What Keeps you Awake at Night?

I've been intending to respond, but I think I feel a little embarrassed of my reasons in comparison to yours, nochipa. I agree with anagrams that you seem to have a deep spiritual motivation, which I believe can enhance one's well-being. I can imagine you have a lot to offer to other people, too.

I have sleeping problems and suffer from occasional insomnia. I don't necessarily wake up in the night unless in a very stressed mode, but I have trouble falling asleep. Big time. My kids are the same, and they stopped taking naps already at age two, because they simply couldn't fall asleep (we tried everything, believe me). Even as a child I had to read a book until I dropped into sleep. I need someone else's thoughts to relax, because my own ones keep me awake. I don't always think bad things, but I have a tendency to "plane" my thoughts either having to do with some past experience or anticipating future ones. Especially troubling are situations where I have felt or could feel embarrassment. They stick to me, and give me adrenalin showers, which is a sure way to stay awake. I also worry a lot of different kinds of subjects, which usually have to do with my kids. It's perfectly normal of course, but it goes into extremes in my head. Even when I rationalize my dispositions on certain issues, the moment just before falling asleep lowers the barriers of rationality and the primitive feeling part comes forth. So it's common for me to suddenly jump up from bed with the adrenaline burst, when I'm just on the verge of sleeping. It is almost impossible for me to fall asleep in anywhere else than my home. Too much irritants.

It may be a little misleading to say that I'm not spiritual as such. I deal with spiritual issues for work, but it's more theoretical. In general, I prefer to analyze and systematize my emotions and life philosophy over other kind of processing. That calms me more than any other activity, and I even regard that as a sort of spirituality, because I deal with questions of meaning and other existential issues. I have always feared death, and that sure kept me awake even as a child. Now that I think of it as a day job, it kind of gives room to other more mundane thoughts, although I do delve into work related issues also. I thought previously that one needs to have spiritual feelings and community in order to be holistically happy, but I don't think so anymore. One reason is that I believe there are personality based differences in people's tendencies to experience what we describe as spiritual emotions (e.g. feeling of holistic connection to everything, sacredness of certain entities, trust in goodness of the world etc.). It is degrading to say that one has to have specific kind of emotional experiences to be able to have a happy, moral and fulfilling life. For some people those may be needed, but for others not. I believe cognitive functions can partly explain individual differences also with regard to spiritual tendencies, and there surely are cultural differences on how we value them. It is sad, if one happens to be a person whose innate tendencies don't fit into the general culture. For instance, I would have trouble living in charismatic religious circles, because I abhor any sort of "group ecstasy", whereas for a person who longs for shared emotions and group support might find highly individualized and private spirituality as empty and lacking. In a healthy society people have choice and equal appreciation for their specific spiritual dispositions (as long as it doesn't harm others).

Oops, I derailed a little. Anyway, I would like to be able to calm myself down more, especially in the evening. I know meditation might work for me, but I've been too lazy to try yet. Sometimes I read a dictionary or something extremely boring before going to sleep to benumb my brain. It may work or not, depending on whether there is something lurking behind the rational barriers.