Closing The Tabs in My Brain

Writing Is Succeeding Where Years of Medication, Meditation and Melatonin Have Failed

Something interesting has happened to me since I started writing.

I am a long-term, clinical insomniac who has depended on pills to get any meaningful sleep for years. My biggest problem used to be to get my brain to shut down for the night, even when I had popped the pills. I took all the sleep hygiene advice and tried to practice it as diligently as I could. Even now, I switch my phone off data and go on DND (Do Not Disturb) latest around 8pm, though I’d be lying if I said I don’t watch some TV before bed.

I used to find that even though my body might be dead tired, my mind would be jumping around like an excited eight-year-old boy waiting to get on some thrill ride. Or I might just be seething about something that happened during the day, overthinking something someone said in a meeting or stressing about something I need to do tomorrow. I was convinced that my maker had given my body someone else’s brain, or my brain someone else’s body.

But as I have made writing a part of my daily routine (a paragraph, a page, a whole article, comments on other people’s articles, whatever), I realised at some point that I was getting into bed and falling asleep quicker and without effort. Most of the thoughts I have pre-bed now, are things I want to write about, so most times I just write them out. I do not even have to re-open my laptop if I have already shut it down; I just write it out as a WhatsApp message to myself, which I can revisit whenever.

So, a friend of mine told me that this is the logic behind journaling, “you close the tabs in your brain by dumping them on a page and then your mind clears”, were his exact words. And I couldn’t help wondering: why did all those expensive shrinks I saw just say it exactly like this?

I am not a difficult man; I just needed to understand the logic.

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