Sleep and Mental Health

I accepted that if I’m going to study full-time I need to rest when tired, and sleep at night. This was hard, even if I know it on an intellectual level, accepting it on the emotional level was not something I’ve really been able to do.

Yesterday I both napped, and slept at a reasonable hour. 3hr nap when I got home from uni, and 10hr sleep from midnight, approximately. I was a lot more tired yesterday than I thought I was, and “crashed” when I came home from uni. Note, I could’ve been home all day, but I wanted to get some stuff done, pick up a book and do some studying, so I went to uni. When I got home we had food ready as leftovers, and I could eat before resting (thank you past me).

What I’m trying to get at is this: I will still need to rest today because I’ve been at it all week. Even if I feel surprisingly rested already by allowing myself to both nap yesterday and sleep at night.

Again, there was an emotional “I’ve been good all week, let me be up all night and game”-response which I had to fight, not too hard luckily. I did it by just examining how I was feeling, and which was stronger, and tired was it. After a 10hr night, I’m still going to take it very easy today, but do a few things around the house to make us both feel better, to make next week even easier to deal with.

I do feel like if I keep at this balancing I should be okay. And I need to process and remind myself what works and what doesn’t work. As well as, why it works or why it doesn’t work.

The Night Owl

This morning, I felt good about having gone to bed early last night, and that sparked a conversation on Mastodon about Night Owls.

I realized that, as a night owl it had helped me to figure out Why I enjoyed being up at night in order to be able to enjoy going to bed early and waking up early. This can also be combined with why I would enjoy going to bed early, but I’ll try to cover that in another post.

For me it’s the silence and calm that comes over the City at night, a lot less cars, almost no people, animals are resting too. And usually it gets a lot cooler.

If I get up early I can still get some of that calm before the morning rush, and if I go shopping while everyone else is at work I catch it too. Oh, also, going out to the park early in the day as the sun is coming up is its own tranquility. Or a morning walk to get to work / school.

I can seize the means of my tranquility by finding space ever day to lay down and ground myself, find quiet areas, ask that we do not have stuff on the speakers all day, as well as tuning out the world with classical music.

The darkness is also very calming at night, and helps me get work done. Lucky for me, as I’m going back to Uni for studies, I’ve found that the silent cubicle at the university, is a glass box for reading, where you’re not allowed computers or sound on your phone. There are drapes up as well which block out most of the light. This space turned out to be a great place for me to hide for a bit and get some energy and focus.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: If you want to change a habit try to identify what about that habit makes you want to do it, and see if you can fill that need some other way. Do it alone or with a friend.


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A journey in writing and editing

This particular journey started about 9 years ago, when I began using the internet for activism, and eventually got my first Netbook.

Thinking about it it’s possible that it began even earlier when I was in my teens, hanging out on IRC and eventually learning to write scripts for mIRC. I began programming.

That interest stayed with me, while the interest to write had already been with me since I started to learn how to write. I kept a diary when I was 8 years old, and eventually I began writing more and more in it, always caring a diary with me in later grades in school.

Different communities provided diary functions, what I didn’t realize at the time was that this was basically blogging, and I did it a lot. Even when I had a physical notebook to write in by hand, I would also keep a public, to friends or everyone on the platform, diaries.

The first one was plain text, which eventually got some formatting options, and if you understood how to use them you were some kind of wizard. But I wanted to learn, play around and find my own esthetic.

But, the journey I’m more interesting in is from html text editors and CLI, and shunning WYSIWYG, to be now actually preferring to work with editors which help me along the way.

Basically it’s a mental health thing, an allocation of resources. Finding that I’m now incapable of running Linux which tbh even the best of visuals still rely heavily on the command line, and opting for windows “because it just works”.

Yes, I’ve run my own wp server. I’ve had two Ubuntu servers to play around with. One for media and one for internet stuff (the WordPress, as well as irc related stuff). And yes I’ve run Ubuntu on my Netbook. I’ve fixed broken windows installs with help of Linux, and used to write really noob guides for Linux when I got started with it because there wasn’t any that were on a low enough level to teach me the lingo etc.

I used to prefer plain text, and just focus on writing first and formatting later. I’d be able to crank out an idea without looking at it until later, sometimes already formatting in code format because of the editor.

Today I have been trying out the new Gutenberg editor with WordPress, and I’m finding it very rewarding to use, for me in the place I’m at right now. What I mean is, because of various brain fog and other difficulties it helps me to be able to just view the visual and find the correct button.

So I went from this to only running Windows or Osx (because we have two MacBooks in the household), not launching my own servers or self hosting in other ways. And writing in editors which help me along.

My journey had taught me that wysiwyg editors etc. serve a purpose, and help those who need it. Currently for me, with CFS/me it’s just too much mental overhead to set up my own server, learn a new platform to work with, instead of just picking something I already know.

On that note though I’m currently trying to baby step when I want to try new things, and there’s progress being made, but we can talk about that another day. Being able to choose what I do where, gives me a lot more space to learn new things, and energy to write more blog posts. I feel like we’re on to something here.


This post had been updated from its first draft to add in a few more paragraphs.

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Disorganized publishing – publishing on the go

While writing at the keyboard at the computer is quite nice, swiping away at the phone is a whole other beast.

I’ve learnt that I can touch swipe better if I’m looking at the word in writing rather than looking at keyboard. Which is interesting. I think it’s easier to remember the approximate motion of the swipe by just not looking at the keyboard, when I do it always feels like I’m missing

Example of wiring with the apple store function while looking at the keyboard

Example of looking at the text instead.

I did change what I wrote, because I started editing. Maybe I should make a video some day to show you all how smooth this is.

I have two words that always get written wrong when I look at the keyboard :

Thank has been plaguing me for the past few months always turning into Thanh and Thang…

Remember I had to rewrite three times just now.

That said, I guess this is my endorsement for SwiftKey!

Yes, I know they basically track everything I type, but it’s so valuable to be able to just swipe away.


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