I have been up for about 45 minutes now, it's 03:29 GMT and I'm wide awake. When I was a smoker I would simply have got up, rolled a fat joint, smoked it and gone back to sleep, and of course I would have woke up stoned.
That's not me anymore and I don't have the slightest urge to do that, luckily I was never one of these smokers who regularly woke up in the middle of the night to have a wheeze.
Now, as a non-smoker I'm wondering what to do. I think part of it is I was a bit depressed last night just before bed, which prompted me to go to sleep at 21:30, which is ridiculously early even for me. Now and again I'll get to bed by ten, but ten thirty to eleven is usually perfect for me, that allows me six to six and a half hours sleep.
They warned me about this.
The other day as I perused the various stop smoking sites I saw that mild depression can be a symptom when you give up smoking. Unfortunately this has been exacerbated by the fact that I've moved into a new office, however it is not ideal and I've already committed a lot of money to it.
Another reason I may be mildly depressed is that when I was smoking 4-8 spliffs a day, there was a fairly steady stream of chocolate and sweets being consumed.
I was looking forward to cutting that consumption down, I felt my pancreas and teeth would benefit the most, not to mention a little less fat around my stomach would show off my blossoming gym-fed six pack.
What I didn't figure for was the fact that chocolate is a mild anti-depressant, and to suddenly cut it out like that must be a bit of a shock to the system.
The problem is, I don't think I really like chocolate that much!
I put an exclamation mark after that statement because up until a few days ago, I ate at least one bar of chocolate a day.
Sometimes I would try and go a day or two without eating any, but I'm sure I made up for that with fizzy drinks (soda), which I still love, but don't have any anti-depressant properties.
I suppose (self-employed) non-smokers do what I'm doing now, they simply get up, switch their computers on and catch up with some work.
Whilst this is working for me, instinctively it doesn't feel right. I spend large parts of the day in front of the computer and today especially I am going to be diving deep into the world of coding and learning and then more coding. So in a way I feel like I'm burning up my total tolerance levels towards the computer.
Plus, even though I'm awake and not tired, it feels like I should be giving my brain a rest. I could of course put youtube on and mindlessly flick around videos for the next hour or so.
The problem with that is it scrambles the brain and really messes with its ability to concentrate, which I think brings me to the answer of the question I asked at the top of the page.
Well maybe it doesn't answer the question; what do non-smokers do at 3 a.m.? But it does answer the question; what does this non-smoker do at 3 a.m.?
I'm simply going to do my concentration training, pull out my deck of cards and try and memorise as many as I can, last time I tried I got to 35, but I'm a bit out of practice and what better time to get back into it?
Well, it's 03:52 now, and this is the fastest article I've written in months! I'm hoping when I read back over it I haven't just written ..and then they went over and over again.
Ha! That's given me idea, if you know what I'm referencing in that last sentence and you put it in the comments, I'll send you 3 Steem.
It is not Googleable by the way, if you try you'll come up with a load of song lyrics and bible verses and it has nothing to do with either of those things.
OK, well I better skedaddle, seeing as I usually get up at 05:00 anyway, smell ya later . . .
WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU CAN'T SLEEP? WHAT'S THE WEIRDEST SIDE-EFFECT YOU'VE HAD FROM GIVING UP SMOKING? AS EVER, LET ME KNOW BELOW!
Title image: Sydney Sims @fairytailphotography for Unsplash
