The Pitfalls of Being Online Past Midnight
Wednesday, June 15, 2010, 2:42 a.m.
I had an epiphany just now: I would avoid some problems if I were not allowed online after midnight. Or not allowed to send emails, at the very least.
I would not, in blue moods, send emails to people in my life about things that, by the light of morning, seem far less pressing, or at least less deserving of obsessive rumination.
(That excessive rumination is half my normally introspective nature and half bipolar monkey*. I don't know if people who don't suffer from bipolar or depression issues can understand the way a problem or even just a negative thought gets trapped in your brain, playing over and over again like a broken record. It's like a greyhound that can't resist chasing that damned rabbit, even after it knows it will never, ever, catch it. Worse, you know you're doing it. I have conversations over and over in my head, but still can't shut myself up. I rehearse what I would say to people if I could lay it all out for them, and practice for confrontations that haven't even come up yet, and probably never will.)
Neither would I research diseases, syndromes and physical complaints, practicing medicine without a license. Just now, trying to find the correct spelling of serotonin, I discovered something called serotonin syndrome, and have almost convinced myself I am suffering from it. Reading about serotonin sydrome, I succumbed to the temptation to look up all the drugs I'm currently taking, which can scare the hell of someone even just taking aspirin and vitamins.
But back to the idea of staying offline late at night. There are several problems with putting that into practice. Like, I'd never send any email or post hardly anything if the wee hours of the morning were off limits. Put in sole charge of my routine, I am a terrible to my inner child. I don't want to listen to myself whine, so I let myself do whatever in the hell I want.
In my last three years of on-again, off-again non-participation in the 9-to-5 daily wage-earning world, my body has found what I believe to be its natural rhythm. (To call it my natural rhythm sound so much nicer than admitting that I just might, possibly, be merely a lazy slob.) I am most awake and productive between the hours of 8 pm and 3 am. Left to my own devices, I sleep until 11 or noon.
For a while, this worked well, but I'm having a damn hard time going to sleep the last few months. Is it because I stay up so late, then sleep so late, that I can't go to sleep at a reasonable hour? Or vice-versa? It's a chicken and the egg kind of question.
I've been trying to force myself back into some approximation of normal, i.e. going to bed around 1 or 2. It isn't working. Even when I get myself in bed at midnight, or 1 or 2, I can't seem to drop off until at least 3. Some mornings, I'm still awake at 4. Sometimes I just give up and get online, or mop the kitchen floor.
Some nights I lay in bed for an hour or so, and suddenly I'm seized by this strange desire to run around the house as insanely as my cat. It's as if my skin is trying to crawl off my body, or my very molecules are vibrating.
And, as this note attests, my brain is just wide awake and feeling the need to express all the random and often pointless thoughts banging around in the empty space between my ears.
I wasn't always this way. I used to be a morning person. Well, maybe not the kind of morning person who is annoyingly chipper in the morning, but I could jump out of bed, fully awake, and get about the business of the day with little difficulty. My showers were brief, efficient. And I could fall asleep at night within fifteen minutes of my head hitting the pillow.
Now, if I take a shower at all, I will just stand there, half-asleep, until the hot water runs out.
In the last ten years or so, mornings have gotten harder and harder. Waking up is like pulling myself out of sucking quicksand, or trying to rise to the surface of consciousness through a river of taffy. I feel like I'm bumping my head against a tangible barrier, too sleepy to fight through it.
I finally had to get two alarm clocks. I keep one on the other side of the room, in case I turn off the alarm by the bed completely in a semi-conscious state so deep that I wouldn't even remember doing it. I set the clocks in my bedroom ahead by half an hour, trying to trick myself. I have missed a few days at work (when I had a job) because I overslept and then thought, "I'd sell my soul just to go back to sleep."
One night I woke around 3 am, certain that I'd heard the front door open. I remember clearly thinking, "Go ahead and steal everything I own, just let me go back to sleep while you're doing it. Rape me even, just don't wake me up." And then I was out again.
On-again, off-again depression has been a culprit in my difficulty and reluctance to awaken, but not always. For a time, it was a medication that upped my seritonin so much that by the time I went back to the doctor for help, I literally fell asleep in the exam room waiting for him. Only to have him say immediately, "Oh, it's the medication. Let's try something else."
(And why do doctors always want to change your meds the day after you've had it refilled? It is a conspiracy with the drug companies?)
Stupid Facebook games have been a culprit, as has an addiction to solitaire and mahjong. So, too, has the attitude of a petulant child: "I don't have to go to bed, no one can make me, so I'm not gonna."
And before someone suggests it, I may have sleep apnea. Rex has informed that I've begun to snore. Or maybe I always snored, but before he got a CPAP, he couldn't hear it over his own frighteningly loud emanations. He says that, unlike his own condition, I don't seem to stop breathing completely -- the first few nights I spent with him, I would literally lie there terrified that he would suffocate, wondering if I should shake him awake.
I watched a documentary on dreaming that makes me wonder if my sleep cycles are screwed up. They talked about two types of dreaming: one that is pleasant, often lovely little wish fulfillments, and another when the brain seems to be working out problems, stresses and fears. The first causes people awakened during them to be very positive and optimistic when give a word association test. The second causes people to tend toward more negative word associations.
I've forgotten which one occurs in REM sleep, but I almost always remember my dreams in vivid detail, and most often they are the problem/stress/fear kind. (I've frequently dream in which I'm crying, sometimes for no apparent reason. They seem to last all night.) I wonder if my stress and pessimism is tied to an overabundance of those dreams, or a shortage of the other.
And this is a perfect example of the kind of things that fuel that hamster-on-the-wheel I call a brain. I should avoid this kind of self-diagnosis and leave it to the professionals. I'd have a sleep study done if I had insurance. But I can't seem to hold onto insurance long enough to follow through.
This difficulty falling asleep was periodic at first. Maybe once a month. My doctor gave me Xanax, just a miniscule dosage, for those occasions, and for a while, it seemed to do the trick, though I felt even foggier in the morning if I didn't get enough sleep. (And since i only took them when I was still staring at the clock at 3 am and had to get up for work, I was almost never getting enough sleep.)
But recently, it's become an every night occurrence, and I'm not taking the Xanax for fear of overusage. Last week I did buy an over-the-counter sleep aid, which is basically a low dose of antihistamine. Normally I can't take antihistamines because they put me to sleep, and even the non-drowsy formula gives me really weird dreams. But not now. I might as well be swallowing Tic-Tacs.
I've reduced my caffeine intake to a single cup in the morning, instead of my usual three a day. It hasn't helped. Exercise doesn't make any difference. I can be dead-tired and still unable to drop into that hole.
So, here it is, 2:32 am, and I'm still wide awake. Maybe I'll go vacuum the house. Or torment the cat.
Wish me luck.
*I call my bipolar issues my "monkey," because, like a monkey when it escapes the cage, they are all over the place, almost impossible to control and likely to throw shit.
I had an epiphany just now: I would avoid some problems if I were not allowed online after midnight. Or not allowed to send emails, at the very least.
I would not, in blue moods, send emails to people in my life about things that, by the light of morning, seem far less pressing, or at least less deserving of obsessive rumination.
(That excessive rumination is half my normally introspective nature and half bipolar monkey*. I don't know if people who don't suffer from bipolar or depression issues can understand the way a problem or even just a negative thought gets trapped in your brain, playing over and over again like a broken record. It's like a greyhound that can't resist chasing that damned rabbit, even after it knows it will never, ever, catch it. Worse, you know you're doing it. I have conversations over and over in my head, but still can't shut myself up. I rehearse what I would say to people if I could lay it all out for them, and practice for confrontations that haven't even come up yet, and probably never will.)
Neither would I research diseases, syndromes and physical complaints, practicing medicine without a license. Just now, trying to find the correct spelling of serotonin, I discovered something called serotonin syndrome, and have almost convinced myself I am suffering from it. Reading about serotonin sydrome, I succumbed to the temptation to look up all the drugs I'm currently taking, which can scare the hell of someone even just taking aspirin and vitamins.
But back to the idea of staying offline late at night. There are several problems with putting that into practice. Like, I'd never send any email or post hardly anything if the wee hours of the morning were off limits. Put in sole charge of my routine, I am a terrible to my inner child. I don't want to listen to myself whine, so I let myself do whatever in the hell I want.
In my last three years of on-again, off-again non-participation in the 9-to-5 daily wage-earning world, my body has found what I believe to be its natural rhythm. (To call it my natural rhythm sound so much nicer than admitting that I just might, possibly, be merely a lazy slob.) I am most awake and productive between the hours of 8 pm and 3 am. Left to my own devices, I sleep until 11 or noon.
For a while, this worked well, but I'm having a damn hard time going to sleep the last few months. Is it because I stay up so late, then sleep so late, that I can't go to sleep at a reasonable hour? Or vice-versa? It's a chicken and the egg kind of question.
I've been trying to force myself back into some approximation of normal, i.e. going to bed around 1 or 2. It isn't working. Even when I get myself in bed at midnight, or 1 or 2, I can't seem to drop off until at least 3. Some mornings, I'm still awake at 4. Sometimes I just give up and get online, or mop the kitchen floor.
Some nights I lay in bed for an hour or so, and suddenly I'm seized by this strange desire to run around the house as insanely as my cat. It's as if my skin is trying to crawl off my body, or my very molecules are vibrating.
And, as this note attests, my brain is just wide awake and feeling the need to express all the random and often pointless thoughts banging around in the empty space between my ears.
I wasn't always this way. I used to be a morning person. Well, maybe not the kind of morning person who is annoyingly chipper in the morning, but I could jump out of bed, fully awake, and get about the business of the day with little difficulty. My showers were brief, efficient. And I could fall asleep at night within fifteen minutes of my head hitting the pillow.
Now, if I take a shower at all, I will just stand there, half-asleep, until the hot water runs out.
In the last ten years or so, mornings have gotten harder and harder. Waking up is like pulling myself out of sucking quicksand, or trying to rise to the surface of consciousness through a river of taffy. I feel like I'm bumping my head against a tangible barrier, too sleepy to fight through it.
I finally had to get two alarm clocks. I keep one on the other side of the room, in case I turn off the alarm by the bed completely in a semi-conscious state so deep that I wouldn't even remember doing it. I set the clocks in my bedroom ahead by half an hour, trying to trick myself. I have missed a few days at work (when I had a job) because I overslept and then thought, "I'd sell my soul just to go back to sleep."
One night I woke around 3 am, certain that I'd heard the front door open. I remember clearly thinking, "Go ahead and steal everything I own, just let me go back to sleep while you're doing it. Rape me even, just don't wake me up." And then I was out again.
On-again, off-again depression has been a culprit in my difficulty and reluctance to awaken, but not always. For a time, it was a medication that upped my seritonin so much that by the time I went back to the doctor for help, I literally fell asleep in the exam room waiting for him. Only to have him say immediately, "Oh, it's the medication. Let's try something else."
(And why do doctors always want to change your meds the day after you've had it refilled? It is a conspiracy with the drug companies?)
Stupid Facebook games have been a culprit, as has an addiction to solitaire and mahjong. So, too, has the attitude of a petulant child: "I don't have to go to bed, no one can make me, so I'm not gonna."
And before someone suggests it, I may have sleep apnea. Rex has informed that I've begun to snore. Or maybe I always snored, but before he got a CPAP, he couldn't hear it over his own frighteningly loud emanations. He says that, unlike his own condition, I don't seem to stop breathing completely -- the first few nights I spent with him, I would literally lie there terrified that he would suffocate, wondering if I should shake him awake.
I watched a documentary on dreaming that makes me wonder if my sleep cycles are screwed up. They talked about two types of dreaming: one that is pleasant, often lovely little wish fulfillments, and another when the brain seems to be working out problems, stresses and fears. The first causes people awakened during them to be very positive and optimistic when give a word association test. The second causes people to tend toward more negative word associations.
I've forgotten which one occurs in REM sleep, but I almost always remember my dreams in vivid detail, and most often they are the problem/stress/fear kind. (I've frequently dream in which I'm crying, sometimes for no apparent reason. They seem to last all night.) I wonder if my stress and pessimism is tied to an overabundance of those dreams, or a shortage of the other.
And this is a perfect example of the kind of things that fuel that hamster-on-the-wheel I call a brain. I should avoid this kind of self-diagnosis and leave it to the professionals. I'd have a sleep study done if I had insurance. But I can't seem to hold onto insurance long enough to follow through.
This difficulty falling asleep was periodic at first. Maybe once a month. My doctor gave me Xanax, just a miniscule dosage, for those occasions, and for a while, it seemed to do the trick, though I felt even foggier in the morning if I didn't get enough sleep. (And since i only took them when I was still staring at the clock at 3 am and had to get up for work, I was almost never getting enough sleep.)
But recently, it's become an every night occurrence, and I'm not taking the Xanax for fear of overusage. Last week I did buy an over-the-counter sleep aid, which is basically a low dose of antihistamine. Normally I can't take antihistamines because they put me to sleep, and even the non-drowsy formula gives me really weird dreams. But not now. I might as well be swallowing Tic-Tacs.
I've reduced my caffeine intake to a single cup in the morning, instead of my usual three a day. It hasn't helped. Exercise doesn't make any difference. I can be dead-tired and still unable to drop into that hole.
So, here it is, 2:32 am, and I'm still wide awake. Maybe I'll go vacuum the house. Or torment the cat.
Wish me luck.
*I call my bipolar issues my "monkey," because, like a monkey when it escapes the cage, they are all over the place, almost impossible to control and likely to throw shit.
