Sleeps cleans the brain of toxins, the BBC reports, from a study by a team of neuroscientists at the University of Rochester published in Science.

So that's why I feel so lousy and end up napping away my first day off.  I've not been sleeping so well, four long night shifts, fighting daylight creeping in, a bit too much red wine, probably eating too heavy, too late.  No wonder the mood feels like a poisoned one, hard to be optimistic.

And it feels like it is all the thoughts that didn't get written down that cause an ache this first day off and leave me unable to write a thing.

I write in order to remember the mind's usefulness and good health.  My big fear is of not being able to exercise the need, the inherent right, the duty, having the sense of writing being the main work I must do.   Perhaps the same fear drove Shakespeare, the fear of bad brain health, a lingering sadness of how much one may have missed in foolish duties, idleness, laziness of expression, distractions.

Some of us write principally out of health, brain health, moral health, as a way of combatting the stresses jobs bring you and cost you, the night shifts, the poor sleep, the lack of energies on days off.

Writers are shy, often enough, in person.  There are things to say, and time gets rushed in the pace of life and people coming and going.   There are healthy things to say, to write, and one doesn't always have time, or to another, more used to the mainstream habits of speed would take their slowness as strange.