Anxiety

[johnpalmer]

I'm having some anxiety/over-energized feelings and I'm talking about how I feel and how I'm trying to deal. I'm putting it behind a cut-tag because I'm not sure if this might be troubling for some folks.


This is not a plea for sympathy, and please, do not offer any - it will make me feel bad in this moment. It's just me trying to get something down, and share something with the world.


So, for the past week, on a moment's notice, I can get that jumpy-feeling in my abdomen - not my guts, mind you, but that tense, anxious feeling. My heart can go into fast mode.

I can feel what it feels like to be "toxic", to feel that your presence poisons other people. I can feel what it feels like to feel hated. I can feel what it feels like to want to beg for crumbs of companionship, and realize that desperate people begging for companionship are energy sinks (at best) and vampires (at worst), and you either have too much pride and just suffer, or decide your pain trumps your pride and you go begging. And, probably, end up hurting both yourself and others.

I can feel all of those feelings, and others, and they're all competing with my normal thoughts in my brain.

I can feel incipient anxiety and I don't like it. I can feel incipient hypomania and I'm trying to avoid it. I feel buzzy and frazzled and a large part of me wants to drink enough alcohol to get to an even keel, but I come from a family with alcoholism in its history, and I know better than to tempt that particular fate.

So, how am I handling it?

Well, I'm taking stock of my symptoms and reminding myself I know them all. That buzzy feeling? Yeah, I've had that before, I don't like it. And that feeling of energy/adrenaline in my gut? Yeah, I know that pretty well by now. That headachey feeling? Yep, that happens sometimes. That jumpiness? Yeah, I get that.

And I keep reminding myself that it's not real, it's just a set of physical sensations.

Does that sound dry and analytical? "I take stock of myself and remind myself that it's all just a set of physical sensations." If you say that in the right voice, and the right tone of voice, and you know how this feels, you'll probably burst out laughing at the thought, the very idea of someone saying that.

But that's what I'm doing.

I'm helped by thinking of an LJ acquaintance - I'm shy about giving the name because I can't even remember if it was a public post - who said that she didn't expect even her best days to be pain free.

It would, in some ways, be easier if this was a physical pain. Everyone knows that if you hurt, things suck. But we all have our pains, and only some of them are the kinds that trigger the responses that make us go "ouch". And if I was in intractable pain, I would have to live with it, somehow or another. I wouldn't like it, but I'd still have to deal. Because what else could I do? Not live? Not a really good option.

But I think it's the same sort of process. "Ah, *that* pain. Yes, I know that one. It's normal - well, it's known. It's something that pops up and I can't just make it go away. Okay, I'll have to learn to deal."

Because this is the funny thing about these pains. If I start to be afraid of them, if I start to get anxious over them, or hate them, or if I start to judge my day by whether or not I still feel them, then I'll give them more emotional energy. I'll keep making them worse.

This is *not* a blame thing! Okay, I'm not saying that if they get worse, it'll be my fault. But I do know that if I let myself go down the path of fear/worrying/hating/judging, I know that will generally cause them to get worse. So I have to find a way to deal with having the pains, and not letting them drive me down that path. And I need to learn to live a healthy life while still feeling these pains.

And I'm trying to deal.

I mentioned to a friend that if there was one thing I really wanted right now, it was a peek ahead a bit further in my life, so I knew if I was getting through a storm or whether this was normal, and if I'd learn to deal with it or what.

I still don't know, but I also know that if I'm not able to be patient, I won't ever learn if I can get through this and find a happy balancing point.

Comments

[fourgates.livejournal.com]

Just another data point: Your analysis reminds me of my own analysis, from years ago, of causes of my chronic mild-to-moderate depression. After some years of this I decided to try acupuncture (actually, I tried it after convincing others to try it for other purposes). I found acupuncture to be amazingly effective, though the reset wouldn't last for long. Over time seeing the contrast between "tuned" and "not tuned" helped me to better figure out what causes me to get untuned.

Now changing the patterns is a different story. :) But I digress.

Back to the main point: I had lots of reasons to attribute the depression to psychology, and ran circles trying to fix those things I thought were root causes, to no avail. When I tried a different track it was better than I ever imagined possible. I found it quite a relief to be able to self-check and say "ah, it's a chi thing."

By the way, the effect of acupuncture is profound enough that I later started studying full-time at the Northwest Institute of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine. Then they went bankrupt and I decided that while I appreciate it a lot and find it fascinating, I'm a better accessibility technology geek. I can decide to go back to that later when I can't keep up with techies any more.

So I would strongly suggest giving acupuncture a go. It might be a chi thing. Either way, checking it out might be enlightening.