Special Topic Research

Last Wednesday I didn't have to come to school until 10:35 and I was really excited to get to sleep in and not have to do all my assignments that night.  I didn't stay up super late that night but as always my mind got caught up in a certain topic just before I was about to fall asleep.  When my mind gets really set on a topic right before bed, not only does it make me stay up much later, but it always leads to a dream.  The dream is always extremely vivid, I feel like I am actually there. The sights and sounds, smells and touches, all feel so real.  When I wake up it always takes a few minutes to realize that what just happened was just a dream.  When I dream I am pretty much dead.. I won't wake up for anything.  I had set my alarm for 9 A.M. and I when I woke up I was confused as to why it was so bright outside.  I looked at my clock to see that it was in fact not 9 A.M... No, no, it was 11:45.   I had slept through about 3 alarms, and had a missed call from my mom.  I kept staring at my alarm waiting for the numbers to tell me they were just kidding and go back to 9:00... But they didn't.  I made a familiar facial expression at my clock and let out a long sigh.  I wasn't even really that mad.. I was impressed.  Anyway, once again, getting lost in my mind had a serious detraction on my day before it even really started.

The research that I found led to some pretty good insights on why I dwell on the larger topics.  The article pointed to a kind of anxiety over serious topics, the inability to be clutch when it counts.  The article pointed towards sports as an example, highlighting many athletes who had failed to perform in intense moments.  Thankfully I have been able to avoid this issue in sports because I'm having fun during games and the stress doesn't get to me.  However, as far as academically and socially, I would say this is true.  Many times that I get caught up in one of these topics, it's due to some sort of anxiety or stress.  This is a problem many people encounter, and the article suggests doing other things to take your mind off it will help.  If you distract yourself it will ease the stress and help clear your mind for whatever the activity is.

What I could not find an answer to is why I get so wrapped up in little things.  Tons of small questions and intricacies cross my mind daily that I ponder for hours.  Every day I wonder about things as trivial as why the sky is blue, how cameras are made, where certain NFL players went to college, and so on. I miss about 75% of my AP Gov assignments because I sit right next to a world map and I pretty much just stare at it and thing about all sorts of topics.  Maybe I am just a very curious person, and maybe that's not a bad thing.  I just wish I could let go of these questions sometimes.  I guess the saying that "ignorance is bliss" carries a lot of truth.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200809/mind-your-body-lost-in-thought

Special Topic

My dad often calls me a "Space Cadet".  This of course refers to the long periods of time I spend staring into space while my mind is somewhere different than the rest of my body.  At school, lots of people ask me if I am sad, or upset. They see that I am staring off into the distance with a melancholy look on my face and they think something is wrong.  While this is understandable, it is not true.  I am simply lost in my mind.  I daydream all the time, probably once per class at school. I don't zone out because I don't care about the class, my mind simply wraps itself around a new topic and I forget about everything else.  This is something I have done for years and I have always wondered why I do it.  I chose this as my special topic because I want to find an understanding for why I get so lost in thought and how to avoid it at times when I need to be focused.

I believe that when I zone out it is to a degree that is worse than most people.  For example, one night I was playing Xbox and started thinking about something.  All of a sudden, I was just sitting in the dark.  I felt like I had actually been asleep.  While I was daydreaming I had actually turned off my Xbox and T.V. and then sat there for a while without even realizing what I was doing.  It was the weirdest thing ever and was hard to explain to the people I had just been playing Xbox with.  The worst time that being trapped in my mind affects me is at night.  I'll be almost asleep and then something will enter my mind.  Then it's a good 2 or 3 hours of sitting up or pacing around the room contemplating this thought until I am able to sleep.  Needless to say this really sucks when I have to wake up early for school the next day.. thank God for late start days.

I do not know much about why I seem to get stuck in my thoughts so severely, other than it seems to be worse than the average person.  Another interesting idea is that, even though he criticizes me for it, my dad does the same thing.  My dad has been known to fall into these long periods of intense thought in the shower.  Many times my mom has to tell him to get out when he loses track of time and takes very long showers.  I don't think that I inherited this from him, but it's an interesting thought.  It doesn't seem like something that could be inherited.

I do my best to stay busy so that this problem doesn't affect me as much.  Sometimes it comes about in a really bad time such as when I am taking a test or trying to focus in class. Now that I am actually focussing on it, hopefully I can find patterns and reasons to explain why my mind does what it does.