Worryman

It’s been following me for years. Sometimes I feel like I’m outrunning it, sometimes it’s breathing down my neck, sapping my strength. Sometimes I almost forget about it, so small and manageable does it seem. But it never seems to go away.

There are three components to my insomnia. The first is largely self-inflicted, and involves a continued disruption of my natural sleep patterns. It occurs when I drink to excess, and exchange sleep for a few hours of stupefied unconsciousness. It occurs when I take drugs, and find I can’t sleep at all for what feels like a fortnight. It occurs when I make the conscious decision to stay up all night playing Mass Effect 2 (worth it!) and find the dawnlight creeping spitefully around the blinds on Monday morning.

The second is a biological and possibly hereditary component. Sometimes it just takes ages for me to drop off. I’m not exactly exhausted, but I am pretty tired, but I just lie there dozing for hours on end. Sometimes I wake early for no reason I can find, and doze for hours until my alarm goes off (at which point I hit snooze and fall deeply asleep). I require good sleep hygiene. My father suffers from a similar complaint, as do some of my brothers. It can be managed by regular, timetabled exercise and what could be broadly termed cognitive behaviour therapy (I refer to it as “not fucking around anymore and sorting stuff out”). It could be a LOT worse. I am always grateful that my insomnia is not linked to a more concrete and less manageable cause like clinical depression or pain-related conditions.

The third and most irritating cause is my anxiety, an admission that upsets me on several levels. To begin with, it’s a massive bugger. I mean, seriously Brain, can we not come to a better working arrangement here? I’ve got a job interview tomorrow. I need sleep in order to perform well at said interview. Acquiring said job will give me better access to funds with which to procure goods and services we can both enjoy. Help me to help you. What do you mean we’ve discussed this before?

I also don’t like the fact that my anxiety keeps me awake because it’s a wussy condition I try to not to give credence to. I do not, let’s make this absolutely clear, have any major problems in my life. I have a good standard of living. I have a loving family that consistently support me and a group of amiable friends, a small cadre of which I would happily die for. I do not appear to have any major medical conditions. I am of average attractiveness. I have Mass Effect 2 on my Xbox. Life, in short, is sweet.

And yet… it’s been following me for years. A nebulous cloud of half-formed worries and associations, sometimes gaining a toehold in my mind, sometimes relegated to the fringes. Again, none of them are particularly grievous. Bills left unpaid. Important forms lost. Friends and acquaintances upset. Love lost and unlikely to be recovered. The vague feeling that, at some point in the near future, I’m going to get in trouble about something.

It’s bollocks, innit? It really is all in my head. And yet there seems to be some gap between my hearty rationalisations and the feeling in my gut. Even though I know this stuff isn’t important, it still keeps me awake at night. It makes me hide from my responsibilities, and shy from acquiring new ones. It makes me moan constantly to anyone who will listen. It fills up my blog with self-indulgences when I should be writing funny lists about parties and stuff.

There is, however, a bright side. Sometimes it goes away.

Occasionally I emerge from this ridiculous cloud, always unscathed. It happens at key turning points in my life, those moments when you get the feeling that this could be it, this could be the fresh start the marks the beginning of everything else. From now on, you will be a new man. You will pay those bills on time, you will file every letter. You will be virtuous in thought and deed and not watch nearly as much porn on the internet. You will visit your gran regularly and find a nice girl and cease telling pointless lies to everyone you meet.

It doesn’t last. I fall back into old habits. I let things slide away from me until they begin to swarm and amalgamate, returning to me bigger and more menacing than they even seemed in retrospect. I let it happen because I’m lazy, and because, perhaps, I’m not the person I think I ought to be yet.

The potential, however, is there. The potential to make it all stick this time, to make the next big change mark the start of my adult life. When problems will be assessed, analysed and finally crushed under the mighty engine of my self-belief and maturity. When I wake up early every morning having slept the sleep of the just and look life right in the face even as I kick it in the nadgers.

Inspiring stuff, eh? Unlikely too, but it’s nice to have a goal. And the main thing, as we’ve already explored, is that it’s no big deal anyway. It keeps me up at night sometimes, but I have a good standard of living. I have a loving family that consistently support me and a group of amiable friends, a small cadre of which I would happily die for. I do not appear to have any major medical conditions. I am of average attractiveness. I have Mass Effect 2 on my Xbox. And I have you, dear reader, and next week I shall be funny again. I promise.*

*Author's note: may not actually be funny.

What'll we do tonight, brain?

I wish I used my brain more. A common lament, I suspect, but I mean it in a sense beyond the immediate. Obviously I do still wish I were more thoughtful and considering in my actions, more capable of logical or complex thought processes. I wish I pondered the consequences of my doings to a greater extent, to thereby avoid the unfortunate mishaps that seem to plague my adventures (unwise sexual encounters, I’m talking to you).

I wish I were smarter, definitely. But, like being taller (or, indeed, a baller) or having better eyesight, wishing for extra cranial capacity is unlikely to get me anywhere. I can certainly try and find more things to put in my brain, and this is an endeavour that will hopefully fill my entire life.

But what I really wish is that my brain would give me a little more say about what goes on aboard the good ship JP. It seems to me like I don’t get enough say in the matter.

Your brain is the most complex machine humanity has ever encountered. Abstract thought is all very impressive but what you ought to be really grateful for is all those sublime reactions that keep your body ticking away, all of which your brain takes care of at no extra charge. Regulating temperature, blood concentration, insulin and glucose levels, the rates at which your organs function, your metabolic rate and the hormones that control your emotions, urges and desires. We think ‘run’ and your brain begins to balance the systems to maximise our running output, as well as sending countless electrical signals to the relevant muscles to get us up to speed. Your brain does a whole load of shit without you even having to ask.

Your brain keeps your body working as best it can within preset parameters, a concept known as homeostasis. Consider the myriad systems it is in control of. Consider the thousands of impulses needed every second just to direct these systems. Now imagine trying to control them all through direct thought. If we were in complete control of our bodies, we’d burn our minds out in no time, struggling to cope under the immense pressure of just staying alive. Good ol’ brain, then.

Still, sometimes it’s difficult not to feel a little hard done by. The knowledge that some clinical depression is caused by chemical imbalances in the brain makes it seem like Mr. Thinky up there is holding out on us. We could be happy, if our brain felt like making us so, only it doesn’t. We don’t have to be fat; our brain could just jiggle the hypothalamus around so we didn’t feel quite so hungry. The possibilities are endless.

For me, it would have to be sleep. Insomnia may have a genetic component; it seems likely, as it appears to run in my family. My father struggles with it, and my youngest brother also. As disorders go it ain’t so bad, but it’s not a huge amount of fun either. It is even harder to swallow when I lie awake thinking that blissful oblivion is just a few hormones away.

Imagine if we could work on a more cooperative basis with our brains. When we thought it was time to go to sleep, we could just tell the brain it was so, and off we’d go together. Everybody gets what they need. An ideal system.

Of course it can’t work like that. Machines do not work that way, and at the level we are talking about your brain is just that: a machine. As far as I am concerned it is probably for the best, as I doubt I am really the man to be left in charge.

My brain does a lot for me, that we have already established. And how do I repay its kindness? I poison it with drugs and alcohol. I feed it more than what it needs of some things, and starve it from all the rest. I go without sleep, and then complain when its rhythms are upset. Homeostasis matters not a jot to me, I smash through the brain’s delicate systems in search of selfish hedonism.

So I can’t really complain. If I’m going to do Ecstasy, I only have myself to blame when I can’t get warm for hours at a time. When I’m drunk and constantly need a pee, I can feel my brain prissily stating:

“It isn’t MY fault. Everything was going fine until YOU got involved. Now look at us, not enough serotonin to go around, and I can’t get your bloody heartbeat to slow down. Yes, I KNOW you need a pee, you’ve ingested five pints of fluid. No you can’t have any more hormones, they’ve all gone. Well you shouldn’t have demanded them all at once, should you? And for fuck’s sake would you put that cigarette out? Can’t I leave you for five seconds without you deliberately ingesting a toxin? Was all that basic danger recognition we learnt as a toddler a complete waste of time? Honestly, I don’t know why I bothered dragging you down from the trees.”

So maybe it’s best that my brain does all the really challenging stuff itself, and leaves the idle musings to me. And maybe I should treat the old guy a tad better than I do. But I really would like some sleep now. Pretty, pretty please?