Impostor Syndrome

I don't feel like myself at the moment. It's not like I don't think I've changed, or I've changed too much. It's basically the fact I don't recognise myself anymore, looks and behaviour wise. Thankfully I have a psychology degree and learned first hand that this is all normal after a huge impact of change. 

It started after a huge change, the biggest change I've experienced in my whole life. It's safe to say it left me a little vulnerable to say the least. Whilst this was happening I was coming to the end of my degree and I was being pressured to think about the future. It was a lot for a person to handle and to deal with it I focused on changing myself for the better. I started doing things completely out of my usual comfort zone and although some would say that this is a good step towards growth, I just wasn't thinking and therefore, wasn't growing. I booked a trip to the middle of nowhere for a month, I used to go out almost every night and kiss strangers, I took drugs at festivals and did a lot of damaging things. Although this is a completely normal way to behave after radical change, it was pretty risky and damaging and I do not recommend, especially if you're trying to build up your self worth. 

Last month I cut my hair. When I look in the mirror I don't recognise anything about me, it's very un-nerving. When I'm putting makeup on in the morning my skin looks different, I have more eye bags than I used to and the colours of the makeup and my clothes don't look right. Also I don't seem to recognise consequences (that's a bit extreme but I don't know what else to explain it as) or recognition when I do something good. When I play a show I don't believe the applause is for me. I feel like I'm pretending, because I don't know who I am, therefore it mustn't be me. I'm fully aware that this is due to my long running and continuing bouts of identity crisis that I tend to go through monthly and they certainly don't help the situation. Maybe they are a consequence of this feeling though? All I know is it's hard to grasp hold of how it makes me feel; I'm aware of growth and change but I'm also aware of how un-settled I am and I'm getting a bit tired of it, I want to feel comfortable again. It's a very strange feeling and I'm not sure I'm making sense so let's let science talk for a bit. 

This feeling is a mild reflection of what people in the field like to call Impostor Syndrome. When a person constantly feels like a fraud or out-of-body because they can't identify with themselves. This can come from both radical change and the need for perfection/inadequacy. People projecting this feeling can go one of two ways; either overworking constantly or not working at all from fear of failure. I have experienced both of these things over the last 8 months and tend to fluctuate between them daily. 

I know the term syndrome is dangerous and is thrown around for none psycho-symptomatic feelings or emotions, however I am using this term lightly. IS is a psychology buzzword and not actually a diagnosed mental illness, although it can be a form of depersonalisation. I'm writing this post because I feel weird and I would like to know that I'm not alone with these feelings. I know they're normal after the events of this year but it is still very un-settling to not know who you are anymore. 

I do try to see it as a kind-of positive though, just knowing that I have so much room for growth and one day I will be able to recognise myself again and acknowledge my accomplishments. I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing and hopefully one day find out that I've been myself this whole time. 

This was an absolute brain dump and I'm sorry if it doesn't make sense, even if I tried to use science to explain. I'll leave some more factual and knowledgeable links here because I recognise that I haven't explained this very well. 

I would love to know if you have had any of these experiences before and what you did to make yourself feel better about it or more normal? Do you think IS is a thing we need to recognise in ourselves more?

        

   

On Being a Night Owl

I've always had a strange relationship with sleep. When I was a kid I would patter down the stairs multiple times a night to find another form of stimulus because I couldn't sleep, it took me hours, literal hours. 

And nothing much has changed to be honest. When I was in school the early mornings were a huge problem for me because I had been going to bed really late the night before. When I was doing my GCSE's and Alevels I was revising well into the night and I have a feeling that my sleep patterns back then took a huge effect on my exams. When I moved to Uni I had no sleep schedule, literally none, but for some reason I felt more awake in lectures, I was getting loads of work done at three in the morning; more than three in the afternoon and I always felt the most productive past midnight. 

My family are the same. We're all night owls, I didn't realise how unusual feeling productive at night was until I started talking to my friends about it. They had scheduled bedtimes at about ten and woke up at seven or eight the next day, whereas I was staying up until three and waking up at ten. It was quite frustrating, especially in relationships, but I know that people can't help their sleeping habits, just like I can't help mine. 

What I've found is that if I go to bed at two and wake up at half nine, that's the best amount of sleep for me to feel great. Too much or too little and I find myself feeling like a zombie all day it's so strange. I researched this and asked a few of my psychology lecturers and it seems to be that people who are more creative appear to have more problems with sleep. This is due to an overactive mind and creative stimulus. I don't know how true this is and it probably contains a lot of limitations, but from my experience I think that it has truths to it. I always find myself with ideas just when I'm meant to be settling down. Every song I've written so far was created at three or four in the morning, it's just how I operate. 

There's this stigma around night owls I've found. That early birds or 'morning pigeons' -as I like to call them- are much more productive because they can get up at five or six and have their to-do list done by lunchtime. Especially on social media, people strive for that kind of lifestyle and for night owls like me it just seems impossible. I've tried to be a morning pigeon, throughout every year of Uni I had this supposed epiphany that if I got up earlier I'd be able to get more done. But then I wouldn't be able to sleep that night and end up back to square one. I would feel inadequate that I couldn't fit into this magical lifestyle, until I realised I don't have to and I found my perfect sleeping pattern. 

Sleep is a weird thing and it works differently for everyone. If you're a night owl or a morning pigeon it doesn't matter as long as you fit your productivity around that. I don't care that I probably wake up later than all my friends and it takes me longer to get going in the morning because you should see me at night. I think being an evening person is built into my personality and I now know that I can't change that right now, but maybe I'll grow out of it. Maybe I'll get a career that requires me to get up early and I'll find out that I can actually function at five am, things change, but sleeping schedules don't have to. 

I would love to know if you too are a night owl or one of those magical, mystical morning pigeons and how it effects your productivity. I'm currently writing this at 2am, I told you so. 

         

Dreams

Since I now have an Honors degree in psychology, I kind of want to apply a little bit of that life to my blog and I think some of you may be interested in the psychology side, so I thought this month I'd give it a bash and slip in some subjects that I find interesting and important. Okay here we go, a dive into the rabbit hole, literally:

Dreams fascinate me, so much to the point that I write them all down in a dream journal. I love how something so magical-feeling and spiritual can have such scientific undertones. Because from a scientific perspective that's what dreams are; hallucinations that occur during REM sleep due to an overactive and bored brain. From a psychological perspective it suggests that dreams un-cover our deepest desires, good ol' Freud once said something along those lines and that a persons' dream can explain a lot about their thoughts and underlying behaviour. But before you start thinking about the weird dream you had last night involving Harry Potter or a colleague at work and comparing it to your life; there is a lot wrong with this theory. Freud for one was a bit of a drama queen and tended to run away with his theories on little evidence. His theories did however explain the kind of dreams where you wake up feeling incredibly motivated and inspired, this is due to a manifestation of your thoughts when you go to sleep, if you are worried about something and need to solve a problem, you are more likely to solve it in your sleep, most of the time. There are many other theories on dreams but, as always Freud got the closest to explaining exactly why we dream, although the results are quite disturbing, they are still pretty interesting and thought provoking and they obviously contain sex!

My dreams are like films. I have always been gifted with this incredible detail I can apply to my dreams and my mum has always been curious about this because her dreams don't tend to have a plot, things just occur and then she wakes up, so is the way we dream genetic? We would argue that it isn't. In 2015 I decided to start writing my dreams down and it was the best idea ever. No matter what time it is in the night once I wake up from another blockbuster dream I will write that fucker down in as much detail as possible. Some of them are hilarious and so, so weird. And some of them are just downright disturbing and scary. I suffer a lot with what I think are night terrors, to the point that I sometimes wake up screaming and sweating and have to call or text someone. Also when I was 15 I used to have this terrifying recurring dream every night for about a year, it was so particular to my fears at the time and so exclusive to my situation it used to fascinate me and terrify my in equal measure. From a psychological perspective I would probably say that this links heavily to my anxiety, but we wont go too far into that. I want to give you an example of the kind of shit I dream about and what I have written in this journal. Here is an entry from Sep 2016:

"Dreamt that we were in a dystopian universe and we were headed to a castle with a group of people including my supervisor from work and Justin Bieber. When we reached the entrance Justin went first and went into the hallway, we heard a gunshot and laughter...The truck from Mad Max pulled up and 3 armoured women and one man with a machine gun jumped out, I didn't know whether to shout for help because this is a universe where you trust no one...We met the Mad Max people and explained the situation, they said we could hide with them but now the castle was half safe again we decided to stay. They did stay for tea though."

Like what the actual fuck is that about?! RIP Justin I guess.

If you don't already keep a dream journal I would recommend it so highly. One it's hilarious to look back on sometimes and two it's a great way of keeping track of your moods and what you're worried or stressed about. In true Freudian fashion I do find that if I have been ruminating over something, it will appear in my dreams and if it is a big thing it will feature more than once every night. That's when I'm able to focus on it in reality and see why I'm dreaming about it so much, there's always a reason trust me. I'm partly with Freud on this one, don't ever deny or surpass your dreams they are so important and can explain a lot about your subconscious and your brain, especially your stress levels. Spiritual or not, or whether every part of your dream does have an underlying meaning; they are absolutely fascinating and sometimes bloody hilarious. I hope we got out of that castle in the end. 

What do you dream about?