There are a lot of things on my plate at the moment. There’s your usual serving of rice, a chicken drumstick, courgette fritters, and a large handful of lettuce dressed with balsamic vinaigrette -- all heaped on smooth china.

But have you ever suffered the tempestuous syndrome of having far too much to think about? For all the takers, you will probably agree that it’s not the most comforting of feelings. At times, it feels like your head will explode, overloaded like a pair of skinny jeans on a pair of bottom-heavy legs; ready to pop when the zipper says “Go!”

In a person’s life, there’s never a time of stagnancy. If your life seems a bit ho-hum, a little uneventful, you’re usually over-looking something; or maybe a bit ‘unconscious’ at this point in your life.

Brain candy, I call it. It’s derived from the word ‘eye-candy’ where you should really be thinking about something else, but you got distracted on the way there. It’s also first cousins to ‘procrastination’. Wondering where that nine will go in your Suduko puzzle, or speculating the synonym for 14-Down always seems like a better alternative to grappling the larger questions of life. Why do we spend so much time and effort on solving the meager little puzzles of our lives?

At first glance, it could also be a self-esteem issue, where we like to kid ourselves that hey, we’re ‘Zeus’ in the ‘Which Greek God are you?” quiz on Facebook so we must be something special in real life. Little successes equates to bigger things, we tell ourselves. The dense questions can take such a large toll on a person, and so why not have a little nourishment for the ego on our way? You’d think that if you ask yourself a question enough times, you’d have an answer — but no. So we like to add a little sprinkle of easy-to-answer issues to reap some self-confidence in there.

As humans, we like to think and wonder, we’re naturally open and curious about the large vastness of our lives. We take the large questions on board, and then we develop the bad habit of taking questions that we don’t really need answers to along with us.  The result: a tumbling throbbing ship that’s sinking every time it moves forward.

So before we start drowning in the lake of sweat and start suffocating in the anxious beating of our lungs, may we reflect on the real questions of our lives, questions that are worth taking along with us in our lives, questions that aren’t synthetically-sweet like brain candy. But for the deep, higher-thinkers of our populace, every time that your head starts to thunder, and that familiar feeling of breathlessness sweeps over your respiratory system once again, make sure you have some sort of trashy magazine handy, and don’t hesitate to get lost in the pages of lives that are not your own. Or just do what my mother does and click yourself over to YouTube and proceed to spend half the evening there, while your blood pressure steadies.

Have a good month.