{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "bskyPostRef": {
    "cid": "bafyreidkbcrhk4lzqgbrwljp5s3kohtyworl7ph4e6fnh6lntxzngehwdq",
    "uri": "at://did:plc:a2liw7vr2avabmr5qionzzxu/app.bsky.feed.post/3meifcmssoha2"
  },
  "coverImage": {
    "$type": "blob",
    "ref": {
      "$link": "bafkreibzyqe62slujlf2pbl7s4ql26mz7q4otqcjzj4mcurftwbq7yv2li"
    },
    "mimeType": "image/jpeg",
    "size": 85661
  },
  "description": "So much to be learned from being ill! 🤢",
  "path": "/observing-symptoms/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-10T07:00:50.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.gilespcroft.com",
  "tags": [
    "there are only ever two things keeping you awake",
    "reason your way out of a low mood",
    "always",
    "never",
    "The two things keeping you awakeThe solution to sleep problems is about as counter-intuitive as it gets. 🛌💤The Daily RemindersGiles P Croft"
  ],
  "textContent": "Having just had some enforced time out through illness, and given that you’re human and you’ll be doing the same at some point too, it would be remiss of me not to share my observations. Here are three for you:\n\n### 1. Doing nothing _seems_ hard\n\nI’m not telling you anything you don’t already know here, but my _word_ are we programmed to be _doing!!_ Take ‘doing stuff’ away from a fully conditioned human, and the wheels feel like they’re coming off, pretty damn quickly.\n\nEven when I was sick as a dog, incapable of putting my mind to anything vaguely work-related, I noticed the mind still looking for something to do. _Anything_ but nothing! Watch TV. Listen to music or an audiobook or a podcast.\n\n(At about this time, my wife’ll be dropping in to suggest I take up knitting: The Panacea 😉)\n\n> 📦🗣️: “ _Don’t make me just BE ill!!”_ it says.\n\nAnd I’ve written that it _‘seems’_ hard, because it can’t be, really, can it? How can resting—not doing anything—be difficult?\n\nIt’s the opposite of hard, surely?\n\n🤔\n\nWe’re funny creatures, us humans; the things we’ve learned to accept as ‘normal’.\n\n### 2. Being, with symptoms\n\nLook, I get it. Distraction is pretty effective—no bad thing!—especially when the alternative is… fully experiencing symptoms.\n\n🤢\n\nIt’s just that there are limitations to using distraction as a technique in general. Because, as with all coping mechanisms, there’ll come a time when you _can’t_ rely on it (or it becomes unhealthy/an addiction).\n\nAnd then you’ll have a baptism in the fire of ‘just being’.\n\n🫣😆\n\nI discovered this, lying there in my pit of illness. I’d actually had enough of distraction, I couldn’t handle any more. I needed to rest; I needed sleep.\n\n📦🗣️: _“If you get some rest, you might feel well enough to write a quick Daily Reminder, afterwards,”_ it says. 🙄\n\nI mean, FFS. How about we just rest, eh? That’s clearly what’s required here.\n\nI lay there, but I couldn’t sleep because I felt too nauseous.\n\n😑\n\nThen I got a bit curious about that word – ‘because’.\n\nIs that _really_ why I couldn’t sleep? Haven’t I said before that there are only ever two things keeping you awake? Which was this?\n\n🧐\n\nOn the helpful-harmful scale, this one looked ‘harmful’. Nausea looked ‘bad’. Something to be avoided. Something to get rid of, before I could indulge in that most natural of processes: sleeping, when you’re knackered.\n\nBut nausea was just happening. It was out of my control. If I was going to be sick I was going to be sick – freaking out about nausea, or focusing on it as a _reason_ for not sleeping wasn’t going to change that.\n\nIt was a life sensation, like any other.\n\nSo I zoomed out a bit. Took the view of the non-judgemental _observer_ of the nausea. And then out a bit more, taking the view of the _observing_ of the observer. (Feeling like you’re at death’s door is the _perfect_ opportunity to try this stuff! 😆)\n\nI can report I didn’t have any major revelations about the nature of existence or anything, but I did fall asleep pretty much straight away, lol.\n\n* * *\n\nI woke up 45 minutes later feeling less ill, picked up my phone and immediately developed a pre-migraine aura, with dancing lights stapled to the fronts of my eyes. Ten minutes later I’d lost the entire left-hand ⅓ of my visual field and _that’s_ when I decided I needed to listen to life and hit Pause 🖲️ on the Daily Reminders.\n\n🤷🏻‍♂️\n\n### 3. Energy & enthusiasm come back\n\nIn a way, unpleasant though it may be, I do hope you’re as sick as a dog when you’re reading this, because it’s _that_ version of you—the sick one—that needs to hear this.\n\nFor if you read the statement _‘Energy & enthusiasm come back’ _from a place of wellness, it’s so frickin’ obvious, it’s almost insulting.\n\nBut in the same way that you can’t reason your way out of a low mood, when you’re feeling low energy, or listless, it’s impossible to reason your way to the opposite.\n\nBecause of this:\n\n🔑\n\n****Key Message**** : We live in the feeling of a ****Thought**** -created reality\n\nIt’s all we know, right there and then. Nothing else is real. The mind slams us into the always and never corner and nothing else seems even possible.\n\nBut of course it’s a nonsense.\n\nWhy?\n\nBecause who we are is energy! Enthusiasm, or _En- theos_ , is Greek for ‘the God within’ – the same power within that is producing whatever symptoms you’re feeling, and allowing you to be conscious of them in the first place!!\n\nThat’s not going _anywhere_ , so you can bet your bottom dollar that the experience of energy and enthusiasm will return.\n\nRemember this. Bookmark this page. Do what makes sense.\n\nHere I am, with a smile on my face, writing again, when all was lost.\n\n😁\n\nGiles\n\nSIGN UP FOR THE DAILY REMINDERS newsletter\n\nWant to start __your__ days with helpful, insightful content like this? The Daily Reminder is a quick, lighthearted email that arrives in your inbox, to help keep you grounded in reality, so that you get to __‘Think less, and live more.’__\n\n __“They feel like a moment of stillness in a world of madness.” ~__ Neil, UK\n\n __“One of those small things with big impact. Honestly, just sign up!”__ ~ Paula, UK\n\nGET YOURS NOW\n\n### Related\n\nThe two things keeping you awakeThe solution to sleep problems is about as counter-intuitive as it gets. 🛌💤The Daily RemindersGiles P Croft\n\nGet this one in your head, for the next time you can’t sleep.",
  "title": "Observing symptoms",
  "updatedAt": "2026-05-29T11:59:16.825Z"
}