Wired at Midnight
3 June 2025
A short account of sleep, meds, and mental gymnastics
The Midnight Typist
I'm up at 12am typing this. It would be okay if it was 2–5am, because then I would have had a good night's sleep — I go to bed early. The issue I'm having in the last seven days is that I am going to bed wired. This happens every now and again when I overclock my CPU doing mental work, in which case I take a Zyprexa — an antipsychotic drug used by people with all types of mental illness, but also doctors who've just come off a twenty-hour day and have to shut down before they work again — at least that's what I'm told.
My History with Zyprexa
I was on Zyprexa for ten years, so I'm not a stranger to it, but I moved on twelve years back — luckily. It's a wonder drug, but it's like taking a weight-gain pill. It makes you hungry all the time. That's how I went from underweight to overweight — that's what I tell myself — but really, that's how it started. Then it was more lifestyle: spending too much time in front of a PC and too little time moving my carcass.
Back to the Present
Anyway, back to the story. For the past six or seven days — minus tonight where I'm up already — I’d had to take Zyprexa to get to sleep. I just couldn’t shut my brain off. I sort of know what caused it, and it’s not coffee, which is the usual suspect.
No, I had stopped taking all my other medication until yesterday because I hadn’t had it boxed up and was just taking my Invega 9mg, instead of my full deck of around six pills (minus the supplements). I normally do this at the end of the month where there is a bit of a lag with me reboxing my 28-day pill box. Just out of laziness.
I’ve never had this effect though, but I also never leave it this long.
The Turning Point Pill
The Invega I have been taking is the antipsychotic I started taking twelve years ago when I got off Zyprexa. There was an inflection point in my life — it’s when I finally started getting my shit together and also when I met my wife. That’s causation, not correlation.
What Now?
But the weird thing about this whole episode is that my mental health and mood are fantastic — to the point where I really don't think I need to take an antidepressant any longer. So, I'm going to take all my usual medication, minus the Zoloft 100mg (antidepressant).
If that is the reason I can't sleep, I'll have to see a psych and work it out — but I try and steer clear of psychs. They're a bunch of nutjobs, lol.
So I'll kick the Zoloft and see if things get back to normal with sleep. And I have plenty of Zyprexa if I need it.
I'm going to be 5kg heavier after all this hullabaloo.
Lost your shoe?
Nah mate, I found one.