Dark Thoughts

Sleeping problems are rife in M.E./CFS.  I've been lucky, I' haven't had too many problems with my sleep.  I go to bed at night, read for 1/2hr to an hour, and then fall asleep.  I wake up still ill and tired, but mornings are my highest energy time of the day.

The exception to this is during PMS (sorry men), I always seem to have a few days of insomnia.  It reminds me how lucky I am not to have constant issues with insomnia.

I did do a sleep study early on in the illness, and they found very low-quality sleep.  Of the 4 stages, stage 3 and 4 sleep are the deepest, most restorative. At least on the night of the study, I had almost no restorative sleep and more than 70 'awakenings' during the night (most of these I was unconscious of).

As I've been lying awake for hours the last few nights (PMS), my head has been swirling with dark thoughts.  Thoughts about the uselessness of my life, my lack of friends, the issues with my family of birth, all the things I haven't experienced or lost due to illness (regrets), how stupid and pointless my PhD work is, and finally, ridiculously, I keep reliving the the death of my last dog, Merlin.  While these thoughts are not useful or welcome, they seem to arise nonetheless as I lie there tired but awake.

Of course I use techniques to try to keep them at bay.  I choose something happy, something I like and try to focus on that.  I try to block them out by counting breaths, using relaxation techniques.  Funny, but when I wake up the next morning I wonder how my world could have felt so bleak the night before, my concerns seem so trite in the light of day.  It's strange, but none of my concerns/regrets become untrue the next morning, they just seem to loose their power to torture me.

My PhD work, while leading me to feeling depressed and bleak at night, has me feeling productive and interested when I put in my session each morning.  I lay my big-picture concerns about the futility of my life and PhD aside, and focus on a specific task: editing a paragraph, reading an article or a book chapter, doing a data base search on some related topic.  Once I am engrossed in a task, I enjoy the break (a break from myself to be honest).

And while I am managing between one and two hours of work each morning in bed (imagine me surrounded by books, papers, pens and highlighters, propped up with pillows, my laptop on my lap), I'm noticing no ill-health repercussions.  That is, except the repercussions I expected…specifically, this energy I put towards PhD can no longer be put towards various other activities.  For example, I'm spending less time online, less time reading, and most sadly, no time at all doing art.

Today is a gorgeous day and I want so much to do a short outing outdoors, but I'm completely fried.