Hello, dear soul. I would love to know if this is something that you've experienced as a highly sensitive man. The day has been full, perhaps at work, and just the energy of people has drained you, or you've been masking so much that just to hide kind of parts of who you are, or you've been responsible for kids and wife and whatever. And then the the nighttime comes, the rest of the world turns off its lights and goes to bed. And you feel like you can finally breathe. You can exhale, you can become yourself again. You feel like it's time to whatever it is that you love to do, read or ponder, or write, or you know, the creativity kind of comes alive. Because I feel like this is something that I know has been for me as a highly sensitive woman and for my husband as a highly sensitive man. Um, and we're both empaths, just that it's a time where everyone else is asleep. You know, the energy calms down and even the noise outside, everything is quiet. I feel like that's such a special time. But here's the thing, right? It's like a rock in a hard place because we we should be sleeping. We really should be sleeping because, you know, we gotta get up the next day and do it all over again. And we need that, you know, good energy and restedness to deal with the next day. But, you know, it feels like our life, we can only, you know, we get to have these moments of of wholeness or stillness at night. And so recently we've been, my husband and I have been up till three, four in the morning. And it just starts getting like light out. And it's like, you know, um, yeah. Yeah. And this used to be me when I was a young, a young, a young girl, young woman. I would read my fantasy books um till very late at night, as late as I could possibly push it, and be like, I really do need to go to bed now. Because, you know, we just I just wanted to live in a in a fantasy world of like not dealing with the real world. And so, you know, it's the time to escape and be away from the world. And who wants to go to bed when you're living in fantasy land? Anyway, maybe you can relate to that. Um, but in today's journal injury, I wanted to talk more about some of the ways that highly sensitive men can it's like are just exhausted and tired all the time because of being an HSP, being a highly sensitive man. And it's I think I think in some ways it depends where you live. Like, you know, living in the forest, living away from people, it can maybe like I know for us we experienced that, and we could go to bed earlier because we weren't so drained, there wasn't as many people around us, and so we weren't as drained. And so when nighttime did come, it was like, oh, we can, you know, go with the rhythms of of nature, and that was lovely. But in the city, it's just there's so much energy and intensity, and it's just like when nighttime comes. Um, but one thing, so when we're ready to go to bed, and it's like, okay, finally going to bed, um, we can end up ruminating, overthinking. I don't know if that's you, but um, or for my husband, it's he's an INFJ and he's constantly working on his theory of everything, right? And how does all the the information that he took in during the day from his podcast or his books or whatever is is like, you know, how do these puzzle pieces all fit together? Um or perhaps it's replaying conversations that you had with with people during the day and being like, how could I have done that better? Or, you know, I wish I hadn't said that, or you know, um, for me, it's worrying about money and um it's it's it's because during the day I have more energy to steer myself away from thoughts that I know are not helpful, thoughts that I know are just ruminating, and it's not not helpful. But when it comes to being so tired at night, I just don't have the energy to steer that away. So I end up like worrying and worst case scenarios, and it just becomes like, yeah. Or we can end up stressing about the next day, like if we've got something important to happen. This is this is the ironic thing when we have important things to do the next day, and then we start kind of going, how's that gonna go? And it's like when we should really be sleeping to get well rested for that thing. It's like, no, let's just stay up and get tired worrying about it. It's like, okay. And it's like, yeah, the more important it is, the less likely we get sleep. And I think when we when I was a kid, it's like this used to be, I used to be get so excited about things that I couldn't sleep, you know, like first day of school was exciting to me. It could be also, you know, dreading, but I I got I used to get excited about the first day of school. And um, or you know, yeah, when it was really exciting, there's just so much over stimulation in our body and mind that it's hard to sleep for exciting reasons. As an adult, there's not so many exciting things anymore. Sometimes there are. Um I should probably make more exciting things happen in my life so that I'm excited about them and won't sleep because there's exciting things happening as opposed to anyway. Um, Light Bears Library has made things much more exciting. You know, I'm I look forward to getting up in the morning and and, you know, just arriving in my day and then eventually kind of reading all your lovely comments and um yeah, I uh it it makes my life sort of much more full and meaningful. So that's great. Thank you. Um and I'd like to say, like, if the library has become a meaningful place to you and it has, you know, been somewhere where you feel not so alone, I would be really, really grateful if you could consider donating to my to the Lightburner's library and helping this keep this alive and thriving because this is my work. This is what I do all day long, every day of the week, pretty much. And um, so yeah, I just I want to see this this thrive and grow and um for us to just all spiral upward together in some way, just sharing, sharing the experience of being highly sensitive empaths in this world. Whew, whew. So thank you. I appreciate everyone who has already supported by you know donating or joining joining the men's groups, which I'll talk about at the end. But and then there's the the sort of more things that you would think about um that keep us awake, right? So it's um like oftentimes lots of people are sensitive to pain. So if you're you know having going through illness or suffering um some kind of like my husband broke his toe a couple of months ago, it's still it's still healing. Still, we're still just kind of hanging around home. Not that we don't hang around home most of the time anyway, but it would be nice to go for walks. Um but um yeah, so so pain can keep us up. Being too hot or too cold, I know that really it's it's like finding the right temperature, and often it's it's it's finicky, but and then noise, noise throughout the night. My husband is really a really light sleeper, so he finds, and and I'm not, I like once I'm asleep, I'm pretty much I can pretty much sleep through anything. I think that has to do with him like growing up in South Africa, and you know, he had to be kind of a light sleeper back then. Um in he's a Gen Xer, so back in the back in the day. Um but you know, there's airplanes going over the house, and there's a dog upstairs, so it walks around at night, and um people getting up early to go to work. So when you share, when you share living space with other people that aren't on the same schedule as you, and as we talked about at the beginning, like we like to stay up as late as we possibly can. And because because we work for ourselves, that's easy, it's easier to stay up late than when you have a job and you gotta get up early, right? But um, when you live in a space with other people that get up early, um, it's very difficult. And I know it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, well, we should just synchronize our schedule with the people that live upstairs. And it's like we try all the time to do that, and it's just so, so difficult because of what I what I said earlier, just about the energy, and we're just naturally night owls, you know. Um uh if you look into chrono chronotypes, chronotypes and sleep, it's like my husband is a dolphin and they have trouble sort of sleeping anyway. Um whereas I think I think this was a while ago that we looked into this, but I think I'm a bear. It's like I just, I just, I would just I love sleeping. I wish I got more sleep. Anyway. Um then um temperature dreams. Oh no, back to noise, just one more thing. Um, and it's funny because even when we lived in the woods, like I we it was like we yes, we slept earlier, but also like my husband would be woken up by deer walking around, like there was gravel outside the house that we lived, or the the cabin we lived in, and there was like the deer walking around at night and raccoons fighting in the night, and he would be like and then in the early morning, all the the roosters that lived around us would would wake him up. But he was like, I don't mind being woken up by all those things, it's like by animals, it's okay. Um, so maybe that's that's part of what your um your your experiences. Um, and then dreams. I thought this was an interesting uh thing to think about because we might be more sensitive to our dream world and our dream life that, you know, we could be if in the middle of the night we're woken up or in the morning, early morning, we wake up after having a dream, and it could be that we maybe start analyzing the dream or um writing down the dream and try trying to figure out like, is this a precognitive dream? Um, I don't have precognitive dreams, but my husband sometimes does, or I mean maybe you do, but it's like, you know, we're trying to remember it and um and then if it's a disturbing dream, I know for me if that happens in the middle of the night, it's very hard to go back to sleep. Um just just that that feel it just it's it's that feeling of whatever the disturbance is is just in me and I can't really get back to sleep. And you know, it's like in the dark, and sometimes it's like it's a bit creepy. I don't know. Anyway, so um, those are some of the thoughts my husband and I had about yeah, being highly sensitive. So I would love to hear from you about anything that that keeps you up at night for good reasons, for not so good reasons, um, and just kind of share the experience of being highly sensitive and being tired for various reasons. And and I guess just just being exhausted for all the reasons of dealing with dealing with the world and the people. But um, this was kind of more specific around sleeping and bedtime when we should be in sleeping. Um, so if you would like to come and speak about anything to do with your experience of being a highly sensitive man, then I run weekly, I host weekly men's gatherings. Um, and we just come together, a small group of highly sensitive men, and just speak about whatever's on your heart and mind um about anything, relationships and um being tired and sleeping, like just just hearing one another, witnessing, giving language to our our our experience is so healing and nourishing. So I would love to have you join. So all the links for donating and for the men's group will all be in the description or the pinned comment. And um I look forward to hearing from you and all your experiences. It's gonna be it's gonna be great. So um wishing you so many blessings. Signing off for today, XOXO Kate.