Pre-Sleep Catharsis

Work.. the source of lots of positivity in our lives in the right circumstances but also a source of considerable pain and frustration.

I've recently had a considerable amount of frustration with work due to some of the people that I'm working with. They are quite difficult and in a lot of ways unreasonable in their attitude and expectations but I am trying my best to turn a bad situation into a good one, as much as that is possible. With that situation though, one of the things that I've had quite a bit is racing thoughts and when are racing thoughts occurring? When we are trying to go to sleep, of course! :D

The racing thoughts are conversations that go through my mind, things that I want to say to them but likely can't, or things that I think they would say and what I could counter that with. Basically just trying to play out every scenario in my head so that I can prepare arguments and counter arguments to any of the positions they are taking. It helps me formulate my path forward in a lot of ways but what it does is gets me to focus my thoughts and get things concentrated.

With the racing mind though, one thing that sucks is it really eats into your sleeping time! I was awake for easily an hour or longer past my normal bed time because of the shit that I was going through in my head, that's not good!

I did find a pretty good solution though one night after laying awake for an hour: I decided to write the things down!

By writing the things that I was thinking down, it really helped my brain consolidate the thoughts into something coherent and legible. When I get into these states of mind, one of the things that can happen is that my thoughts race and they get all disconnected and I forget things. I go through so many points that I end up going back to one area and coming up with something different and it creates this pretty intense cycle of work and rework of something.

With writing it down though, I found I was able to not only write it down and make it a more coherent and logical statement and information, I was also able to finally freaking fall asleep!

I then had a similar thing happen the following night and instead of letting my thoughts race for an hour or more, I immediately wrote the things down that I was thinking, how I would formulate my thought and response to the information presented and it was such a relief! It was literally a cathartic moment for my brain! I don't like having to be in these situations because they come with all kinds of other complications but at the same time, learning how to best handle them is an incredibly important skill. When we can have a path forward by making a coherent list of pieces of information, how we would respond to said information and what the potential counter arguments to what we are trying to get across, we are able to really have a solid grasp of the situation that we are in.

Granted, with anything of a tenuous nature like this, things could go much differently then we would expect them to go but that's just the nature of it all. Having a way to manage and deal with the stress though, that's an excellent thing for me to have learned and I feel like I leveled up a bit on that one haha.