Dumb joke : I am hoping that Wellbutrin will make me a Well Bertrand.

In the interested of squeezing out as much of my pain as possible out into these lonely pages of mine, I decided that today is the day that I will talk about my health, and my worries about it.

After all, talking out your worries is supposed to be good for you, and I could use as much wellness as I can get my fat, sweaty hands on lately.

What has me worried right now, what the current tense has me currently tense, is this vague but pervasive weak feeling I have been feeling ever since I started on my current dose of Wellbutrin.

It is tricky to describe, but I just feel sort of tired and weak, like my body is heavier and my head weighs twice as much and there is just not enough air in this old balloon of mine any more.

Now first off, don’t worry, I will tell my therapist all about this on Thursday, and we will see if this is a bad reaction to the Wellbutrin or what.

But it has me worried. When I first took the 300 mg dose, I had a reaction that mirrored the physical symptoms of a panic attack : pounding head, rapid pulse, profuse sweating.

Now Wellbutrin is of the stimulant class of drugs (technically), so that was not entirely unexpected, and I more or less dismissed it as an adjustment effect that would fade over time.

And so far, that has only recurred once. Normally, if I am already busy and active, I barely notice any kind of side effects at all apart from the faint sense of disconnectedness that I used to get when I was first taking Paxil.

And I figure, I am radically changing the very chemistry of my brain and hence shifting the very ground upon which my entire consciousness, and hence, my very being, rests.

That is bound to make me feel a little weird now and then. At the very least.

But this weak feeling is something different, and far more worrying. At first it came in waves, but now it is pretty much constant. I feel like someone turned up the gravity on me, and that is not a good feeling.

Now, I have had attacks of this sort of feeling before, long before I ever tried Wellbutrin, and so it might not be related to the new drug at all. It might just be one of the weirder stops on the long bus route that is my sleep cycle.

This could be part and parcel with the fact that I am catching up on sleep lately and that my sleep apnea has left me somewhat deprived of oxygen, and hence, tired and weak.

Heck, I might just be kinda dehydrated from night sweats. A lot of things can influence one’s energy levels and wakefulness, and so it is not necessarily the Wellbutrin that is to blame.

But still, I worry. I worry about my health in general, to be honest.

I don’t want to wind up a hypochondriac again, like I was in my early 20s. It was hard enough to dig myself out of that terrible hole the first time, and I did it all by myself. I was not well enough to seek therapy or even get some sort of useful answer from a doctor. I had no perspective on the whole thing as a mental health issue. I thought I was physically sick, and it took years to figure out that I was not, exactly, except for Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

So I am working hard to maintain perspective. But I also don’t want to overcorrect for the problem either. The next decade of my life is going to be fraught with potential health issues, and I do not want to be one of those schmucks who ends up seriously ill because they ignored the signs of illness when they were minor and only end up getting treated for the illness when it forces them to pay attention to it by causing a very serious problem.

And I have ample reason to be worried. The years between 40 and 50 years of age are extremely dangerous for the morbidly obese like me. This is when that “morbid” part comes home to roost in a serious way.

It is when we start to die.

And before we die, we can end up in a very bad way. I am terrified of ending up debilitated to the point where I can’t even function at my current shitty level.

And that means that if I want to avoid such a terrible fate, I am going to have to find my way to losing some of this goddamned excess weight.

Maybe Wellbutrin will help me find the motivation to do that. Something has to heal this profound disconnected between intention and action that has kept me in the same place for my entire adult life.

I have seen little signs that the Wellbutrin is doing me some good. Doing things seems like less of an enormous effort lately. I sometimes even find myself doing things subconsciously, and yet doing them right. That must be how normal people do stuff.

And it would be very good for me if I could relax some of the hyper-vigilence that has been inherent to my mental state for a long long time. If I could trust the peripheries of my consciousness to handle small routine tasks instead of approaching every situation like I am a member of the bomb squad who does not know where the bomb is yet, that would do a great deal to relax my entire mental state and would presumably free up a lot of energy currently being wasted on paranoia.

And I am convinced that recovering that kind of energy is vital to becoming a happier me.

It takes a certain amount of mental horsepower to keep one’s mood aloft.

I am determined to get that kind of energy back from my neuroses.

Been having a sleepy day today, and it is a vast relief.

I have been having trouble with sleep lately. Even taking three Quetiapine was only buying me five hours of very unsatisfying shallow sleep.

And I could feel myself growing a little stupider as the sleep debt built up. It was getting harder and harder to concentrate, and my mental discipline was shot. Even just focusing enough to write a blog entry took an enormous effort. My brain just wanted to lie down for a while.

Luckily, the drought has ended. Most likely cause : taking my Wellbutrin in the morning, like I am supposed to do, as opposed to with supper, which is what I had been doing.

The most common side effect of Wellbutrin is insomnia, and so you take it when you first get up in the morning in order to make sure there is as much time between taking it and your going to sleep again as possible.

But I was being lazy and just taking it at the same time as my other daily meds, and that is suppertime. So I was probably causing my own insomnia.

Well, no more. It’s mornings for me from now on. If that means trudging through a few sleepy days in order to pay off that sleep debt, that is fine by me.

Now for evolution. I just watched a BBC documentary called Are We Still Evolving?, and it got me to thinking about evolution, which happens to be one of my favorite subjects.

Here’s an excerpt from the show. Can’t link to the full thing because the BBC wants to sell you the DVD.

That gives you the flavour of the thing, at least. Honestly, it was a little all over the map and dragged in things not entirely relevant to the question, so you are not missing that much.

But to answer the main question : yes, we are still evolving. There can be no doubt of that. Evolution is not a process which can be stopped. It can only be altered.

The next question is “How, exactly, are we evolving?”.

That is a far trickier question. Modern society is so complicated, with so many factors in play that may or may not lead to reproductive success, that it makes it impossible to plot even the vaguest trajectory for the evolution of the species, at least in those of us living in the modern world.

Certainly, the traditional pressures of Darwinian evolution are still in play. Chief amongst those would be classic good looks. A handsome man or a beautiful woman is still going to be more likely to get the mate of their choice than the baseline of the species.

And other things, like reproductive health, robust immune system, and some forms of intelligence no doubt lead to traditional “success” in the modern context, and also contribute to being able to raise children in a stable home with good nutrition and a full education.

But in the modern world, 99 percent of babies reach reproductive age, and the vast majority of those babies will grow up to have at least one child, so those pressures are not very strong, and probably do not matter much in the long run.

And we have accomplished this extraordinarily high level of reproductive success without needing to wait for evolution, because as human beings, we evolve via culture.

If a human being has to adapt to a change in environment, we do not have to wait for evolution’s slow cruel grind to select out the ones naturally better at survival in the new environment until, many generations hence, if we are lucky, our distant progeny is perfectly adapted to said new environment.

We just build tools. If it gets colder, we make warmer clothing. If the best food is high up on the tree, we knock it down with a pole. If the area floods, we learn to build our houses on stilts.

And because we have language and culture, we can teach other human beings to adapt as well. We are not limited to our individual successes. The innovation of one can become the commonplace tool of many.

Hence, the human species is the most widely spread single species in the world. There is no corner of this globe where humans do not live. From the Arctic to the Antarctic, humanity has found ways to adept to environments as diverse as Pacific islands, broad flat plains, jagged frosty mountains, and vast stretches of frozen tundra.

By any measure, we are the most successful species on Earth. And we have done it far faster than the glacial pace of evolution could ever produce.

So my real answer to the question of whether we are still evolving is “Yes, via culture”.

And on that scale, we have never been evolving faster than we are right now. With the advent of the Internet, the innovation of one can become the commonplace tool of the entire species. With economic globalization, the products which support the modern standard of living are available to more human beings than ever before in the history of humanity. Evolution via innovation goes faster every day.

And in an interesting spin on evolutionary pressures, most of the innovation is in response not to our environment but to ourselves. We are constantly shifting the playing field for ourselves, and that means innovation sparks innovation ad infinitum.

Some people worry that this will somehow lead to a rate of innovation and change that will be so blindingly fast that nobody will be able to keep up with it.

But that’s a ridiculous thought on the face of it. Innovation is not some abstract force that drags us hapless humans along without mercy.

It is a human force and it goes at human speeds. If an innovation is too early or too weird or otherwise before its time, it does not get adopted, and has to wait until the time is right.

It might start to change a little faster than us older people can keep up with, but it will never go faster than we can handle as a species.

So relax, and enjoy the bumpy but exciting trip into the future!