Keeping Busy

It feels like for the longest time now, I’ve just not stopped?

Not in the way of ‘I’ve not slept in weeks’ or ‘I’ve been incredibly busy doing this huge personal project’ or anything massive like that. It just kind of feels like for a few months now, I haven’t really let myself think.

I don’t tend to be alone very much any more. I don’t tend to sit and do nothing much. I keep myself extremely busy. And there is a reason for this.

A few months ago, something personal happened that meant I didn’t really like being at home. This meant over the summer, I was always out. I only came home to sleep and eat, really. Which sounds bad but… it’s normal for teenagers anyway, right? So over the summer I kept myself… not busy, per se, but occupied. I wasn’t being necessarily productive, I just wasn’t doing nothing.

And I was so looking forward to college, to go back to doing something every day, being out all day everyday, and having something productive to keep my mind off of the things that were bothering me. And it’s worked so far, I guess.

But there’s a huge flaw in this plan.

And that is that now, whenever I have five minutes alone with my thoughts, I can’t really handle it. I seem to have a problem with just being. (That’s what my counselor said, anyway). It’s almost as if, when I don’t have some kind of distraction or something to occupy my mind, it’s when I start thinking about bad stuff. Or not thinking at all, which makes me very moody.

Wow, I really know how to make myself sound fun.

So that’s where my great distraction plan starts to suck.

A good example of how this is flawed is this:

I adore lie ins. Like… they are amongst my favorite things on the planet (next to Cadbury’s chocolate and my cat). I love to sleep in, turn of the alarm, sloth out, and then once I’m actually awake, proceed to just lie there scrolling through my phone for the next 3 hours before I get up.

This, however, causes 2 large problems. One being, it makes me feel lazy. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s feeling useless or lazy (which is a struggle when paired with low motivation and concentration abilities, but that’s another story altogether). So lying in bed all day means, eventually, I start to get mad at myself for wasting the day lying in bed. Bit hypocritical, I know. But by this point, I’ve already wasted the majority of the day, and I’m too moody to do anything to make it better.

The second problem with the lie-in-love is that it means I don’t sleep very well that night. I need to be doing things that make me tired. Things that mentally and physically exhaust me to the point I fall asleep as soon as I get into bed. Of course, if I’ve slept in until 1pm that day and try going to bed at 11, it’s not gonna go so well. So that leaves me laying in bed, thinking. Oh God, not thinking!

So that’s a no-go too. You’d think these things would motivate me to like… not lie in all the time? But we all know I’m not that smart.

Anyway, that was a summary of my current distraction struggle. Does anyone else have the same problem? The same niggling feelings whenever they have a rest? If so, let me know! We can chat about it!

Thanks for reading 🙂