I'm not me when I'm hungry

I wish I could say things are changing, but there's still some more work to do.

It's been a few months since my last post about mental health, and I feel like it's worth checking in again.

On a semi-scientific approach

In my last post, I talked about how I'd been drinking more water and cutting out Pepsi. I've continued with this, but has it made a noticeable impact to my mental health after 2 months? Not really.

To begin, I didn't switch to water with the intention of it making a difference. I'd got a lucozade bottle that I'd been refilling with water any time I went to Andy's Man Club, but after a while, those bottles look kind of fatigued, so I bought a proper refillable one that's designed for long-term refilling.

Since then, it became almost something to keep me occupied. Remember fidget spinners? Yeah, it's similar to that for me. My brain subconsciously wants to find something to be occupied with, and the water bottle filled that gap with the added benefit of hydration (*gasp* wow). But did this help my mental state? Nope.

I did find something that seems to help, and it sounds so obvious: Eating when my anxiety gets really bad. This wasn't a case of me not considering or realising it might help, but me getting distracted too easily. I'd sit there thinking too much, instead of getting up out of my chair and trying to do something about it.

To be clear, this doesn't mean I just eat every time I'm anxious, but when I've not actually eaten all day and it's become early evening, then anxiety seems like a reasonable response for my brain. Eating seems to reset it, though maybe stepping away from the computer is also a factor.

There's still a sense of unease in my life that I'm trying to understand. I think I know what factors are involved, but I'm not about to speak about them until I figure it out for sure.

I want more, but I need to understand how

It sounds honestly quite stupid coming from me. To put it simply, I have a fairly easy life. It's laid-back much of the time, but that's become the self-perpetuating problem - I don't know how to seek out more.

Let's go back to 2023. This was the year I decided to make a few changes later in the year. For a long time, my sleep pattern had been really delayed. I won't go into details, but to say I wasn't a morning person would be an understatement.

Late in the year, I decided to start trying to improve it. It's never as simple as "go to bed earlier", but it's part of it. When my brain should be resting or it has downtime, it will run through a thousand different theoretical scenarios. When I should be sleeping, it does the same and going to bed earlier doesn't exhaust it any sooner. My brain has always been this way, and it's probably why the hobbies I've had always focused on something creative.

I started looking into ways to help this, and ended up taking 5-HTP supplements. They don't make me tired, but they do help my brain stop chattering. Combine this with going to bed earlier, and it first leads to getting to sleep earlier (because I'm not fighting my own thoughts) which in turn eventually leads to waking up earlier.

This in itself presents some problems that are mostly inside my head. I've spent my entire life where I have this idea that people expect me to wake up only after a certain time. If I'm awake before that, I expect people to say sarcastic things.

It's not entirely unexpected because there were times in my distant past where people would do exactly that when I'd do something that was unexpected. I'm talking about every-day things, like choosing to wear shorts instead of jeans.

The same fear is why even if I do wake up 'early', I will choose to not make it known that I'm awake for several hours. Oversensitive? Perhaps, but not unfounded.

But, for a time in late 2023, I started taking these supplements and a using a better sleep pattern. It worked. I started waking up many hours earlier than I'd been used to. After a few months, my mental health was much improved. Anxiety hadn't disappeared, but it didn't punch so hard.

Roll into 2024, and things were quiet for a while. Anxiety started to creep in during early summer. "I should be doing more" I told myself because like much of my life, I was very much a loner. I'd stay in my room coding, gaming, or wasting entire days doing nothing, but it doesn't mean I ever wanted that. I did that because it's a safe haven.

In September 2024, I started going to MeetUp events again. I'd used it back in 2018 for coding MeetUps, but stopped attending those when life got busy. Going again after 6 years was a bit nerve-wracking at first, but it turned out to be a great decision.

I started off with a group most local to me which was focused on socialising (as opposed to a hobby-specific group), which in turn eventually led me to groups in the nearest city, and eventually to the next-nearest city. I met a lot of people through these groups.

It's been over 2 years since I started going to these events, and times have changed. I can't dive down into specifics of why too much, but suffice to say that something has changed. I started going to these events because I wanted to meet people. Not for dating, but because time out in social settings became essential. I used to believe I was the opposite, but the truth is that I had the same problem then as I feel I have now: I don't know what to talk about to people.

I cannot explain things to people

If you've read the blog, you have an idea of what interests me. If there's any doubt, I love software engineering and photography. I've had other hobbies over the years, but these are 2 creative endeavours to me.

The problem with these is that they're not the sort of things I can explain to other people. If someone who I don't know asks me what I do, I say "I build websites and apps". If they probe for more, I don't know whether they'll understand what I'm saying, or whether I should start at the most simple version. Being a software engineer means that I've learned the underlying principles many years ago, and so it feels like to truly explain it, I would exhaust myself going through every pre-requisite.

Photography is similar in that it has technicalities of ISO, shutter speed, and aperture, but then a whole lot more on top (chromatic abberation, readout speeds, burst speed, precapture, how the physics of light works). I can explain that to people.

The concern is always "does this person even care?". I know how horrible it feels to feel confused or not understand, and I don't wish that on anyone, but the shallow depth I go to leaves so much unexplored.

I want to enjoy things

I used to love the 'thrill' of coding. That probably sounds ridiculous to many people, but there is something about making a computer do something to solve a problem that intrigues me. More often than not, the fun is in the building and not in the end goal.

Nowadays, it feels like a means to an end. That's not to say I'm not amazed by things any more, but that it feels less engaging. Maybe this is where AI has stepped in too far, but it also feels like there's this knife hanging above us all, that when AI 'pops', it's gonna take out so many things. However, even before AI came along in such a big way, that feeling had started to dull, so that might not be it.

Photography. I'm always looking for something that 'feels' right. I used to be obsessed with the settings. "ISO too high means more noise and less detail, but I can't set it low because of my aperture and the lack of light". This was a big problem especially with concert and gig photography which don't always have great lighting. The reason was always because it tickled that technical part of my mind, the need to always be trying something.

The problem is that I don't know how to just enjoy things. Socialising feels like a chore some of the time, unless it's with the people closest to me. There are some people I can openly talk for hours with, because I don't feel like I need to explain things, or when things do warrant a deeper answer, I know they'll only talk to the level they feel they could understand, or at least appreciate the insight.

I want to find more of that, but it is so difficult when you feel like you can't bore people.

Considering medical reasoning

I'm well aware there may be medical explanation for the way I am. I'm even beginning the process of investigating this further - not by googling and believing whatever it tells me, but by seeking out professional help. To put it in perspective, I am the sort of person who is completely open to the idea that "there's nothing wrong with me" in the sense that it's just who I am, and no medical assistance can really change that.

However, life has most definitely started to become more difficult to reason about in the past year or so, and I feel it is time to seek more substantial change to find peace.