Oi, Pavlov, get to bed!

I love bed. Being in bed is one of life's greatest pleasures; and, no, I'm not talking about that - "makin' fuck" - I simply mean the whole sitting watching TV or reading a book or lying down and sleeping business. I always read in bed. It's wonderful, bliss.

And I shouldn't do it.

I have started attending a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy group to learn how to stop thinking that I'm a loser and give myself the confidence to go out and live life. I'm only on Week No. 3 so don't ask me yet how it's done.

Anyway, today we looked at how depression can adversely affect sleep and some techniques for overcoming the problem. The essence of these techniques is to train your brain to associate "bed" with "sleep" so that when you do go to bed you subconsciously tell yourself that it is time to sleep rather than dwell on problems or worry. To aid the training of your brain is to make sure that you only use your bed for sleeping and not, for example, watching TV or... um... reading.

Suddenly a few things make much more sense like, for example, the fact that when I read in bed I become drowsy very quickly and end up having a nap; and napping during the day is not good if you are having trouble sleeping at night.

In the past I thought that the problem was with my glasses and that I needed a new prescription. I had an eye test and got some new specs but, nope, eyes still got tired. I thought that maybe the lighting was insufficient in that corner of the room so I got a reading lamp for my bedside cabinet. Nah, still got tired.

Today it occurred to me that the reason I get tired quickly when I read in bed is because my brain thinks that I should be going to sleep. Likewise, maybe I have difficulty getting to sleep at night because when I go to bed there is a part of my brain thinking that it should be reading.*

This idea got me thinking about how much human beings are driven by instinct despite our big brains and oh-so-clever capacity for abstract thought that raises us above the level of "mere" animals. Perhaps what does raises us above the level of animals is that we can acknowledge the fact that we are driven by instincts and can define and embed new instincts into our minds.

But greater minds than mine are no doubt ruminating on these ideas in much more depth than I ever could. I'm just another guy trying to learn how to get my shit together and survive.

* I do not, however, salivate when I hear a bell.