#oneaday Day 14: Sleep, Needed

In stark contrast to yesterday’s very good sleep (albeit with interruption by noisily vomiting cat), last night I slept terribly. I went to bed with a pain in my back and took some painkillers, which helped a bit, but it took me ages to get to sleep and I woke up multiple times throughout the night. There wasn’t even a good reason for it this time; Patti was, as usual, in her spot at the foot of our bed, but she wasn’t in the way or being sick. I was just waking up and then taking a long time to actually get back to sleep again.

Still, it’s the weekend now, so if I want to (I probably want to) I can have a nice lie-in tomorrow. I don’t think we have anything vastly important planned for the weekend, so we can just have a bit of nice relaxing time, I can make some videos and we can generally recharge and recuperate ahead of it all starting again on Monday.

I’m not going to the gym or swimming today as I still feel extremely stiff and achey, not helped by the poor night’s sleep. I have succeeded in my original goal, though, which was to get out of the house in the morning and do something active at least twice, and I think I will make some time over the weekend to go either swimming or to the gym, depending on their respective availability.

I’m feeling motivated to try and get things going back in the right direction, so it’s a bit frustrating that it feels like my body is just going “eh, no” right this second, but I’m sure that’s 1) a temporary thing and 2) something that I’ll have to power through in the long term. I’m willing to put in that work, but there’s also no rush to get it done. Past experience tells me that working up to things gradually is the way to go; try and do too much too soon and it’s easy to completely lose all that motivation you’d built up. And I don’t want that to happen.

Apropos of nothing, I thought I’d look back at what I was up to ten years ago today, since the long life of this blog means I can actually check such things. It appears that I was 1,615 posts deep into my original #oneaday effort, and I’d just watched a then-new show on the TV channel Dave known as Alan Davies: As Yet Untitled. I have no idea if this show is still running, but reading back over the post, I remember it being enjoyable, lightweight television that didn’t demand too much of the viewer.

Reading that makes me think how much our relationship with media has changed in just ten years. Today, I’m very unlikely to watch anything “on television” (i.e. live broadcasts), and a lot of the stuff I do watch on a day-to-day basis is via YouTube. Right now, I am watching through all of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on DVD as a bedtime activity, though, and that’s a nice reminder of how enjoyable classic TV could be… hell, how enjoyable a show of that format still is.

In fact, I’m probably due some sort of retrospective post on Deep Space Nine and my relationship with Star Trek in general. Well, I guess that’s a topic for tomorrow sorted! For now, though, my dinner is ready so I’m off to eat and then quite possibly to just collapse into bed aftwards.

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 13: Sleep, Interrupted

At approximately 4.30am this morning, my cat Patti was sick all over the bed. I am annoyed by this, not because of the sick — Patti is very good at being sick, and we have come to accept this as just part of who she is — but because it interrupted what was, I’m pretty sure, one of the best nights of sleep I’ve had for a very long time.

Seriously. It was an unusually good night’s sleep. So much so that when I awoke to the inimitable sound of a cat being sick — if you know, you know — my first thought was not “oh God, she’s being sick” but “damn, that was an unusually good night’s sleep”. Closely followed by a frantic attempt to get Patti off the bed before she erupted, but sadly I was a little too late.

Rather than start a load of laundry in the middle of the night or sleep beneath a vomit-covered duvet, I instead went to hopefully continue that good night’s sleep in the spare bedroom. My wife didn’t wake up throughout any of this, I hasten to add, and the sick was enough on my side of the bed that I didn’t think she’d accidentally come into contact with it while she slept, so I left her to it. She told me this morning that she woke up for a wee, was briefly confused by my absence and then accidentally put her hand right in it, after which she immediately understood why I had gone elsewhere.

As it happened, I did manage to get back to sleep surprisingly quickly, and while I didn’t feel like getting up early today, I did feel quite refreshed when I did finally rouse myself. I had an interesting dream, too; I was visiting my old clarinet teacher from childhood, who had installed himself in a much bigger, nicer house than back when I really knew him. I recall complimenting him on his house and the huge plants he had in carefully labelled glass pots in his front garden, and him laughing that I thought he’d still be in the place I last saw him nearly 30 years ago. I woke up shortly afterwards.

Anyway, the reason I feel having a good night’s sleep is worth commenting on is not just because it’s already late in the afternoon and I haven’t thought of anything to write, but because I’ve struggled for a long time with getting to sleep. But last night it just seemed to come nice and easily. Perhaps it’s the exercise. Perhaps it was the warm milk. Perhaps it was the two episodes of Deep Space Nine. Perhaps it was a little of all of the above. But I hope I can make a habit of that.

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.

2083: Insomnia

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!

1788: Sleepless

I am tired. Really tired.

Like, falling asleep at inappropriate moments tired. Well, maybe not quite full-on falling asleep, but I was most certainly at serious risk of it while sitting at my desk earlier.

It was that kind of tired where you think you’ll just close your eyes for a moment and refresh yourself, then “wake up” a couple of seconds later, hoping that no-one noticed you were drifting off.

It’s a frustrating kind of tired because it’s not a kind of tired you can easily get over. A cup of coffee doesn’t shift it, and it always tends to come early in the day when you can’t really get away with a nap… Particularly if you’re at work.

Fortunately I’m now at home, in bed, having watched The Apprentice, and am now ready to go to sleep. And I’m terribly sorry to not write anything more interesting at this point, but as I believe I may have mentioned earlier, I am very tired.

So I’m going to go to sleep at last. Good night!

1711: Soporific

I have… a problem.

Said problem is that if I have to sit still and do nothing while concentrating on someone else talking for any length of time, I get extremely sleepy, regardless of how tired I actually am. My eyelids start to get heavy, my body gets tired and all I want to do is just curl up and get comfortable for a bit of a nap.

This is a problem because the times when I am supposed to sit still, do nothing and concentrate on someone else talking for any length of time are generally occasions where it would be impolite to fall asleep. Weddings and funerals, for example, but also meetings.

I’ve suffered with this issue for as long as I can remember — certainly for as long as I’ve been an adult. I remember it happening on occasion at university during lectures, but more often than not this could be attributed to a heavy night out the previous evening and a hangover weighing on my mind. (My peers found it terribly amusing when I had to quietly slip out of our weekly piano workshop to go and be a bit sick. Well, I didn’t want to throw up all over the Turner Sims concert hall.) At other times, I could fend it off by occupying my brain somewhat: either taking notes if I was actually interested in the subject of the lecture, or doodling the lecturer getting sucked off by some sort of sinister vacuum cleaner-like contraption if I wasn’t. (This happened once; it wasn’t something I found myself drawing on a regular basis.)

It’s mildly embarrassing, but fortunately I’ve never managed to actually completely fall asleep before. I’ve come perilously close, I must admit, but I always manage to maintain my faculties and remain in the land of the living. I came perilously close on more than one teacher training day while I worked in schools, too, particularly since said training days tend to ignore everything we’re ever taught about engaging people and helping them learn and instead tend to consist of someone waffling on and on and on for hours about something which is, quite possibly, a load of old bollocks.

The peculiar thing is the moment I step out of the situation where I’m supposed to be concentrating on someone else droning on about whatever, I can be back to full alertness in a matter of seconds, with no trace of tiredness. It’s just that while I’m sitting there, expected to take in everything that is being said and actually retaining very little of it at all — usually because it’s not relevant to me and thus immediately filtered out by my brain — my body appears to go into its shutdown sequence. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.

Or am I? That would be awful, and even more difficult to explain than falling asleep in a meeting already would be. But I guess we’ll cross that bridge if — yes, if — we come to it!

1355: Impending Lie-In

Good golly gosh, I’m knackered.

This is at least partly due to the fact that I didn’t really have a weekend last weekend. (Actually, there’s no “really” about it; I flat-out didn’t have a weekend last weekend, since although Eurogamer Expo was enjoyable, I still had to work through it, and also had to overcome my not-inconsiderable social anxiety in order to actually, you know, talk to developers and stuff. I think I did fairly admirably, all things considered.)

Anyway. Consequently, I am looking forward to having a weekend this weekend, and the first thing I shall be doing with said weekend is having a lie-in. I’ve been waking up relatively late each morning this week and desperately wanting a lie-in — in some cases even dropping off until about half an hour before I need to start work (which, fortunately, as you probably know, involves walking from my bed to my study, and I don’t even have to put on pants if I don’t want to) — and not being able to have it. But tomorrow morning, I can have a lie-in, and it will be glorious.

Except going on recent past experience, the opportunity to actually have a lie-in is usually a signal for my body to wake up promptly at 7am and be unable to get back to sleep. This is infuriating when it happens, because any hope of catching up on sleep is then completely ruined. Of course, it’s often quite nice to deliberately wake up early and have considerably more hours available in the day than usual, but come on. It’s the weekend. I want to lie in bed and not move for more hours than I’m normally able to, then get up, have a bacon sandwich (or similarly greasy equivalent) and do nothing of any value for the remainder of the day.

Ah well. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow morning. Perhaps I’ll play some Sweet Fuse until the early hours and see if that will lull me into a deep sleep filled with bishounen.

(Speaking of Sweet Fuse, I’m still enjoying it a great deal. What a silly game. I’m glad it exists. If you’d have told me ten years ago that one day I’d be playing a game in which I took on the role of Mega Man creator Keiji Inafune’s niece as she wandered around a theme park that had been taken over by a pig-like terrorist, I would have probably laughed in your face. I have since learned, of course, that anything goes in gaming, and when you take into account the possibilities of less interactive genres such as visual novels, you really can tackle pretty much any subject matter as a “game”. But that, as ever, is a discussion for another day, I feel; time to head bedwards for me — Saki Inafune and her harem of gentlemen friends is awaiting me.)

1225: Red Wizard Needs Z’s Badly

I’m exhausted. I’m not quite sure why I feel so utterly exhausted because I slept well last night and today hasn’t exactly been a particularly strenuous day. We played a couple of short games this morning before departing the pleasant country farmhouse we’d been staying in over the weekend, drove back, then, presumably, did our respective “Things” once we got home rather than immediately falling into a coma like I feel like doing right now.

The only thing I can possibly attribute it to is the two gin and tonics I had last night. I don’t really drink any more so even a tiny bit of alcohol tends to have quite a strong impact on me — disappointingly, this doesn’t tend to take the form of getting amusingly giggly or wobbly any more; rather, it tends to just make me a bit tired, particularly the day after I’ve been drinking. I guess what I’m enduring is a sort of hangover, albeit a rather pathetic one that will be immensely disappointing to those who used to enjoy past drunken (and post-drunken) ramblings.

The other thing it could be, of course, is the fact that we stayed up until about 2 in the morning playing various combinations of board, card and computer games, then tumbled into bed (not together) before waking up relatively early (for a bank holiday Monday, anyway) today.

Either way, it’s not a particularly good show, is it? I vividly remember the days when I’d happily stay up all night just for the hell of it (and regret it for the majority of the following day, particularly if there were any university lectures involved) and consume several gallons of alcoholic beverages before texting people I fancied messages with lots of X’s on the end of them (the number of X’s was typically proportional to how much I fancied them) and collapsing into bed, quite possibly fully-clothed.

Depressingly, the time when I was able to behave like that on a regular basis was over ten years ago now. Longtime readers will doubtless note that the posts I linked to above were from relatively early in this whole #oneaday lark, but they were isolated incidents rather than something I was doing on a regular basis.

Actually, I say “depressingly”, but I don’t really feel the need to stay up until ungodly hours in the morning and stagger in as pissed as a fart on a regular basis. At the tender age of 32, I’m more than happy to spend my evening lounging on the sofa watching some entertaining videos or playing a game. It doesn’t stop me from indulging in a late night once in a while, of course — apparently I just have to be prepared to deal with the consequences the following day!

Now I am going to go to bed and possibly sleep for about a thousand years. (Note: It will probably not be about a thousand years. Probably more like 8 hours or so, I imagine.) Good night, and hopefully I’ll have a more lively brain that is willing to talk about something a bit more interesting on the morrow.

#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 132: Sleep Tight

(Aside: “Sleep tight”? What the hell does that mean? For one, it implies you can somehow “sleep loose”, which sounds suspiciously like bollocks to me. But I digress.)

Sleeping’s a strange thing, really, isn’t it? It’s something natural and instinctive — so much so that it’s pretty much impossible to explain to someone how to do it. I know I can’t. I know that I can’t even explain it to myself, and the more you think about trying to get to sleep, the less able you are to actually do it. “Trying to sleep” becomes “lying in a dark room with your eyes shut trying not to think about anything and failing”.

Because that’s impossible. You can’t think about nothing. It’s actually impossible. There is no way you can completely clear your mind of absolutely everything, because even if you’re picturing darkness or a black wall or something, you’re still picturing something, not nothing. And your consciousness of the fact that you’re not clearing your mind, the fact that you’re thinking of something, not nothing, that makes things worse.

It gets even worse when it’s late and you know that you actually need to get to sleep otherwise the following day is going to be hellish, especially if you have to get up early. Not only do you have the pressure of trying to clear your mind and get to sleep (and inevitably failing) but you also end up opening your eyes every so often just to check how much time you’re wasting when you could spend it sleeping.

Then you realise your phone’s by your bed, so you figure a quick round of Bejeweled Blitz/couple of levels of Angry Birds/few weeks on Game Dev Story/couple of attempts at Tiny Wings/an episode of Cause of Death is just what you need to make you drop off. And so you play for a bit, and your eyes get heavy, but then you figure “what if someone’s said something interesting or exciting on Twitter?” so you check that, then look at your emails, then possibly send an email or two to people you’ve been meaning to email for ages but never remember to in the daytime. By now, your brain is full of words and jumping birds and Special Agent Natara Williams and so there’s no hope of you getting to sleep any time soon, so you go and get yourself a drink and/or a sandwich and/or a jammy dodger and then repeat the whole process over and over again.

I envy those people who can just keel over in pretty much any context and start happily snoring away. Clearly I need to sleep in a sensory deprivation chamber approximately three miles away from my phone and any other electronic equipment.