Are these signs of mental problems?

You need to talk to someone .... A professional I went through a lot of the same things you are

Turns out I just had social anxiety I'm not sayn that's what you have but... I would sleep all day to avoid dealing with the people around me that turned into a very lonely life resulting into the same things you are going through talking to myself and things , loathing being around people and that took me to a point where I felt so awkward about myself I didn't even want to leave my room when I would I felt like people stared at me like I was a freak

Sure it may be depression but please try to just talk to someone first try not to get on medication unless you absolutely have to just because I would hate you to have to go through a life of feeling nothing at all them meds can wreck a person sure you done feel depressed on them but sadly you don't feel love joy ANYTHING But if you want to talk to someone just ask me I can get you a number to a great counselor who will do phone consultatio

Depression can cause insomnia.

Most sleeping problems are probably caused by stress, depression, anxiety and worry.

Sleeping pills can give you bad side effects such as headaches and drowsiness during the day so you are better off without them.

To sleep better just relax and switch off, if you can.

If you are having trouble switching off at bedtime some light exercise (for example, push ups or sit ups) at bedtime often helps you to relax, unwind and switch off and that often improves your sleep. Strenuous exercise at bedtime is likely to ruin your sleep.

Common OTC sleep aids include Chamomile tea, 5-HTP, Melatonin and Valerian Root.

Sleep enhancing foods include warm milk, turkey, cherries, oatmeal, bananas, wine and others as in http://au.search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22sleep+enhan...

You can see further tips in http://au.search.yahoo.com/search?p=%22how+to+fall... which tells you "how to fall asleep and stay asleep".

This doesn't sound credible. You would need to be in contact with a doctor. I can't imagine any parents supporting this kind of behavior.

Here is a simple way you can determine if you have mental problems. If something going on in your mind is a source of distress for you, i.e., a problem then you have a mental problem. I think you can figure that out for yourself. What to do about it is another matter entirely.

You may want to seek out psychiatric advice from expert psychiatrists:

Radovan Karadzic, psychiatrist who specialized in exterminating Muslims in former Yugoslavia.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radovan_Karad%C5%BEi%...

Nidal Malik Hasan, psychiatrist who specialized in exterminating non-Muslims in the United States.

(A U.S. Army psychiatrist.)

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nidal_Malik_Hasan

You may want to seek help from the American Psychiatric Association or Big Pharma in general along lines of the disease model of mental health:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosurgery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_the...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_shock_therapy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardive_dyskinesia

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/medicatedc...

Or you may want to learn about how the mind actually works and apply some free will to shaping your own mind into a friend rather than being a lifelong victim of your own mind being blown about like a leaf by winds from various directions.

Dhamma claims that all there is of good and evil arises from mind, and that there are three strong roots of evil: greed, hatred, and delusion. Dhamma also claims that there are two kinds of health, namely, physical health and mental health. Many people enjoy good physical health even into old age. But relatively few people enjoy good mental health unless they are vigilant and relentless in rooting out delusional thinking, alleviating ignorance via insight and rational inquiry.

The above claim is typically presented in terms of two kinds of illness—physical illness and mental illness. But the term health is a corollary to the term illness and without which the term illness takes on a circular definition. Homeostasis (a normal and desirable state) requires proactive care, e.g., one must feed and exercise the body, keep it from physical harm and toxic substances, shelter it from environmental elements, and keep it free of parasitic and infectious agents in order to maintain normal functioning. (The latter concern could not have been well understood by the Buddha for he lacked microbiology.)

Likewise for the mind—it requires proactive care to be free of what the Buddha referred to as the three poisons: greed, hatred, and delusion. These things are all too commonly culturally acquired features of minds and are acted out without question as to their value by individuals mired in family, community, religious, and political culture.

The Buddha had a theory of mind, but he probably did not understand that the brain evolved as a means for organisms to adapt to their environment. Human beings have a relatively large amount of neocortex, and because of that we also have the capacity and propensity to construct schemas that have no real-world counterpart. The real world—and the universe surrounding it—is extremely complex and much of it is beyond what our senses can detect.

A history of human thought shows that although people may believe they have acquired insight into the nature of reality and the nature of sentient experience, often what they report to be reality is a reflection of their conformity to unwarranted opinion or randomly constructed delusional schemas without any objective reality checks.

MINDFULNESS MEDITATION

Your perceptions and desires are products of conditioning and other sentient experience you have acquired up to this point in life. You can change the contents of your mind, and you can shape your mind to be pro-social, rational, and smarter, too.

That task is part of what is called mental development and, in my opinion, requires a long-term commitment to high quality education about the real world including the evolution of our species and how the human mind has evolved along with evolution of our brain.

Some kinds of suffering are self-imposed although we do not always recognize this to be the case. Instead we are on a sort of automatic behavior method of coping with reality. We can change our sentient experience however by a sort of deconstruction into component parts; from that point it is ultimately a matter of adopting new, rational, wholesome paradigms.

Unless you have brain damage, as in dementia, you will never lose certain mental schemas and memories. Your inner life is largely based on those schemas. The perceptions and sentient experience you have can be moderated and shaped purposefully as long as you are still functioning. Such an approach requires vigilance and practice. It can be enhanced with greater knowledge of the real world and acquisition of critical thinking skills.

Consciousness is a function of a cognitive neural network processing both sensory data and memory. Sentient experience can be subjectively deconstructed into four foundations of mindfulness:

1. Mindfulness of body.

2. Mindfulness of sensation as pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral (physical sensation).

3. Mindfulness of state of mind (attitude, emotion).

4. Mindfulness of content of mind (ideas, learned skills, memory, mental images, beliefs).

As you consider this paradigm there will be the usual background of a continuous stream of thoughts, random or specific ideas, and images, feelings that come and go. Any of these can distract you, but you can just ignore them, too. The brain will do this sort of thing as long as you live. There is no need to suppress any of it; your brain normally processes information via random association or cognitive models you have acquired either on purpose or by random experience. These are the things that usually drive your perceptions and behavior, even your dreams.

See comments by Denim at the below:

http://debateunlimited.com/Debate/viewtopic.php?t=...