I wish coffee was a big drug for me like everybody else.
This is gonna be stupid and vague but my brain only shifts into high-activity write-mode at like 2 or 3 am. I get hit with genuis ideas and brilliant little plots, and then I have two options: wreck myself on an all-nighter before work, or sleep on these ideas and be unable to write jack shit next morning.
It’s so stupid, all through the day my brain is asleep, then at night I become borderline manic and wanna write shit. Why, pls help.
BIT IDEA: 48 hour days where I get that maybe four hours of being free from anxiety-inducing external pressure. Just dont fuckin sleep lmao.
Spitballing here:
It might be anxiety-related.
A lot of people with chronic anxiety tend to get late-night zoomies because there’s less pressure to perform and to do things because the world has gone to sleep and, suddenly, without all of that external pressure weighing down on that anxious mind you feel extremely motivated to do things or to revamp your life etc.
If we assume that this is the case for your experience and we assume that the major cause for your writer’s block is anxiety-related (both of which are pretty plausible without actually knowing any specifics) then the logical conclusion is that you feel motivated to write at 3am not because of the positive presence of inspiration but because of the absence of anxiety, or the relief from it.
Obviously this is just wild speculation so take this guess with all due caution. It’s easy enough to test whether this is the case in order to rule it in/out though and if you think it might be a fit then the next step would be looking at ways to manage your anxiety levels so that you can enjoy more creative pursuits.
I’ve heard this be called “Revenge Insomnia” because you’re trying to make up late at night all the things your brain wants to do during the day.
This is a fantastic term, thank you for introducing it to me.
Double check me on it. It’s a half remembered article I read on
Meh, I’m gonna take it and run with it - I’m not concerned about its provenance. You could have coined the term in the comment above and I’d appreciate it just the same.
I decided to look it up and I wasn’t completely wrong. The correct term is “Revenge Bedtime Procrastination” insomnia is a bit less voluntary sounding, while “Bedtime procrastination” sounds more like a choice, which for many I assume it is.
I used to have it really bad, staying up all night to do mainly gaming, because it was a about the only thing to do at 5am in the morning, and didn’t live anywhere close to a Konbini Store .
Now I’m older and midnight is like latest stay up time. Probably shocked it out of my systems trying to moderate this website in the early days when I was the only person staying up till like 6am to delete the forbidden phrase.
I’m frankly in awe of anyone who can be a moderator and not get insane insomnia. Just thinking about that responsibility stresses me out
It’s part of why I stopped doing it. My mental health was flowing down the drain and it wasn’t worth holding on to something that was bringing me pain.
And despite coming out trans like within the year of me leaving, I still occasionally see stuff about what a huge Transphobe I am, because I one time made a typo that accidentally misgendered someone once.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
holy shit this explains so much.
Yes that describes exactly how I feel. I have tabs open for Meloxicam and Gabapentin, are they from you? It would be very cool to just pop pills to fix my anxiety.
I have tabs open for Meloxicam and Gabapentin, are they from you?
Actually no, I haven’t looked into meloxicam and gabapentin is one of those drugs that I wouldn’t feel comfortable recommending to people because it’s one that I feel like deserves proper supervision from a prescribing doctor for; that’s not to say that it doesn’t work or that it’s particularly risky or anything but there are some conditions that you can throw a drug at and you can be reasonably certain that it’ll be effective - lithium with bipolar, stimulants with ADHD, that sort of thing - and then there’s other drugs that get pretty specific in what they treat or how they treat things so without sitting down and really mapping out what the symptoms are, what the causes are and ruling out what isn’t a cause, and getting specific about how a drug is going to treat those symptoms based on a working hypothesis then I usually leave those ones to the experts, such as gabapentin.
I’ve never tried gabapentin before but I know that some people absolutely swear by it.
I have a doctor who is willing to prescribe me things, so there is that. Also my wife says I tried gabapentin already (for nerve pain) and it sucked lmao.
Anyways how dare you curse me with this knowledge that I could be cool if anxiety was not ruining my life 24/7! The absolute nerve!
Lol, knowledge really is a curse.
I guess if it’s any consolation, I don’t see it as a matter of “you would be cool if it weren’t for the anxiety” but more like “you are cool and you also have anxiety that causes you trouble”.
My brain frames it like, “look how fucking cool you are at 3am. You have such ideas and power and freedom. But your dumb ass is flattened every day by being SCARED, why are you SCARED small bean???” which yknow…
So your brain is making you scared of being scared? Mine does that sometimes lol. Whenever I figure out how to diffuse one level of anxiety, just bring it up one level of meta and keep the anxiety flowing.
No I’m furious about it. Brain cool only at night, garbage all other times.
This is coming from someone who spends a lot of time screaming internally at their own experience of anxiety, so it’s something that comes with very sincere solidarity and an acute awareness of my own hypocrisy in saying this but…
I wonder if there’s might be a different way of relating to your experience of anxiety, and I wonder if you chose to extend some hospitality towards it what this anxiety would might tell you?
(e.g. I know oftentimes I feel anxious because something is important to me and that my anxiety is telling me that it’s important, sometimes my anxiety is telling me I need reassurance or validation, sometimes it tells me that I have an unadressed need to feel more secure, and so on…)
absolutely me
ADHD? If so having diurnal patterns and energy spikes is sadly normal.
Autism but maybe? I match some adhd symptoms but not many.
https://add.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/adhd-questionnaire-ASRS111.pdf
If coffee makes you sleepy instead of energised it might be ADHD.
I think it does nothing to me, is that still adhd? Also I wish I could fill this out and it would score me, my brain is melted.
I struggle with a lot of executive dysfunction, so please understand this within the context of trying other stuff to help you feel better in general. But practice and scheduling really do help. It can feel daunting to schedule too, but the important part is to train your brain to be ready and willing to do a behavior at a certain time or within a context. So for me, I have a time in the afternoon where I tend to be able to draw because I kept trying to do it around then. It’s difficult to get it started, and I had to sometimes stare at a canvas for a while before scribbling some shit out and deleting it a few times before, eventually, I could stare for shorter, scribble out something, and then get interested enough to keep going and find that I was enjoying making something.
Sometimes building good habits is about tricking yourself into doing them until you like it. Maybe you can jot some of your notes down at night and go back the next day and just tell yourself you’re going to read it again, and maybe fix a word or two. Or that you’ll remember one key idea from the night and just write that down the next day and look at it for a while.
One more thing, give yourself permission to write trash. your drafts don’t need to perform for anyone, not even yourself. The important thing is just to write.
In writing terms I am incapable of grinding through the unbearable, overly stiff cringe that comes out of me when I write during daylight hours. I know I can do a lot fucking better when there’s not a fog descended over my brain. How do I make it so my brain does the 3am thing at 3pm instead? I have not written during the day and enjoyed it in a decade. At the point where I’ve backspaced more than twice I usually give up.
I absolutely refuse, when the shit I write now when the sun is out is hot garbage even compared to what I wrote in highschool, I will not. I do not need my non existent confidence crushed further by that.
I mean, if you refuse to write through the day, you won’t write during the day, and you won’t get better. You have to practice the things you want to improve. Yeah, it’s gonna feel like shit, you’re not gonna like what you produce at first, maybe for a long time. But it’s not like you have to be good at it to start. Swallow your pride, accept that you have more refined taste than ability to perform during the time that you want to write, and focus on improving your ability to practice.
I went through this kind of thing when I decided draw more and more seriously last year. I had to make a lot of terrible gesture drawings, there was progress and regression, I fell off a lot, but slowly and surely, I improved - not just at drawing itself, but at doing it and feeling into it at times of day and in contexts where I would have just given up out of fear of not being able to perform previously.
There’s a lot of things you might try to allow yourself to write things that aren’t up to your standards for the purpose of keeping yourself doing it. I’m sure there are prompt generators in the same vein as pose libraries for gesture drawing. Try on awful styles of writing as a bit, tell yourself you’re going to make the most purple prose you can bear, or stream of consciousness it. Again, the important thing I think, for our purposes, is that you are going through the processs of writing, that is: the typing, the rhythm of thought, the practice of letting yourself keep going even when you feel like you’re not doing well. That’s what you need to train to be able to write in the afternoon the same way you can in the small hours.
yeah this is me also
Shit sucks
