Insomnia, depression, anxiety – and too many negative thoughts.
It’s no surprise to those who know me that I’ve been laying awake since 2:37am.
Again.
Sleepless.
My years of sleepwalking through my nights – and days – have luckily drawn to a close, coincidentally right around the time I came to admit I had a very serious problem and that I needed help.
Funny how that happened.
The sleeplessness, though, the endless, drawn out solitary nights however, have not left me alone. The only thing that have left me are all the frustrated sheep I’ve been counting for decades, finally having given up and tired of being numbered night after night after hour after hour, trotting down the stairs and out the front door to someone else’s sleepless night. I’m simply drawn to the witching hour, stirred by something tapping at my shoulder throughout the night, hunched over me and breathing heavily on my face while I sleep until my mind awakens, racing once again with where am I’s and too often, dread.
I become a troubled mathematician, stumbling over problems and possibilities, struggling to piece together an equation that solves all my problems, jumbled too quickly with additions and subtractions, nothing ever equalling what it’s supposed to. It’s a clunky hamster wheel, doing it’s best to turn and occupy me when all it brings is overthinking, leaving me feeling divided, multiplied by, too often, negatives.
Negative balances.
Negative self-talk.
Negative thoughts and negative motivation.
Negative self-doubt.
The night is full of demons, and they all creep out from beneath your bed to haunt you when the world has grown dark and quiet, arriving to fill it with chatter and creaking whispers in your ear that always manage to find their way inside, like a drafty window that always lets the weather outside in.
It’s the sleeplessness that invites the demons in, when I’m most vulnerable.
When I’m available and not distracted by the lights and too often misdirected attempts at turning my brain off with anything – everything – that keeps me from the dizzying rabbit hole of confronting my fears, clawing them back daily with work and technology.
Anything that keeps me busy and awake.
Until it happens again.
No matter the pages I fill, the ones I turn and digest, or the digging I’ve done over the days and years and endless sleepless nights since I committed to – at the very least – coming to a better understanding of our common shared struggle of being human, I return here.
Every. Night.
I believe even the best mentors and leaders of our world today and those passed have experienced the same sort of sleeplessness we all do, especially the ones that talk the most about how to find peace and overcome the negatives that creep out when daylight drifts into darkness; itself quite literally the negative and inside out of what should be our waking hours, turned on it’s head and filled with figure-me-out’s.
It’s a common discussion with books, blogs, groups and workshops abounding in every country, in every language, in every far-reaching corner of the globe because it’s an inherent condition we all share, no matter who we are or where we come from. It’s the reason dramas and tragedies exist in our real world, on the big screen, and too often, within ourselves. It’s the natural, negative compliment to simplicity, to optimism, to positive self-care and peace, no different than how black needs white and day needs night; it’s a required piece of the puzzle that is built into us to keep us balanced.
Until it doesn’t.
Despite how we all know better and despite how we all know what to do and what we shouldn’t do, we always seem to take a wrong turn, ending up on a dizzying tilt-a-whirl of troubled thoughts when all we wanted was to ride the lazy river and go with the flow.
Or, when the demons slip from beneath your bed and crawl under the covers with you.
This habit of negative thinking is referred to as ANTs: Automatic Negative Thoughts.
I know – there’s an acronym and term for everything – as we humans love to do our best at simplifying common concepts to understand them better, usually resulting in complicating of what’s already obvious.
But, they help.
I learned about ANTs a long time ago, and I say it works because I still remember it to this day. Inherent to those struggling with depression and anxiety (though I believe in one way or another, to varying extents and degrees, we all suffer from these conditions) these Automatic Negative Thoughts are triggered entirely randomly. For lucky ones like me, roughly ever night around 3am.
ANTs are are always negative and irrational by their very nature.
That doesn’t make them any less real or destructive.
Churning and spiralling at first within your gut, then your mind, then spinning faster and faster until they become a chain reaction that can cause a tornado inside you – even though they aren’t true. Too often, no different than a tornado, they leave you feeling devastated, with logic being tossed out the window, followed by all the pieces of you that know better.
And just like ants on the ground, when there is one – there are always many more lined up right behind them.
The common strategy of overcoming all the ANTs climbing all over you is mindfulness – or most simply put – returning to the present moment, recognizing the thoughts for what they are (lies) and reminding yourself that at this moment everything is okay and that you’re safe. When you begin to pause and look at what the ANTs are made of, they’re always warped ideas and fears of the future or regrets, sadness, or anger over the past. They’re usually dressed in negative self-talk, destructive self-image, and hurtful ideas about yourself and your imagined inadequacy. They are masters of fortune telling and mind reading, guilt, blame and labeling.
And, they always smell like fear.
ANTs never, ever, look like what’s happening now or what’s real.
What you’re reading right now is the trick I use to calm myself, talking it out – most often on the page – to settle my thoughts, ordering the demons from my bed and placing bait along my edges to keep the ANTs at bay for now – until next time.
Until the next, sleepless night.
No matter the amount of digging I’ve done and continue to do, I still struggle to uncover where all the ANTs come from, or why they built their homes inside my body and mind in the first place.
But I’m determined to find them and kick them out, because I could really use some sleep.
It’s time to kill the ants.
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