A Timid Brain

I have come to find someone else occupying that same cavity that serves as my seat of consciousness. In a sense I am one, and yet I also feel we are separate. I should preface: I don’t have disassociative identity disorder. My perspective is of philosophical-bearing, not pyschiatrical. It emerged from a gradual buildup of piecemeal epiphanies.

Sleep

It’s only been this last year, I’ve started to develop a feeling of disunity within myself. The root of this disharmony lies in sleep.

My discipline has improved by leaps and bounds this last year, I’ve been gradually shaving away my vices and bad habits. Although, one detrimental habit was sleep procastination. It sounds harmless, until you consider it was stealing hours of sleep from me every single night. Consider this. REM sleep is heavily back-loaded to the tail end of a full-night’s sleep: the majority of your REM comes from the last 1-2 cycles. So being short on an hour or two of sleep consistently can cost you the majority of your REM sleep on a daily basis, which naturally carries drastic long-term consequences.

I say all of this in order to provide perspective about why I prioritize a full-nights rest to the extent that I do. So much so, that I actively stress over getting sleep. The issue is that this very strong desire to sleep is the very thing that will cost me it. The more I want sleep, the less I will recieve. This is what sowed an adversity within myself. But who’s my adversary? Me?

A more severe case highlighting this issue is sufferers of trauma. Often people who suffer trauma find themselves struggling to get the only thing that will relieve their suffering: REM sleep, which offers emotional regulation of intensive experiences in order to make life managable.

Luckily, I was able to overcome this by way of analogy. In the Christian religion, there was a specific criteria one needed to meet in order to enter heaven that often kept me up at night (during my Christian days). You can’t enter heaven because you want to be there. Instead, you should merely seek to be a good-person and pretend entering heaven (or avoiding eternal damnation) was never a motivating incentive. I realized that there’s an interesting parallel here. I can’t enter dreamland simply because I want to be there. I have to be a good-person and the sleep will be a mere serendiptous byproduct of that mindset. In this case, being a good-person is being chill.

So by pretending that I don’t care all that much about sleep and am fine just chillin’ is the thing that finely unlocked consistent full-night sleeps day-after-day. But wait? Who am I pretending to?

Ancillary

Today, I finished “Ancillary Justice,” by Ann Leckie. While the quality of the characters and plot were meh, the book provided fascinating concepts (TODO-reword). One of which was a contradictory simulataneous singleness and pluralness of minds. The characters in one vein were of a single mind, yet in the other was a aggregation of multiple separate minds. The line quite blurry.

Here I found a concrete form of the problems assaulting me. I had thought I was one, but on closer inspection, I start to see individual fragments. Parts where a single unitary explanation fails to capture the apparant contradictions. I feel as if I am both one and whole but also segmentary and partial.

It was here I discovered Timid.

Fatigue

I was today’s year old, when it crystallized in me the two fundamentally different types of fatigue: Sleep and Overload. It’s obvious in hindsight, however, being aloof as I am—I had completely missed it.

The thing that tipped me off was coffee. Some evenings coffee reinvigorates me, whereas other evenings such as today it completely floors me. Why is that? Well it turns out there are two fundamental types of fatigue.

1. Sleep Fatigue, driven predominantly by the circadian rythm using Adenosine. Also known as “sleep pressure.”
2. Overload Fatigue, driven by buildup of metabolic waste (such as glutamate)throughout the day hindering further thinking.

Coffee blocks Adenosine receptors such that it’s effective against sleep fatigue. Hence, why I become awake in the mornings. Although, coffee ramps up the brain in ways that exacerbate load driving overload fatigue. So coffees varying effect I experienced in evenings can be attributed to the varying ratios of sleep to overload fatigue.

Overload

Contrary to what one would expect, most of the brain’s processing and energy budget is devoted to intrinsic processes and not conscious thought. It’s been shown that conscious directed thinking, doesn’t drive up the energy budget all that much. Instead, most of the brains energies are directed to awareness and supression of stimuli among other things. As someone with autism this is even more pronounced. As the brain’s awarness is constantly on listening for anything and everything. This excessive activity naturally creates metabolic waste far quicker. Thus, overload fatigue.

I have found that complete sensory deprivation for 15 minutes serves as an amazing tonic. Hell, an hour ago I was in complete misery wanting to do nothing but die already. Then 15 minutes of deprivation, and here I’ve written a messy incoherent article within an hour!

Once again, similar to the sleep issue, I find my brain has someone else that is exhausted. Something my consciousness is actively battling.

Timid

This someone is timid. He is sensitive to pressuring from my consciousness in the form of stress and struggles to function. It was timid I had to decieve and calm down so that he would let me sleep.

My brain’s infrastructure is poorly developed thanks to Autism. As a consequence, Timid is constantly overwhelmed with sensory input from the world. So much so, that he tends to revolt against me for dragging him through sensory hell.

I enjoy this sort of dissassociation, as I believe seeing oneself as a unity of different but intertwnied beings allows one to generate a certain respect and empathy for them and in turn oneself. It allows one to work in concert with himself instead of against. Now that me and Timid are better acquanted, I hope that we can understand each other’s needs and react accordingly.