Can't sleep

So I post about some humiliating past experiences and when I lay down and try to sleep what happens? I think about those experiences and what I could have done different. I quit sports for the most part when I was 14, even though I had the ability and loved to play them. I quit because I was too worried about what everybody was thinking of me. And let me tell you, in case you forgot...those early teenage years are hell. Most of my "traumatic" humiliating experiences came from these years. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. I was so worried of what everybody was thinking that I was dumb, that I blanked out and became temporarly dumb. I could not think. But I'm not dumb. It's just when I was experiencing a lot of anxiety.

Now why is it, that my mind is on overdrive while I try to sleep, but as the time approaches for me to get up for the day, suddenly it slows down and without effort, I finally drift off and I get a grand total of two hours of sleep.? My mind is not racing then. Why is it now?

Lack of Socializing

We are midway through the second week of the summer quarter and things are going pretty well right now. I'm doing some live remotes out at the Gage County Fair and that went good. It is not the easiest thing in the world for me to get out amongst the people like that, but on occasion, my job requires I do it. And you know what? When I have to do something like socializing I can do it. But my default mode is to not socialize. It is part of my make-up, but some of my lack of socializing obviously stems from prior experiences where I was humiliated in social settings. Of course that is in the past, but those experiences serve as a sort of post traumatic stress disorder. I don't want to minimize PTSD, since soliders are coming home all screwed up from the war, but from an experiencers' point of view the pain from a humilating social experience is every bit as real as somebody who saw there buddies get blown up. Not that I have experienced that, but from what I read about war time PTSD, and compare that to a lifetime of humilating social experiences, the pain is the same. Now the difference between someone like me and the soldier is that the soldier experienced life threatening danger, while I merely interperted my experiences as being horrific.

It all starts and ends with the mind. I have a choice to how I react to a given situation. In the past I would have recoiled or lashed out in certain situations, but now I choose to react calmly. I have also learned to reinterpret certain situations. A situation where you think everybody is thinking oddly of you, may not be what they are thinking. That fear is coming from your mind. But the true power lies within the attitude that even if people are thinking oddly of you it does not matter. You can't control what people think of you, but you can control how you think and react.

Fight or Flight

Today I called the guy that manufactures the Emergency Alert Message machine we have in our studio to troubleshoot why we were not receiving any messages. He was not the standard "friendly" support person you talk to, as he is a one man operation and obviously has no supervisors to "correct" him when he becomes inpatient. Now, I am sure he probably is a nice guy, in fact, I would bet on it. But one thing he doesn't have is patience. And he was getting really inpatient with me as we tried to troubleshoot what was wrong. He started yelling a little and making it out like I was stupid for not understanding. It was really pissing me off. I almost told him off and hung up on him. But I didn't, because he hung up on me. He told me to do a couple of things and said he needed to get back to work, so before we formally ended the call he hung up. Click. Nothing out of the ordinary, he was not evil or anything. The dude is what he is.

But what frustrates me is my reaction. I don't know where or how it started in my childhood, but if anybody is anything less than very civil or polite to me I imediately click back into "Fight or Flight" mode. My body tenses up and I am ready for a Fight (Tell the person off) or to Flight (like hangup). I am ready for battle. Now the Fight or flight response is an evolutionary trait that benefited us well when we were really in constant danger, like hunting prey or running from predators. The problem is: Why is this activated from a situation as trivial as an inpatient tech support guy? I mean it really pisses me off. I had to muster up every once of self-control I had to avoid telling this guy off or hanging up. And believe me, it was a great acting job on my part, and I sounded cool and collected while on the phone. But if he was talking to me in person, he would have seen that my face was beat red, and that I was shaking and sweating.

I wish I didn't have this automatic reaction and I don't know what to do to keep it from happening.

You can't control how people treat you, but you can control how you act. I would rather not demand everyone walk around on egg shells in my presence. I would rather people be themselves and I don't react them.

That "Fight or Flight" reaction stems from something in my childhood obviously, and it's programmed into my subconscious mind.

So how can I defeat this?

Friday

Trying to keep my enthusisasm for life up right now. It's harder when I can't sleep at night. It sucks my motivation dry and I just want to sleep all afternoon. Currently reading a Law of Attraction book by Denise Coates. Now, I just need to get some sleep so I can work on the "principles" described in the book. I believe in the law of attraction because I have practical experience. The problem was...as a teen and in my early 20's I was miserable a lot of the time. Why was I miserable? I was miserable because of negative thought patterns I forged when I was real young. Misery begats Misery. I'm changing that. Now, if I could just get some sleep...

Format blowup

Allright I tried it a month, but no one was coming to my serious news/talk show Beatrice News Network. I know I didn't promote it, but the people that logged on did not stay logged on. When I spend all afternoon working on a daily show and nobody logs on when I post it, only to be old news by the time somebody get's around to listening is not worth it. So, it's another format change for my internet station. This time I am going to try to stream a variety of talk programs, not all of which will be my own. I guess this time I want to draw in some listeners, and then once they are there, introduce some of my own programming.

On the other hand I would like to stop my old school hip/hop station. The problem is I keep getting new presets, it is somewhat popular. It's coming up where I am going to have to pay to keep it another year. I barely have enough money. It's looks like I am going to keep it...since people keep presetting me.

Lazy day thoughts

Well it's a lazy day for me. I have done nothing but watch my Supernatural TV on DVD episodes. I can hardly wait for the fall when the show starts up again...well yet then again I can wait. In fact I can wait for a very long time. This fall is when school starts up at SCC and when things get "interesting" again. In fact school starts up again July 15th for the summer quarter. You know what? Even though I am working only 4 hours and barely have enough money for rent and feeding myself, I like it. This will be the last week that I will be all alone at Jackson Hall doing my thing, before my supervisor comes back and we get back to "business".

For once, I don't want to fast forward through the rest of the summer to get to football and new TV show season. I wish this week would last forever. It's just me and my thoughts. I am by myself at my house (roommate is in North Dakota camping) and at work. I like be alone. And I like being in control of what is going on. And being alone is the only time that I feel in control

It's not that I FEAR the future, but I have a certain amount of unease and "what if" thinking going on. I do think I am afraid of stress and anxiety, which always brings pain. There is not one thing I fear going wrong, it's just I fear many things will go wrong. I do fear that I will not be able to handle some things that may be coming up.

You cannot always control what happens to you, but you can control how you react. My fear is: will I be able to control how I respond?

First Post

This Blog will be associated with my Beatrice News Network internet radio show, but I will blog more that just the news and commentary, this will be about my life as well. Obviously there is "stuff" that will forever remain private, but I was inspired by a podcast on morningcoach.com to start a blog so I have a "legacy" that follows me after death. As a general rule I am a very closed and private person, but then I started to think, "What is so noble about a man who's tombstone reads Here lies Strider, not a damn thing was known about him".? At the very end of life I want those who came after who knew me to know about me, what makes me tick, why I think the way I do, and all that and a bag of chips. In a sense I feel a bit narssisstic about blogging all about me, but on the other hand, I experience the world through my perspective, my view point, my lens, whatever you want to call it. And since I am no different from any of you, we are all narssistic to a point.

I expect certain thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes to evolve as I blog. There is a certain core set of values that will never change, because I am very proud of them and they are a part of what makes me a good human being. But I am always in search of ways to improve my life and make it better, as I spent a good chunk of my life in a proverbial dump, and I am trying to climb my way out of it.

Expect a stream of thought a lot of time, because sometimes it's hard to condense my thoughts down to the fine art expected of a composition II college student. Some days I will blog on what is going on in my life, how I am feeling, other times about news and issues and politics, sometimes the paranormal (which is my big interest) and a little Husker football here and there. I am not a one track cat, as I quickly bore about talking about one thing all the time, which I why I elected to go with a general blog versus something specialized. All right here are the stats:

Politics: Conservative

Religion: Agnostic I guess

Hobbies: Radio, Working out, Talk radio, Reading (mainly non-fiction)

Topics of interest: Philosophy, Pyschology, History, Current events, Politics, Religion, Spirtuality, The paranormal, Social issues, Self-improvement.

Okay there is a start. Stayed tuned.