I can hugely, *hugely* relate to that, Therion. It's a description I could have written myself. (But not so concisely or illustratively!

)
THERION wrote:For a long time I feel like my days don't have 24 hours. Then there's the thing where future has so many threats that I don't really want to be transported 8 hours into it.
That's haunting, and incredibly accurate for me too!
(Though I'm so locked in the present that even vaguely contemplating future personal plans or details in anything other than a detached, "professional" way, has my mind rebel in horror; it's like I won't even tolerate the hint of the anxiety it might cause. [Or, more peculiarly: that I just had no sense of anxiety. Pretty certain I do though, But its a bit... distorted from how most everyone talk about it.])
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Sleep has been one of the chief issues I've struggled with myself. I'm still erratic, and easily disrupted, but after about five years of trying various different tricks and things, something seems to have worked for me. (Though I'll be damned if I can say authoritatively what it is.)
My routine now is very much, not that it will necessarily be of huge interest:
1- awake between 6 & 7, usually thanks to a single alarm and no tolerance for the snooze button.
2- go for a swim via the 7am (first) bus. (Expensive, week to week, but I'm trying to justify it whimsical carelessness with money. If I try and say it's "making a sacrifice in other bits of my life because I know it's an investment in myself and self-care", I think I'd get the dry boaks.)
3- swim for a short time (2 breast, 8 front, 2 breast, 8 front, 2 breast), pushing myself as hard as I can each length. This also means most of my time in the water is spent puffing away at the end of the lane, chest heaving, trying to recover my breath. On the upside, this short time and low number of lengths means I don't have to spend too much time wrestling/dodging other swimmers, even at busy times.
4- I'm now in town so early that I can't do my usual 'vague wandering' (which inevitably ends up with me spending at least £2 on some tea in a cafe [or more, if cakes are involbed])
5- do the day's stuff: catch up with people; get back to the flat; off to appointments; meetings; work etc.
6- dinner between 5 & 7.30pm, no caffeine after 12 noon (unless almost zero sleep, in which case "break glass in case of emergencies", as late as 3pm, or if my whole schedule is out the window anyway [e.g. when my dad had a heart attack earlier this year, he's fine now thanks to Valencia {where he was for a few days on little holiday at his son-in-law's} healthcare], I'll have caffeine even after 3pm.)
7- try to avoid my phone/tablet/laptop as of 9pm (console games that are easy to set aside, e.g. Borderlands)
8- ideally, bed by 10pm (Or theatrically act out "blimey, this is late!" nonsense - try not to keep it internal to me, or set it aside to be dealt with later [spoiler: later could be years away for my subconscious].)
9- phone/tablet mostly forbidden from the bedroom, categorically when going to sleep. (I slipped up with this on Sunday evening, and with the UK Brexit minister resigning at 1130pm, I inadvertently stayed up following the news [and more significantly: twitter commentary!] Until a solid 2am)
Also I now drink lots of water. A laughable amount.
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There's a good chance none of that has been responsible for better sleep, but it's certainly minimised potential disruptions to a Good Pattern[TM]
Also: whilst I'd hoped that fixing sleep and fixing my exercise (and to a lesser extent my weight and diet, but I don't *really* care about them, only in a vague intellectual sort of way - they don't motivate me much), might sort out other mental challenges I wrestled with...
They didn't. They helped, but it wasn't the sort of miraculous transformation that is often tantalisingly implied when people talk about exercise and sleep being important.
What was *really* useful was getting doctors to take my suspicions urgently. Not that they'd dismissed me either, but I think in their minds what I was presenting to them could easily be mixed up with "poor lifestyle" sort of things.
But when I could go to them and say
Xisor wrote:Look here, you patriarchal elitist benevolent scumbag who I want to help me!
I eat better than I've done in years, I sleep well, I exercise vigourously and regularly, and have done for months, *but* my mood is still atrocious, and my attention span is there's a squirrel outside the window, and my motivation is near-zero.
What are we going to do about it?
By then, the medical folks were quite able (and super enthusiastic/positive, not just officious and well meaning but stressed) to actually start getting to the "real" issues. (Not that those other issues aren't real, but that in my case they weren't the lone cause(s) of my woes).
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Of course, my route round this sort of thing is fairly... meandering.
One of the key factors that this has all highlighted to me is that, whilst I am fairly educated and not without the little grey cells, I was unwittingly but absolutely atrocious at studying things *properly*.
(And one of the saddest lessons to accept, for the time being, is that I should probably stop trying to study as I did before. To, as the little hermit on Dagobah says "unlearn what you have learned", in technique, at least - mostly because it was wall-to-wall bad habits.)
I was doing things and things were going into my brain, but that wasn't the first things causing the second!
Which is bloody annoying, because I like studying and I like learning. But I'm resolved, on that front at least, to set it aside as "out of service", at least I until such a time as I can overcome, demolish, repair or otherwise salvage those bad habits into material or fuel to set up some new, ideally *good* habits.
But the jury's still out.