The Internet: Blessing, Curse

I've been having a problem with insomnia for awhile now. But it's lately developed a new twist: paranoia. (What's that called together - insomnoia? parasomnia?)

It goes like this. I will be exhausted throughout the early evening, or maybe just start getting really tired around bedtime, but either way - usually I am tired when I first begin thinking about going to bed. Then one of several things happens. Either I go to bed, but can't fall asleep - feel wide awake as soon as my head hits the pillow and the lights are off - or I fall asleep, but wake up in a few hours totally wide awake and unable to go back to sleep.

This was annoying enough. But lately when I'm laying there totally unable to sleep (or when I wake up in the middle of the night), I'm suddenly beseiged by a bout of total paranoia. I will be worried about anything and everything, but not just normal every day worries. I will either take semi-legitimate worries and blow them completely out of proportion, or I'll fabricate totally unfounded fears and let my mind elaborate on them for awhile. Then my heart rate goes up, I start feeling all antsy and anxious, and that just keep me more awake. Oy!

This is really getting on my nerves. A couple months ago this was bad enough that sometimes several nights a week I would wake up in the middle of the night, and be up until 5:00 or 6:00 a.m., when I had to work the next day (or, umm, that day).

At least tonight it's the weekend - and yes, you guessed - that's why I'm blogging this blather at a little after midnight. Not that that's late for some people, but it generally is for me, and earlier in the evening I was so completely exhausted I could barely hold my eyes open, and was only hoping I could stay awake until 8:00 p.m. (as going to bed any earlier seemed just wrong).

But as soon as my head hit the pillow, bam - I was wide awake. I tried staying there for about half an hour, then gave up.

An acquaintence of mine who happens to be a counselor told me once that insomnia has to be watched carefully, because if it goes on too long it can begin to create paranoia. Now I'm beginning to see what he meant.

So I'm up and awake, and decide to go do some browsing online. For fun, I typed into Dogpile "insomnia and paranoia" to see what I could find out. I turned up a blog where someone was talking about a disease they'd found online (probably during a late night insomniac bout of the same type of sleepless surfing I was indulging in) called "fatal familal insomnia." Just what it sounds like - the patient develops insomnia which worsens over several months until they can't sleep at all; hallucinations and complete delusions occur, followed by death. There is no cure.

"Oh, great," I thought. "Just what an insomniac who is also paranoid needs to read in the middle of the night!" I'd have been convinced I have it, except it's extremely rare - it's definitely genetic, and only 28 families in the world have been discovered who have the gene. I think I'm safe in assuming mine isn't one of them, or I'd probably know it by now.

Unless I've developed some mutant strain of it ...

Okay, enough of that. To be more serious (not that death by wakefulness isn't serious) ... I actually am pretty sure I know what's causing mine, and I just have to get my head out of my ass and do what needs done to fix it. It's actually a number of things all piling up. Stress - both job and home. Drinking way too much diet Coke, especially throughout the evening (apparently my former immunity to caffeine is wearing off as I age). And I need to do a bit of personal cognitive-behavioral therapy on myself. I've just let myself become too negative, too always ready to assume and expect the worst, and way too much of a worrywart. I recognize that I do this, in just about every aspect of life (day or night, so it's not just a late-night sleeplessness thing). I've always been a somewhat negative person (okay, those of you who know me - stop with the sarcastic "(snorf) Somewhat!?").

But in the past year or so it seems to have gotten much worse. And that is something I could have some control over. While I don't practice what I preach, I am a firm believer in the concept of mind over anything. Our thoughts really do to a great degree create or effect our reality, and I really could work on not always seeing the world through soot-colored glasses.

As for stress, well, unfortunately it just got ramped up. My boss fired one of my co-workers Friday. I understand why he did it, but man, it wrecked my job. I was already just barely treading water with my own work - we recently hired a new person who had no law office experience at all, so I am training her totally from scratch - a very time-consuming thing.

My boss had also recently assigned me to create and handle a 'case management' system to monitor and track the status of all his domestic cases (several hundred) because we hadn't previously had such a system, and too many things were falling through the cracks. Now, I think this is a great idea, and I didn't mind doing it, in fact I was sort of looking forward to both the challenge, and the increased organization it would bring to the office. But it has been a very time-consuming thing to create and tweak the system until it works for us, and to begin entering all the cases into it. Out of the several hundred, so far only 30 are actually up and running in the system.

With all of that, I was barely keeping up as it was. Now I have to take on all of my former co-worker's work as well as mine. This just about doubled my work load, and I do not honesty know how I'm going to possibly do it - even increasing my hours from 25 a week to 40+ and working Saturdays, I still don't see how it's going to get done on time - because it's not like I can just say "I'll get to it when I get to it." It's a law office - everything has deadlines, and everything that isn't an emergency right now will be in 3 days.

They will replace her, but in my past experience of this (many experiences - there have been at least 14 or 15 people there who have quit or been fired) it takes quite awhile to find someone, and even if we're lucky enough to find someone with law office experience, I still have to train them for how we do things, our systems. So I'll be training two people, with all the rest of it.

Yeah, it's enough to make my head spin. In the 12 years I've been there, I have never, ever been in this bad a place with my work. I'm completely overwhelmed and do not see any way I can do all this.

That alone ramped my stress up to possibly unmanageable levels. And I'm sure it's what's contributing to tonight's wee-hours blogfest.

But there's one bottom line to all this: I am the only one who can do anything about any of it. I have to get myself straightened up, and start normalizing my life. I have to stop with the diet Coke and maybe in fact any caffeine for awhile, until I get this situation under control. I want to start eating better, and taking my vitamins again. Some exericse would probably do me a world of good - both for reducing stress, and maybe for helping me be relaxed and tired enough in the evening to actually sleep. I want to start meditating every day, to help calm my over-anxious paranoid mind.

And as for work ... I really don't know yet what I'm going to do about that, except do the biggest emergencies each day, and the rest of it will just have to wait. And my boss is just going to have to understand that. Fortunately, he's very cool that way, and he won't give me nearly as much grief as I give myself.

Well, I feel a little better for having written it all out. I'm still wide awake, but not as stressed.

And the bonus - I bet I put you right to sleep!