Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: burnout

Sleep is as sleep does, (my brain), part seven

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Let’s talk more about burnout, sleep, and how the hell I can do better with both. I’m pretty sure the lack of the middle one is causing the first one, but I feel helpless to do anything about it. My sleep is wild these days. I had to get up before noon for my class, and I went to bed fairly early for me (5 a.m.), and I planned on getting up a quarter to twelve. Instead, I fell asleep, snoozed, and got up several times. At eleven or so, I woke up and just could not go back to sleep.

I have a weird thing in which if I have to get up at a certain time, then I’ll wake up early and keep on waking up until I give up and get up for good. It’s so frustrating because I could get an extra hour of sleep if  Iwould just stay asleep, but my anxiety does me in every time.

When I used to fly frequently, I would often get an early morning flight because it was the cheapest. If i had to be at the airport at, say, four in the morning, I just was not going to sleep that night. Even as I’m writing this, I’m struggling to keep my eyes open. I’ve nodded off, slept for a few minutes, started awake, and repeated the cycle.

There’s no reason I couldn’t just go to bed now, but I won’t for whatever reason. I know what will happen, though. If I stay awake for ten more minutes, I’ll be up until five or six. This is just the way my brain works for whatever reason.

I’m exhausted, and then I can’t sleep. This cycle is the worst, and I know that I don’t help myself. I think the thing I need to do if I can is take out the self-judgment. I was talking to A about how hard it is not to be negative about oneself in addition to the actual problem. After all, we’ve been told all our lives that we’re lazy; that our brains were broken; that we just needed to try harder.

I can’t tell you how many different things I have tried to get better sleep. In fact, I listed several ways I tried to get better sleep in my post from yesterday. Every time, I had hope in my heart that this would be the answer, it wasn’t. There is nothing that has worked–except Taiji. And that took several years before it helped in the sleep department. Before I studied Taiji, I got four to five hours of sleep a night. Afterwards, I pushed it up to six, maybe six-and-a-half, inch by inch. Now, I get six to eight, depending, and it’s mostly on me if it’s less because I set my alarm for the same time no matter when I go to sleep (unless I have to get up earlier).

Why? Because I’m hoping in vain that it’ll spur me to go to bed earlier. I have mentioned that I would like to go to bed by 3 a.m. Now, it’s more than  half hour past that. 3 a.m. to 11 a.m. is my ideal schedule, but I have rarely been able to stay on that schedule. After I got out of the hospital (after my medical crisis), I was sleeping 10 p.m. to 6 p.m. I never did that even when I was a kid. I have never gone to bed before midnight–even when I had a 7:45 a.m. class in college. In fact, during that time, I rarely went to bed before 3:30 a.m.


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Brain brain go away, part five

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Talking more about how my brain (doesn’t) works. Here is my post from yesterday toxic positivity, toxic gender stereotypes, and why both of these things have made me struggle with burnout.

I started out this series by wainting to talk about how my neurodivergence led to my current threat of burnout, but then, as usual it exploded out of control from that point. By the way, I tend to use neurodivergence rather than autism because I know that my brain is wired differently, but I’m not sure in what specific way. I’m pretty sure it’s autism, but i have not been tested for it.

I am still kicking myself for not thinking it was even possible, but that’s really not on me. The stereotype of autism ever since it’s really entered society’s conscience is of an adolescent (or now, kid) white male who has no social skills, doesn’t like to be held or maintain eye contact, and is constantly stimming.

Side note: I am so tired of ‘but have you thought that maybe he’s just socially awkward?’ bullshit when a guy does something creepy. All the endless excuses that maybe he doesn’t know what he’s doing. But, no such grace that maybe the woman (and it’s almost always a woman) he’s creeping on is autistic herself and doesn’t need that shit.

Also, you can tell when someone is socially awkward in general versus them targeting a select  few. Someone who is socially awkward is that way in general (as I said), and the level doesn’t change too much from person to person. When it’s a creeper, it’s much different and done with a laser-sharp focus.

Side note to the side note: This is one of the most frustrating things about being harassed–feeling like you have to prove it over and over again. There’s never enough evidence that it was harassment and not something else, short of broken bones (or broken other parts)–and sometimes not even then. When #MeToo was happening, so many men were making it about them. How they were scared to approach women and say anything to them.

I mean…what?! That’s your takeaway from #MeToo? How hard it is to be a man? But of course it was. It’s always about the man. That was the whole fucking problem in the first place. When there’s a shooting these days, my immediate thought is, “What pissed off man shot a place up again?” Because it is overwhelmingly men–and most of the time, white cis het men.

Yet, we never talk about it because…why?  (Holds in a 2,000 word rant about patriarchy because I just cannot.)


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Refining my Taiji/Bagua practice, part two

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In yesterday’s post, I was going to talk about why I don’t do groups–and I’ll get to that (eventually)–but I went waaaaay off the rails as I ended up talking about burnout instead. I decided to go with it because it’s obviously on my mind, and I want to get it under control before I completely lose my shit.

It’s ironic. Weapons have saved me, and now weapons are my burden. I am being completely honest. I can do the warmups/stretches with no problem. Then, my brain goes, “Uhhhhhh”, and I procrastinate. I have to force myself to go through it all. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it as I’m doing it–I do. It’s just a small (or not so small) part of my brain going, “I’m soooooo tired.” To be fair, my sleep has been really shitty lately. I don’t think it’s pneumonia again (hopefully), but I can’t rule it out. I’m not as tired as I was when I had it, but I’m pretty groggy.

Also, it’s not that I physically can’t do it; I can. It’s my mind saying it doesn’t want to. And, yes, my body is tired (as I usually am), but I’m not in any distress while practicing.

Here’s how this relates to my neurodivergence. I tend to go overboard when I’m into something. Way overboard. I don’t know where the ‘this is an appropriate amount of effort and time to put into this’ line is.

Here’s a related tidbit about me. My hunger gauge is completely broken. I struggled with anorexia and bulimia when I was younger. Remember, my mother put me on my first diet when I was seven and hounded me about my weight until I put my foot down in my thirties. It was too late by then, though.

Ok. I had a hunch about neurodivergence and not recognizing internal body signals, and I was right. The ability to know what is going on in your body is called interoception. It’s how you know you’re hungry, tired, thirsty, etc. People with neurodivergence (I could find more about ADHD than autism) have a harder time recognizing their internal signals. Whether it’s because of hyperfocus or just bodily issues in general, people who  are neurodivergent tend to be more susceptible to eating disorders as well.

I say this because I cannot tell when I’m hungry or thirsty. I’m pretty good about drinking regularly, but I’m very bad at eating. I don’t like breakfast, so I don’t eat when I first get up. I like to do my Taiji/Bagua practice before I eat, which means I don’t eat my first full meal* until two or three hours after I wake up.


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Less is (sometimes) more, part three

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I want to talk more about weapon forms because I can. Here was yesterday’s post on the same subject. When I decided to teach myself the Double Fan Form, I naively thought that it wouldn’t be too difficult. After all, I taught the Fan Form to myself with relative ease.

Well, that’s not exactly correct. I did teach it to myself fairly effortlessly I thought. But then, a year or so later, I was going to teach myself the left side. I started running into places where I could not do it because I had been fudging it on the right side. This was roughly halfway through the form. I decided to go back to the video and refresh my memory.

Much to my surprise, I realized t hat I had forgotten whole chunks of the Fan Form. I remember teaching it to myself, but I had no memory of those missing postures themselves. There was a chunk in the middle of the  form and another chunk at the end. I took a deep breath and taught the whole form to myself again. I took extra pains to make sure that I had it in my body and was not just fudging postures when I didn’t get them.

It’s hard because my teacher believes in learning the whole form first and then refining it after. Which is great when there’s the opportunity to practice it in class every week. However, when I’m doing it on my own, it’s harder. Yes, I can watch the videos I have in a pinch, but I will say that it doesn’t completely replace in-person teaching.

Also, the obvious problem with teaching myself is that I can’t see what I can’t see. What I mean is that I can’t tell when I’m making mistakes or not doing a posture right. Of course, I could do the form for my teacher–if she knows it. She does not know the Double Fan Form, which I’m making my way towards in this post.

Once I had the Fan Form in my body, I decided to teach myself the Double Fan Form. I also wanted to teach myself the Double Sword Form, but there’s no official form. I also wanted to finish teaching myself the Karambit Form, the Guandao Form, and I’m messing around with a Karambit/Fan Form.

That’s too much. While I can probably teach myself two forms at the same time, I don’t think I would do justice to either. Plus, it would probably take twice as long as it would to teach myself one. So, obviously, doing two back-to-back would take just as much time if not less than trying to teach myself two forms at once.

I’m so impatient, though. I’m like the kid in a candy store in that I want it all. Now! I have taught myself several different forms, or at least part of them. Wu-Li Dancing Sword, which is very short; halfish of the Karambit Form (I thought I had taught myself all but the very end); Fan Form; Cane Form (with the saber, so technically Saber Form); and the second half of the Double Saber Form. Oh, and I’ve taught myself the left side of the Sword Form, Saber Form, Cane Form, and Cane Form with the saber. Oh, and the last third or so of the Swimming Dragon Form, hands only, Bagua.


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