When Your Brain Just Won’t Stop

When I was younger I used to lay in bed at night think­ing. My mind would move from one topic to the next for what seemed like hours. Some­times it was plan­ning out things to do the next day. Some­times I was wor­ry­ing about the things I’d said or done the day before. I’d write sto­ries in my head or I’d replay events fig­ur­ing out how I could have han­dled it bet­ter. My brain just didn’t want to turn off.

I think most peo­ple have this hap­pen at least occa­sion­ally, but it was a reg­u­lar thing for me that con­tin­ued through my twen­ties. In fact it really didn’t stop for me until my life got so busy and tir­ing that I began to fall asleep within min­utes of turn­ing the lights out out of sim­ple exhaus­tion. I had a sim­ple method of deal­ing with my hyper­ac­tive brain and it was read­ing.  Fic­tion was the ideal way to dis­tract me and relax my brain. It’s why I was able to read such a large num­ber of books over the years. To this day I still do most of my read­ing at night. It’s just become an ingrained habit.

Inter­est­ing side­bar. It seems that peo­ple with Asperg­ers often expe­ri­ence this sort of dif­fi­culty calm­ing down enough to go to sleep. While I was never diag­nosed with Asperg­ers, one of my sons has. Maybe it’s coin­ci­dence, maybe it’s not.

The rea­son I’m writ­ing about this now, is that I seem to be revert­ing to my old sleep­ing pat­terns. It took me a few nights to real­ize what was hap­pen­ing, but this week I’ve been lay­ing in bed in the dark replay­ing the days events. It starts off sim­ply enough, just quickly think­ing about a par­tic­u­lar inci­dent. And then I run through it again. And again.

It’s  as though my brain gets stuck in a loop. Part of me is aware of what’s hap­pen­ing, but I’m not able to break free of it and I go right back to wor­ry­ing at the incident.

Did I say the right thing? Was the other per­son being unrea­son­able? What else could I have done? Why didn’t I do it? What will the fall­out be? Did I say the right thing? Was the other per­son being unreasonable?

And on it goes.

I’m not sure why this has started up again, and I’m really hop­ing it’s just a reac­tion to a par­tic­u­larly stress­ful few weeks. What­ever the cause, I guess I’m going to get a lot more books read.