It should have been easy for Jim to sleep on this night in particular. All provisions had been made to ensure a good catch-up sleep. His land line was unplugged, and his cell phone was off. The blinds were closed and the fan on to keep the room at the temperature he prefers when he sleeps. He was dead tired from the lack of sleep he has been enduring for the last two weeks and his sheets on his bed were fresh and crisp and waiting for him.

It’s not that he didn’t try to sleep. Jim just had a hard time quieting his mind. It tended to run from one thing to the next in a maelstrom of thoughts. Most of which concerned things that he’d forgotten to do or things he needed to do to prepare for tomorrow.

“I left the fan on over the stove”, “I forgot to finish up those last two dishes I used before bed”, “I need to make the revisions to my year end report before tomorrow”.

It became a plague to him; never being able to quiet his mind from these concerns.

This, however, wasn’t the first night this took place. In fact, this had become a pattern in his adult life to worry about things that would otherwise be considered slight. A pattern he considered both a strength at times, and a weakness at others.

Jim was called a perfectionist by some of his friends and obsessive- compulsive by others. They were all right though: Jim was hovering on that very thin brink between the two.

One of his friends very adept in the field of astrology contributed this trait to the fact that his a Virgo. Jim had never been aware but apparently he fit the profile of a Virgo perfectly. Jim only found a minor sense of relief in this though and started to wonder if all Virgo’s suffered from lack of sleep over the same things he was.

Eventually he learned to just listen to his mind and do whatever it was that he was being haunted by at the moment. This helped in the short term and would quiet his mind for a couple minutes but before he knew it there would be a new concern sitting up there and terrorizing him.

One night Jim woke up and spent the whole evening scrubbing baseboards. There was a particular section which had been stained with some black gunk where he scrubbed away almost the whole night until it was as white as the rest of the board.

Taking great pride in the present-ability of his home Jim made sure it was all in top notch condition and comfortable for any guests he might have. Though it wasn’t often he ever had guests anyways. In fact it was becoming clear to Jim that his obsession wasn’t only affecting his sleep but his own social life as well.

He would hound group members (who were more-often-than-not his own friends) for not submitting high quality work in a timely manner. He would be moody with people during the day because of his lack of sleep. And he would wind up being late for important appointments sometimes from over-sleeping.

Jim could see the balance he required; how through perfecting one thing something else might suffer, and how it could be made but he suffered from the inability and lack-of-will to change habits. Jim was embarking on a hard path but at least he could see what the first step to a normal life was: the ability to adjust habits.