Undulating Anxiety Waves
By Casey Douglass
It’s been a few days,
and thankfully, my visit to the doctor last week did reassure me
somewhat that things were probably okay. I say somewhat, because
things are never that simple with anxiety.
Despite my best efforts
to relax and be patient, by the time my evening appointment finally
arrived, I’d become very tired. This dented any resilience I had to
my intrusive thoughts of catastrophe, and so I found myself pretty
wound up. Even though some of the tension and fear had gone by going
to see the doctor, my mind was still very much in health anxiety
mode.
When anxiety hits, it
plunges the body into fight or flight mode. Besides the physical
changes this brings, such as adrenaline and a racing heart, it
affects thought too. After the appointment, my thoughts were still
back there, picking things over and trying to find any reason to
worry. This wasn’t a conscious thing, more a fearful peeping under
the bed to check that the bogey man really wasn’t under there. It
was exhausting and upsetting, and my anxiety/OCD being the skilled
agent provocateur that it is, it did manage to find areas of
uncertainty to latch onto. I felt quite bitter about this, as it’s
a sad thing to not be able to find reassurance reassuring, but a
common issue with anxiety disorders.
This mental state has
improved over the days since, but because it put me into a frame of
mind that I’d not been in for some time, it pulled the scabs off a
lot of, what I’d thought were, healed mental scars that relate to
health. My mind has been like a fly buzzing around a meadow of
cow-pats, landing here, then there, then there, rarely settling, but
still finding the same old shit to chew over. This general state has
also bled into other areas and agitated my OCD to start niggling at
things that I was doing well with. Tiring. Fatiguing. Exhausting.
I’ve managed to
mostly hold on to my progress in many areas however, which is
something. This morning alone something that would have plunged me
into despair was dealt with quite nicely. I’m mentally giving
myself a pat on the back for that one, hell, a cheeky slap on the
backside too. Why not. I did good after all.
Letting time pass is
what I need to do, so it’s probably a real bonus that I can’t
really delay time anyway, even if I wanted to. The hard thing is
doing what I can in the day to not be idle enough to give my thoughts
room to wander, but not busy enough to agitate my chronic fatigue
syndrome. I get more fatigued as the day goes on at the best of
times, and with this comes the lowering of my mental resilience. It’s
damned tricky at the best of times, and a balancing act I often feel
far too fat for.
Going for a rest now.
Thanks for reading :).
