The Room 101 thread - for things you hate or just having a bloody good moan

[Raid]

Insomnia.

This doesn't really feel like a room 101 minor grievance, because it's been at least partially life ruining, but we don't really have an escalation process for these things.

I've mentioned a few times that I've been suffering from lack of sleep over the last few months. It actually goes back as far as September last year when I came off a medication that had a sedative effect (that I had been taking close to bed time). I'd been on it for quite a long time, and coming off it, even slowly, has left my brain basically unable to regulate its own sleep pattern. It's rare that I wake any later than about 4:30am, sometimes it's as early as 2am, often without being able to drift off again. I can't sleep during the day, and going to bed any earlier doesn't do me any favours.

Fatigue has been affecting me so badly at work that I'm on an attendance plan because of the amount of time I've missed, and I've now had to reduce my hours even further than I'd planned during a cost of living crisis, just so that I can get at least some quality of life and keep following the drawing course I've been working on. I'm seemingly incapable of working full days any more, and I'm often pretty useless when it gets to my free time in the evenings. Work have been as understanding as they can be, and as much as I don't enjoy my job, the fact that I work from home and can therefore set my own hours has been massively helpful.

But yesterday I managed to fall asleep on my lunch hour, entirely unplanned, after getting maybe 6 hours sleep over three days. My boss called me three times after I'd gone over the hour, and the third one managed to wake me up. I then had to say I was clearly unable to finish my shift, and did the remaining couple of hours this morning.

I've tried all sorts of things to fix it, but as it's almost certainly mental health related and I really don't want to go back to medication for it, I'm just sorta stuck trying to adapt to sleeping less. I go for walks every day to make sure I'm getting melatonin, I've tried sleeping tablets (although they're more for sending you to sleep rather than keeping you as such, and that's not the problem I have), I try to read for the hour before I go to bed, try to stick to a routine... everything short of bashing myself over the head with a comedy cartoon mallet. Things have been a little more manageable because of it (with a few outlying weeks), but nothing's really fixed the problem. I think I've slept until 7am (what I'd now consider a massive lie-in) maybe twice in the last six months.

It is, to put it simply, a bit shit.

Also; the phrase "escalation process," which I just unironically used. I hate that corporate speak has invaded my brain, but I suppose that comes with working for a massive multinational for 12 years.

[Wrathbone]

Sorry mate, I can't imagine how exhausting long-term insomnia must be. Totally understand if you'd rather ignore or not answer this, but have you tried therapy? What with you saying you think it's probably mental health related, it seems like that would be the right avenue for addressing it.

[Raid]

Oh, I've been seeing a therapist for the entire duration (although not for this reason), and on and off for several years. While they've been really helpful in allowing me to sort out a lot of other aspects of my life, this isn't something we've been able to fix yet. When I say it's mental-health related, it's more to do with the job making me miserable, and there's nothing they can really do to change that, it's just the nature of the job. I know I need to change it, but it's been basically impossible to find another position that gives me the same perks (for one thing, the job is paying for the therapy, which I can appreciate the irony of).

I'm pretty open about my mental health these days. For one thing it got to the point where it was impossible to hide, but discussion of MH issues is one of those things we need to normalise, to try and remove the stigma from. I don't necessarily pour my heart out on public fora, but I'm perfectly happy discussing it if asked.

[Sly Boots]

From your mention of MH issues, medication and a soporific effect, I can take a guess at what you were on, and assuming that's correct it's the same medication I've been on for a couple of years now. It's actually levelled me out massively (and probably saved my marriage as a result), but on the flip side it's robbed me of more or less any motivation or momentum, which I wasn't over-blessed with in the first place. I've written basically nothing creatively since going on them, and to say it's a struggle to motivate myself to work is a huge under-statement. However, given the first point I feel like I basically have to stay on them despite the negatives.

I didn't realise they had a tranquilising effect and first and was taking them during the day at the start... took a few days to realise why I was passing out at my desk

[Raid]

Yeah, they had that effect on me too, and it's one of the reasons I eventually decided I needed to come off them. I may as well have been a zombie while taking them because I just had no enthusiasm for anything anymore, I just felt like I was meandering from one activity to the next.

[Drarok]

Similar reasons why I've come off SSRIs – they might balance the worst bits, but they rob me of any sort of emotional peaks, be they low or high. Trudging through life in a grey, monotonous middle-ground wasn't fun, and the most-recent one I tried seemed to make me EXTREMELY ANGRY, so I sacked that off. The come-down (despite tapering as per doctor's orders) was fucking catastrophic, I'm never going to take another SSRI so long as I live.

[Can't think of one]

Have you guys tried meditation? sometimes I have trouble getting to sleep I do a five minutes meditation such as this



For Christmas, I got a Tibetan Singing Bowl which has also improved my sleep, this link provides some useful information about them
https://www.verywellmind.com/tibetan-si ... de-effects

[Raid]

When I was having issues falling asleep too, I did try meditation, but it didn't work for me. My problem was that I just couldn't switch off. I could meditate for half an hour, be perfectly calm, but as soon as I stopped my brain just switched straight back on. It's not a problem now thankfully, it's the waking up early that I've been struggling with.

[Snowy]

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, meditation takes work. I try my best to keep a regular routine (it often slips), but it is worth persevering with. Apps like Headspace can be very helpful in giving you a regular dose of guided meditation. I started on the recommendation of a colleague from India who is olympic standard in comparison to me, and have done some shared meditation with him utilising live YouTube streams from Indian gurus (for want of a better term), which have been really good.

[Mantis]

I had the unpleasant experience of being berated by a passive aggressive police response operator this morning. The sound of crashing and banging at 6am woke me up to find someone off their tits on something or other trying to force their way into my flat from the communal corridor. He was properly having a go at the door with his shoulder and yanking at the handle. When I shouted at him through the door he was adamant that he lived in my flat and refused to leave, getting rather aggressive towards me when I told him to leave because he had the wrong address.

I managed to scare him off by threatening to call the police and doing it right on the other side of the door so he could hear me. But the operator had a less than helpful response to dealing with someone obviously distressed enough to need to call the police. She basically told me in a pretty callous tone that it wasn't a real emergency unless he was inside my flat and that they didn't have enough units to respond so I'd just have to try and get rid of him myself. I imagine that had it been a serious enough emergency that he was in the property with me that I likely wouldn't have found much time to make a call to 999.

She called me back at half 9 to make sure I was still alive and closed the case when I said I'd scared him off with the initial call, telling me in the process that "these things happen".

Nice to know you can rely on law enforcement to look out for you when someone is physically trying to break your door down and verbally abusing you. They'll deploy 100 officers to a peaceful protest that the government doesn't like but they can't spare enough response units to defuse a situation that could have potentially escalated to something quite nasty given the guy was clearly high as a kite. I'm buying a baseball bat.

[Wrathbone]

Jesus.

I'd be writing to my MP and to my chief of police to demand an explanation as to how an aggressive drunk trying to break violently into your home does not constitute an emergency and what they believe the outcome would have been if he had succeeded or failed to stop. If the trajectory of a situation has a high probability of leading to harm, the police have a duty of care to respond. There's no excuse for them dismissing it.

[Mantis]

I would but I'm feeling pretty apathetic about the state of our services at the moment that other than getting a stock response I really don't see what that will achieve.

[Wrathbone]

Probably nothing, but nobody else is holding these bastards to account so it's us (the public) or no-one.

[Raid]

I pretty much don't expect the police to do anything these days unless you're actively being murdered, as in the knife is halfway through your ribcage, rather than you merely being threatened with it. They just don't have the resources, and I suspect the rationale is going to be that by the time they got to your front door, the man would have moved on, so they simply don't do anything as the drive out there would be considered a waste of what little resources they have. It's entirely unacceptable, but that's what years of austerity have done.

I also don't really respect the police as an organisation any longer. All of this hugely problematic stuff that the MET are being accused of seemingly on a weekly basis, along with all of the stuff about breaking up peaceful protests has done nothing to reassure me that they're actually here to protect the public any longer.

I was burgled a few years back, and my then-partner had her car broken in to (along with a number of other cars on the estate), and they basically came out, took a statement and dusted for fingerprints, and then nothing else. We never heard anything back from them, and it feels like basically a waste of time as there's practically zero chance of them catching the little bastards. We pretty much only reported it to get a police incident number for the insurance company.

They can't prevent crime, they can't catch criminals, and their officers are sometimes violent thugs or rapists. You have to question what the hell they're actually there for.

[Drarok]

She basically told me in a pretty callous tone that it wasn't a real emergency unless he was inside my flat and that they didn't have enough units to respond so I'd just have to try and get rid of him myself.

Ok, I'll go get a kitchen knife and sort him out, bye.

I bet they'd have someone over sharpish then!

Bastards.