shot.

#oneaday Day 8: Escaping a Rut

Hello. As has probably been quite apparent from my last few posts, I’ve been in something of a rut mental health-wise for a little while now, and I’ve reached a point where I actively want to do something about it. Starting up the whole #oneaday thing again is part of that, but I also need to make some more active changes to my lifestyle in order to make progress.

Specifically, I need to get properly back into the swing of following Slimming World, as I’ve been a tad lax on that for the past few weeks, and I also want to try and get a bit more exercise. Along with that, I want to try and start my day a bit earlier rather than rolling out of bed and immediately into work.

Thus, what I would like to start achieving from the beginning of next week is getting up a couple of hours earlier, going to our local pool and having a swim before work. One of my big mental blocks with exercise is when I feel like it’s encroaching on “my” time after work, and so going first thing in the morning is a good way of getting around that, since I don’t count the period before work starts as really “my” time as such. This may sound daft to you, but it’s the way my brain has always thought of things.

The difficulty is going to be actually getting up a couple of hours earlier. The reason I’ve fallen into the habit of getting up pretty much immediately before work starts is because I haven’t felt like I’ve had anything to get up “for”, but conversely this means that I don’t want to get up any earlier than I do because my brain has come to think of those last few moments of sleep as somehow more precious than the rest of the night.

Part of this is to do with the “trapped inside your own head” phenomenon that I talked about the other day. I’m most likely to feel like I “can’t” get up because I “need to finish” the dream I was having first thing in the morning, and that, for quite some time now, has prevented me from getting up at a sensible time. That, I feel, is going to be the most significant battle I face on the road to making a bit of morning exercise a regular routine.

Thing is, swimming is an activity I actually like doing, in contrast to a lot of other forms of exercise that I tend to feel negatively about. I find swimming both relaxing and invigorating; I know I’m not very good at it, but it’s something that I simply like. And since it’s something that, done enough, can actually be good for me, I feel like I should take advantage of that fact.

So, then, the challenge is going to be ensuring that I actually haul myself out of bed in time to go for a swim of a morning. My local pool does morning sessions every weekday morning between 7 and 9, and ideally speaking, I’d like to try and go every day. I feel like that might be an unrealistic target to begin with, though, so for the upcoming week I’m setting myself the goal of getting up and going swimming before work at least twice during the week.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see how that goes. I’m trying not to contemplate “likely failure” before it happens, and go into this with a positive mindset. But we’ll see, I guess!

#oneaday Day 5: Trapped Inside

Do you ever feel trapped inside your own head? I mean obviously we’re all trapped inside our own heads, our eyes our only windows out of our self-imposed prisons, but what I mean is, do you ever find yourself finding it, say, difficult to wake up because of what your imagination is conjuring up?

I’ve been feeling this for a while. I’m not entirely sure what causes it, whether it’s a side-effect of the medication I’m taking, whether it’s a symptom of my mental health conditions or if I’m just naturally predisposed towards this sort of thing. Regardless of the cause, though, there are mornings where I genuinely do feel absolutely “trapped” inside the scenarios my imagination has conjured up for me; part of my consciousness is saying “wake up, get up, you need to go to work”, but my brain is saying “no, you need to stay here and resolve this completely fictional, made-up scenario before you do anything else”.

Another way of putting it might be that I feel sort of “addicted” to dreaming. I have quite vivid dreams — always have done — and those dreams tend to be at their most vivid in the morning, particularly if I’ve already woken up once and fallen asleep again. In those circumstances, I suspect they’re probably an interpretation of my brain being aware that I need to get up soon, if not now, and expressing that source of anxiety through somewhat surreal means. But it ends up being counterproductive, because I inevitably find the dreams so interesting that I don’t want to leave them behind and wake up.

I’ve genuinely had mornings where I’ve felt like I didn’t want to get up because I thought I needed to “finish” whatever was going on in the dream first. Except because the dreams themselves were so abstract, there was no real “win state”, for want of a better word; no means of “completing” or “resolving” them. And so I just end up being drawn back in, often repeating the same situation over and over again rather than making any real “progress”.

The human mind is fascinating. I wonder if one day we will be able to better understand and explore the things that go on in there. I’d certainly be fascinated to explore the worlds within in a more “lucid” manner. But for now, I guess I’ll just have to be satisfied with sleeping in slightly longer than I should in the morning, in the vain hope that I might actually “finish” a dream.