I've been going to bed ridiculously early lately.
By 10 p.m. at the latest, I'm in bed.
I exercise during the day, eat well, and feel healthier than ever.
I wake up early too, so by bedtime I'm genuinely sleepy.
Not quite dozing off on the spot, but close — close my eyes in bed for a bit and sleep seems right around the corner.
I write down what I'll do each day, and I'm making progress I'm happy with.
It's the picture of a healthy life.
And yet, sometimes when I close my eyes before sleep, old unpleasant memories or embarrassing ones come back, and I can't sleep well.
I'm healthy enough, but I get this feeling that I still can't quite settle into peace of mind.
I train so my thoughts don't scatter — something like meditation — but it's still hard.
When that happens, I try not to hold onto active worries.
For example, I make sure not to drift into bottomless questions like "What is the meaning of life?" — but all kinds of thoughts still float up passively.
(※ For what it's worth, vague questions like "What is life..." somehow feel as if you could answer them by intuition — but I suspect the question itself is broken, so I try never to go there, no matter the situation.)
No matter how healthy your body is, this kind of state seems unavoidable. Probably everyone deals with something like it.
I'm not even sure whether this counts as a worry — and if it does, it's a luxurious one.
I asked a generative AI about everything up to this point.
Conversations like this get especially interesting answers from Grok on X. In a good way, they're not systematic.
For example, something like this:
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No matter how healthy your body is, the brain just pulls up old data on its own, right? Especially before sleep — when your head relaxes and slips into "stray thought mode" — those memories tend to pop up even more. When you say thoughts float up "passively," that's exactly it: when the brain's default mode network (DMN) is active, emotional memories from the past replay themselves more easily. Scientifically too, that pre-sleep relaxed state is when the DMN goes, "Alright, let's dig through some old files!"
Here's a slightly fun take: when old unpleasant or embarrassing memories surface, it might actually be a sign that your brain is trying to "sort the past." Before sleep, the brain files that day's events and older memories — so maybe those bad ones showing up is the brain asking, "Can we let this one go already?" Seen that way, it starts to look like a kind of charming quirk of the brain (laugh). Like, "You're still holding onto that memory? Nostalgic!"
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That's a fun answer. If a friend replied like that, I'd be genuinely impressed.
The idea that blank space itself activates the DMN and starts all kinds of stray thoughts is nice — it lets you see those old emotions more positively. If you were too busy, you wouldn't even get to think about them.
And the "trying to sort the past" framing lands well too. I get anxious wondering if I'll be trapped in this kind of thinking forever — whether only some intense new experience could cover it over — so that perspective eases me a little.
That's all for today.
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