Well, I have 40 minutes to spare, I am bored of video games, and I don’t feel like masturbating. So I guess I’ll blog.

Another class got canceled. That flu is really making the rounds. My Intro to Journalism prof has it, and so there goes another unit of my education.

You know you are a grownup when having a class get canceled makes you say “Boo!” instead of “Yay!”. I imagine a lot of my classmates are happy to have the extra free time. But not me.

To me, as we learned yesterday, a canceled class leads to depression. And yes, this cancellation depresses me. Not as bad as yesterday, because I had some warning beforehand (the prof warned us via email yesterday that this might happen) but still pretty bad.

And I am helpless against it. This is another one of those moments where I have to look my insanity in the face. Despite having been forewarned, despite my experiences yesterday, and despite knowing that I still have a class today (at 4), I still feel like there is this huge heavy weight bearing down on me, like gravity and air pressure has increased around me, and all I want to do is lay down, close my eyes, and wait for it to be over.

And that’s what I really want to talk about today, because I do that a lot.

I call it zeroing out, or bed diving. It’s what I do when my background stress level has risen to the point where I can’t handle it and I have to reduce stimulus levels to near zero in order to calm myself down.

Mostly, this manifests itself as tiredness. I start feeling sort of sleepy, and what do do when you are sleepy? You lay down and go to sleep.

But often I don’t sleep. Not really. Or if it is sleep, it is a form of sleep that is radically different from the usual kind. It is almost like self-hypnosis, or some kind of intense meditation. I relax and defocus my mind, and slowly turn down the volume on my cacophonous thoughts, and the next thing I know, it’s later.

In a way, it’s almost impressive. There are people who spend their entire lives trying to achieve something sort of like that, but way way better. If I could learn that trick, I would be a much healthier dude.

As is, I feel like all my zeroing out does for me is allow me to break even. But that’s not the problem. The problem is that I use this practice as a crutch, and it makes me reluctant to go anywhere or do anything where this release will not be within easy reach. And that’s a real problem.

Plus I am not sure it is a healthy practice in the long run. Responding to stress by shutting down, like a turtle withdrawing into his shell, is not exactly a winning strategy. Coming out of your shell and actually dealing with your problems is vastly preferable. Some problems just plain don’t go away when ignored.

And I am so sick and tired of hiding.

What got me onto this subject was that last Sunday, I actually caught myself in the act of craving a bed dive. As cognitive psychologists will tell you, catching yourself thinking the wrong thoughts (the ones you want to get rid of) is the first and most vital step in overcoming them. Once you have done it, you have a kind of snapshot of what the wrong thought looks like and feels like, and your superconscious mind can add it to its filters.

It’s kind of like a firewall, in reverse.

Some people don’t believe that cognitive psychology has anything to offer.This includes one of my psych profs. That sounds insane to me. Sure, it doesn’t work for everyone, but for us hyper cerebral types, it might well be the only thing that does work.

We do everything cognitively. We’re very good at that. Why not use that to deprogram yourself from the inside?

I think people get the wrong idea and think that you can’t deal with emotional issues by cognitive means. And they are right to the extent that the cognitive approach might not be the most efficient tool for some issues. But for me at least, thoughts and emotions are intimately and inextricably linked. I am simply not capable of deal with cognitive-free emotions.

I don’t know what to do with them.

Time for me to go to class. I will finish this when I am done.

(—)

And now I am back. Funny story. Sorry if you already read the short version on Facebook.

Either Daylight Savings Time happened and nobody told me, or I somehow managed to think I had class at 3, not 4, and so I went to school way early and sat down in class, wondering how I could possibly be late.

And there was only one seat left, which took me a while to find. And that was strange. I mean, it was logically impossible for a class I had attended twice to not have room for me, right?

But it was the right people and the right material, so…. right class. Right?

Wrong. As it turns out, because I was an hour early, I had come in on the last hour of the previous class, which just happened to be a different section of the exact same course.

I swear, life conspires to fuck with my head sometimes.

It took me a while to figure this out. I got my first hint of the solution when the professor started talking about running out of time. I looked at the clock. 3:30 pm. But doesn’t this course run from 4 to 7?

Eventually, it clicked. D’oh! So I ended up getting the last third of today’s class twice. The prof said I could leave once I came to the place where I had come in before, but I figured, what the heck.

I’ll just learn that section REALLY well!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.