I regularly have trouble sleeping. It's probably the most frustrating thing ever not being able to fall asleep. I've tried camomile teas, melatonin (fuck that shit) zzzzquil, Benadryl, My Pillow and about a zillion other things. I kept a sleep diary and used the iPhone sleep-timer application to try and monitor and catalog my sleep cycle. Nothing has helped. I'm so desperate for a good nights sleep that I'm considering investing money in a huge mallet and just knocking myself unconscious like in a cartoon. I can deal with the brain damage as long as I can get my eight hours. I do a lot of reading about sleep and the negative effects that lack of it has on the body. My eye is twitching as I write this piece a direct consequence of not sleeping. The human body amazes me. The best way to describe it is a bipolar machine. If you care for it there's no better friend you'll have. If not it'll kill you. Literally. Our bodies are constantly trying to maintain a balance and as such we can have a huge impact on it if we shock our systems by, for example, not sleeping enough.
I see a big parallel between that and our mental fitness. Aside from the important impact sleep has on our mental state it is also important to try and maintain a balance in our lives. One of the main reasons that I am stressed is because of my day job. The work I do is not fulfilling for me. I don't feel like what I do is accomplishing anything doing it. And I'm completely full of shit. Everyone feels that way about their work. Mother Theresa had days where she felt like she phoned it in and was wasting her time I'm sure. It's only natural. My problem is that I have an unrealistic sense of what my value is. I'm one person. It's unreasonable to expect myself to impact the majority of lives I encounter. It's also ridiculous to undermine what I do for a living as it makes it so I can do things I want to do. Until recently I took exactly no steps to do something that I found more value in. In that case it's totally fair for me to call myself a dumbass for being mad that I had "meaningless " work. For starters I don't apply myself as I should so of course I'm not getting anywhere. Secondly I compare myself to others who are both in unrelated fields and have no concept of what I do. My work has nothing to do with theirs and vice versa. But here I am saying wow look at Kelly over in South America helping that village (she's a doctor without borders I'm told). Instead of focusing on what she's done (medical school) to get there I focus on what I haven't. Again that's stupid. What she (or anyone for that matter) has done has nothing to do with me. I was a fairly late bloomer in regards to discovering what I want to do with my life. It's frustrating but it's also important to understand that it's common. Our generation seems to be 1-generally and genuinely lost and 2-kind of annoying about it. I'm no stranger to that feeling especially when it comes to my self image. My biggest issue with self image is that it's almost entirely predicated on what I see others doing or having done and then trashing myself for not doing it too. In an earlier blog I mentioned I wanted to be a doctor. What you might not remember is I said that at six years old. By seven I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. Holy shit , in a roundabout way I got there. I'm (in a pharmacist is kind of like a doctor way) a journalist ! But I still compare myself to others from time to time. I look at others who have what I perceive as "better " jobs. I don't really know what they do or struggle with from day to day so I have no real basis to say that. All I see is an incidental image of someone taking a picture of something that helped them in their photoblog. What I don't see is the traveling stress, expenses to get those photos taken and the time they toiled building up to what they became. We live in a world where seeing a Facebook wall becomes the last word on their life and how they live. If that was true, my cousin living In Florida would do nothing but go to daily happy hours and eat table-side guacamole at Mexican restaurants. But there are at least a few hours in the day where I'm sure she doesn't have the most fun and best life ever. There are stressors and bad days that go unposted. Our online identities are not enough to base an opinion on. Unless you're a weirdo who has a Truman Show 2.0 webcam thing going on 24/7. (And no I'm not subscribing.) taking yourself away from the social network and inserting yourself back into the real world might help some of us feel a little better about life. Being slammed by newsfeed alerts that are almost always better than what we're doing at any given moment can be a little bit overwhelming especially if you aren't happy with your situation. Imagine someone commuting an hour in the morning standing on the subway to an unfulfilling job looking at their Facebook and seeing their cousin doing brunch and mimosas on a random Tuesday. It's enough to make you throw your phone. Not that I did more than twice. But again that's just an incidental image. It's not everyday. And if it is it's their life. It's not yours and it is what it is. Maybe unplug yourself from social media. Stop trying to see everyone else's life and live yours on your own terms. If there's something you don't like about your life, something that eats you up way down inside then change it. Or at least try to. But most importantly, if nothing else Stop Comparing . It probably isn't helping that I'm writing this in my bedroom when I should have been asleep already. It's probably the real reason why you can't sleep too. But that's ok. Because I know you'll be alright. The path you're on isn't always clear but worrying doesn't help. Take a deep breath, turn off your iPhone , pop in a Fuk-it-All and you'll be sleeping in no time.
And if not a rubber mallet goes for three bucks at Lowe's. 🔨🛌
Comments
Post a Comment