Around the end of 2018 something strange started happening whenever I’d send voice notes on WhatsApp.
If the note was longer than a few words, I would yawn in the middle of it. In longer voice notes, the yawns were more frequent.
At first, I noticed the yawns in the voice notes because it’s really the only time I’m consciously paying attention to the act of talking.
But as soon as I picked up on the yawn, I noticed it was everywhere. Not just during voice notes, but also during longer conversations throughout the day.
Being a father of two, including a 1.5-year-old back then, I attributed the yawns to the lack of sleep that comes with the privileges of parenthood.
Two things caught my attention though:
First, no matter how much I slept, I still yawned. Even after Leil started sleeping through the night and all.
Second, I wasn’t yawning at night, when I should be my sleepiest. Only in the daytime.
After a year of this, I finally decided to read a little bit about the causes of excessive yawning when I found out that it’s a side effect of SSRIs. I’d been on those since June 2018.
What a peculiar side effect. It’s like life is a little more boring without anxiety, and we’re going to make you yawn to prove it.
Apologies to anyone whose face (or into whose ears) I’ve yawned mid sentence. It’s not you, it’s me (minus anxiety).