Ruled by Chemicals

Hiya, everyone! It's 11:30. I'm tired, and I managed to studiously avoid studying for a good portion of the night, and now I'm tired! Yes, it was hard work, and I couldn't have done it without my TV and the internet, but it is done now.

At the moment I'm feeling antsy. I have that window-shopper feeling. I have that sense that everything would be better, if only X would happen. The crazy thing is, I'm not particularly focused on anything at the moment, so I don't have anything for X to be.

The funny thing about the human mind is how ridiculously chemically it is driven. We are constantly having these automatic responses to our environment, the sugars and other chemicals dancing around in our bodies, and just about everything else in the world. Yet we have this need to rationalize these emotions, rather than accept the fact that we are mostly just chemical machines whose primary form of programming comes from observation.

For example, earlier today I was feeling sad. At first, I thought it was because no one had showed up for my walk (long, uninteresting story), but the more I thought about it, the more I was certain that my response to being let down was WAY overblown.

Even if I were unhappy that no one showed up, I shouldn't have been taking it as hard as I was. That's when it struck me: I was tired. I hadn't been eating much fruit and was probably suffering from some sort of vitamin deficiency. The world was, in fact, probably not against me.

Did I have a right to be angry? Who cares! I likely would have been upset about anything. I would have been upset if one person had shown up, and I probably would have been upset if 20 people had shown up. I was chemically prepared to be angry. It didn't matter which stimulus brought it on.

But the crazy thing about it all was how quickly I associated my emotional state with the situation, rather than with what was going on inside my own head.

I think that's a common issue we all face. Right now I'm bizarrely focused on a 1L girl who is really cute. It took another individual to point out that this attention only really started to develop with the onset of finals fear and an increase in Facebook time.

(Facebook, Sara, is a social networking website that may be used to report gossip, display pictures, establish groups, and bring together events.)

My thing for this girl was directly connected with my brain going into "do anything but studying and homework" mode. If I had to guess, I'd say that even these things were probably related to Daylight Savings Time and my yearly case of Seasonal Affective Disorder (aka winter depression), which I just self-diagnosed.

I don't have a point in this rant. Not really. I guess, if I had to come up with a point, I would say that it's odd we all wish we were driven by logic, when it's clear that practically none of us is.

Oh. And someone should buy me the Uplift Technologies DL930 Day-Light or some other 10,000 lux light therapy lamp for seasonal affective disorder.