eustress

It's been kind of a tough week for me, and I'm pretty sure the cause of all the extra anxiety was my birthday (yesterday). I kept thinking about it for days beforehand and everything that it "means" - getting presents, eating cake, talking to family and friends, everyone (including, and maybe especially, myself) expecting me to feel happy the entire day. There are so many expectations surrounding holidays and birthdays, which is why I tend to be wary of them most of the time, because the day rarely measures up to what it "should" be. Also, with birthdays (and New Year's), there is all that evaluation of your life, what you've accomplished, what you still want to accomplish.

All these thoughts were running through my mind, but I wasn't really aware of how much it was affecting me at first. Because most of it is positive, and for a while, I just felt excitement and anticipation. Then I started noticing that everything I ate was making me feel "sick," and I got a headache that seemed to last for days, and I felt anxious all the time. The night before my birthday, I couldn't fall asleep for a while. The actual day felt like a blur of intense emotion. Again, it was 99% positive emotion, but it was still overwhelming. There were moments when I felt so much excitement that I felt close to an anxiety attack physically, which would then cause the alarm bells to go off in my head, leading to actual anxiety.

I am still feeling the effects of all this (overstimulation, I guess you could call it) today, and I've been reflecting on how strange it is that excitement and anxiety are so linked. That idea of how there is both negative stress (distress) and positive stress (eustress). When you have an anxiety disorder, it seems like the positive stress can quickly turn bad. I am never really sure how to deal with this. When I'm having negative stress, I know I'm supposed to tell myself to slow down, take some deep breaths, counter negative thoughts, etc. But when it's positive stress, I feel stupid for needing to take a break from it, for thinking things like "all this talking, smiling, laughing is getting to be too much." Even more so, I have no idea how to explain the concept to someone else. "This is too exciting, it's starting to freak me out!" I can just imagine the strange looks I'd get with that one. Not to mention it would probably put a damper on the happy times. So I'm much more likely to push myself through it as much as possible without using any of the anxiety-fighting techniques.

The wikipedia page for eustress says, "The body itself cannot physically discern between distress or eustress." For emetophobics (and probably most people with anxiety, especially health-related anxiety), the physical manifestation of stress causes much more anxiety than there was to begin with. I guess that explains why a positive-stress experience can have this effect on me. It's frustrating, because I don't want to fight eustress. I want to be able to enjoy that side of the coin. Instead, I find myself trying to reach a more stoic / sedated state to prevent my mind from getting to that point where it decides "I don't care what this feeling is, it's dangerous."

I don't know. Striving for a calm state of mind isn't exactly a bad thing. The real issue is probably that my threshold for any kind of stress is incredibly low right now. I'm hoping that will change with time (moving away from the 2010 rock-bottom) and all the coping mechanisms I've been learning and practicing.