Last week I noticed a dull pain/ache in my stomach/abdomen area. My first response to something like that is always to try to ignore it. But it persisted for a couple days, and then I started getting really worried about it. I broke all my rules. I did an online search for my symptoms (not at first - I think I held out for at least two or three days, which admittedly is kind of pitiful). I found websites that made me think it was cancer. One of the websites even had a note advising that it was much more likely it was another smaller problem and that only 5% of cases would be cancer, but of course I kept thinking "I could be part of that 5%!"
I then spent a few more days thinking about all this information and my possible impending death, which made me into a semi-mess crying frequently over minor things. I kept mentioning the pain to my wife, and she kept making efforts to downplay it (since I was making no effort to do so myself), but I kept arguing with her about it.
I've read many articles about people who developed some serious health problem. I don't know why. I don't seek them out, but they seem to be everywhere, trying to scare people into taking better care of themselves or going to the doctor more often. I think the only effect they actually have is making anxious people more anxious. It's like those commercials for aspirin where there is a guy saying something like "I'm in great physical shape and run marathons all the time. Imagine my surprise when I had a heart attack completely out of the blue." You could be next! Buy aspirin!
Anyway, in a lot of these articles they will have a quote from the sick person talking about how they were fortunate enough to catch the problem early because they just "felt like something was wrong" and went to the doctor. No specific symptoms. They make it sound like it is just a vague sensation of something feeling different in your body. I think I even saw one article that said the sick person had dreamed about something being wrong with part of their body, which influenced them to go to the doctor, where they discovered it was true!
Do things like this actually happen, or is it just people being dramatic or trying to look like they have a special sense for detecting illness? I don't know. But, me being who I am, I got the idea in my head that it was of the utmost importance that I notice any changes in my body and take them seriously. SUPER seriously.
Well, that was a mistake. Maybe it is good advice, if you don't have anxiety. But it doesn't work for someone like me, because I am almost constantly noticing things about my body that seem "off" in some way or that I can't recall ever feeling before.
So basically, whether the advice is good or not, I need to let it go. I'm not going to be one of those "special-sense" people (if they even exist) - it's definitely not in the cards for me. All I'm going to end up doing is freaking myself out over and over and over again.
I finally managed to get past the autopilot anxiety and convince myself that worrying about the pain was in no way helpful. Worrying wasn't going to make me go to the doctor. If the pain was still there after a few weeks, I would, but not before then. I would only be making myself miserable until that point.
("I'm learning to let go of worrying. I can replace worrying with constructive action.")
So I forced myself to stop dwelling on it and distracted myself as much as possible. And a day or so after that, no more pain. Which means that not only was it not the 5% cancer, it wasn't even the 95% more benign problem. 100% nothing. Probably indigestion of some sort, made worse by my constant stress and attention to it.
It still shocks me that with all I know, I can go so wrong. Catastrophizing is a bitch.
Monday, May 28, 2012
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
tricks
I have been doing so well lately. I've been going out to restaurants and eating with little anxiety. I've been going other places without experiencing much anxiety. I've been eating at home even when I don't feel well, forcing myself to stick to a normal eating schedule.
I even decided to terminate therapy, because I feel like I have gotten to the point where I can handle situations on my own. Since then, I've had a few "oh god what have I done" moments of panic, but I just remind myself that I can go back if I ever need to, which brings me back to the realization that I'm doing okay without it. In fact, I think I could have stopped going a while ago, but I guess I had this fear that if I didn't show up on a regular basis and announce that I hadn't had a breakdown that month, I would jinx myself, and it would happen again. Like a fear that I was being too confident and would possibly miss signs that a professional wouldn't.
So far, so good.
I should be pushing myself more than I am, but I'm still happy with the way things are at the moment. I'm trying not to stress about any of it. In a rural area, there aren't exactly tons of ways to push yourself out of the house. I'm planning on going to a movie and lunch this weekend.
Life may not be super exciting, but I did start having an exciting new thought. I'm going to put it in the category of "positive mind tricks." By the time I hit middle school, I had come up with a bunch of thoughts I used to argue myself out of anxiety in public. They were really helpful, but I started thinking in the past couple years that maybe they weren't healthy. I don't care as much right now, because right now I'm more in the mentality of "living my life" than "step-by-step recovering." So I'm still using them. The main ones I have relied on are:
-- If I was home right now, would I still be feeling this way? When I was younger, I pretty much only felt "sick" if I was out in public, so most of the time, this question was all I needed.
-- If I was home right now, would feeling this way be bothering me as much? Kind of the same thing. It helped clue me in to what I was feeling specifically. If it was hunger, envisioning myself at home with the feeling would help me realize it was hunger.
-- Does the thought of leaving right now, immediately, make me feel any better? Why yes, it does. Look at that. Anxiety. Sometimes I would even test this by going outside or to the bathroom for a few minutes, and I would instantly feel much better, giving me the courage to go back.
-- Is anything else making me feel better? Sometimes I would notice that I was feeling "sick" and then something really funny or really scary would happen, shocking me out of it temporarily. Once the shock subsided, the "sick" feeling would come back, but the proof of being able to briefly feel better was still there.
-- How fast did this feeling come on? Usually leading me to the realization that ten, fifteen minutes ago, there hadn't been the slightest sign of anything being wrong. Actual sickness comes on more gradually.
There are probably more I'm not thinking of, but you get the idea.
I don't know where this new one came from. It just popped into my head maybe a couple months ago when I was sitting at home feeling "sick" and starting to get really anxious about it:
You would be damn lucky to only feel this bad right before vomiting.
I love it. I love how it's not a question. I love how it works at home. I love how it has gratitude built into it, something I'm trying to express more of. Though I've only thought about it during moments of anxiety and feeling mildly unwell, I have this idealistic hope that it would be comforting even if I was sick, even if I was about to throw up. Because nausea, even at its peak, is never going to be unbearable pain. At least that's what I gather from non-emetophobics. Unbearable pain by definition is a level of pain that would make you lose consciousness, but people don't lose consciousness because of nausea, even severe nausea.
Again, I know it's idealistic, and my new trick probably wouldn't hold up in the face of actual nausea and illness, but it is helping me quash a lot of budding anxiety attacks.
I even decided to terminate therapy, because I feel like I have gotten to the point where I can handle situations on my own. Since then, I've had a few "oh god what have I done" moments of panic, but I just remind myself that I can go back if I ever need to, which brings me back to the realization that I'm doing okay without it. In fact, I think I could have stopped going a while ago, but I guess I had this fear that if I didn't show up on a regular basis and announce that I hadn't had a breakdown that month, I would jinx myself, and it would happen again. Like a fear that I was being too confident and would possibly miss signs that a professional wouldn't.
So far, so good.
I should be pushing myself more than I am, but I'm still happy with the way things are at the moment. I'm trying not to stress about any of it. In a rural area, there aren't exactly tons of ways to push yourself out of the house. I'm planning on going to a movie and lunch this weekend.
Life may not be super exciting, but I did start having an exciting new thought. I'm going to put it in the category of "positive mind tricks." By the time I hit middle school, I had come up with a bunch of thoughts I used to argue myself out of anxiety in public. They were really helpful, but I started thinking in the past couple years that maybe they weren't healthy. I don't care as much right now, because right now I'm more in the mentality of "living my life" than "step-by-step recovering." So I'm still using them. The main ones I have relied on are:
-- If I was home right now, would I still be feeling this way? When I was younger, I pretty much only felt "sick" if I was out in public, so most of the time, this question was all I needed.
-- If I was home right now, would feeling this way be bothering me as much? Kind of the same thing. It helped clue me in to what I was feeling specifically. If it was hunger, envisioning myself at home with the feeling would help me realize it was hunger.
-- Does the thought of leaving right now, immediately, make me feel any better? Why yes, it does. Look at that. Anxiety. Sometimes I would even test this by going outside or to the bathroom for a few minutes, and I would instantly feel much better, giving me the courage to go back.
-- Is anything else making me feel better? Sometimes I would notice that I was feeling "sick" and then something really funny or really scary would happen, shocking me out of it temporarily. Once the shock subsided, the "sick" feeling would come back, but the proof of being able to briefly feel better was still there.
-- How fast did this feeling come on? Usually leading me to the realization that ten, fifteen minutes ago, there hadn't been the slightest sign of anything being wrong. Actual sickness comes on more gradually.
There are probably more I'm not thinking of, but you get the idea.
I don't know where this new one came from. It just popped into my head maybe a couple months ago when I was sitting at home feeling "sick" and starting to get really anxious about it:
You would be damn lucky to only feel this bad right before vomiting.
I love it. I love how it's not a question. I love how it works at home. I love how it has gratitude built into it, something I'm trying to express more of. Though I've only thought about it during moments of anxiety and feeling mildly unwell, I have this idealistic hope that it would be comforting even if I was sick, even if I was about to throw up. Because nausea, even at its peak, is never going to be unbearable pain. At least that's what I gather from non-emetophobics. Unbearable pain by definition is a level of pain that would make you lose consciousness, but people don't lose consciousness because of nausea, even severe nausea.
Again, I know it's idealistic, and my new trick probably wouldn't hold up in the face of actual nausea and illness, but it is helping me quash a lot of budding anxiety attacks.
Thursday, May 3, 2012
work tour / low blood sugar
I finally took that company tour for work. It went really well! I was pretty anxious before I left, but it wasn't affecting my stomach, even after I had breakfast. It was more just a shakiness. I sat and did some meditation and deep breathing and just tried to relax as much as possible.
When I actually got to the company, my anxiety was basically gone (other than a social insecurity / awkwardness that is always there). That tends to happen when I get around people, because I become so focused on acting normal in my interactions with them that I don't have the brain space to worry about much else. My tour guides walked me around all through the building, showing me everything involved in the manufacturing process. It was fun and interesting, and even though I don't find business or manufacturing to be that exciting, I got into it a little bit. Maybe just because it was nice to be 1) moving around and 2) interacting with people for a change.
The only problem came after the tour was over, and I went back home. I'm used to feeling MUCH better as soon as I get out of a stressful situation, but I started feeling very ill instead. Mostly it was a bad headache, but then I started feeling like it was affecting my stomach too. Of course, I thought at first that I must have picked up some virus on the tour or touched some part of the manufacturing equipment that was toxic, etc. I kept telling myself that couldn't be the case, because it was so unlikely I'd already be showing symptoms. But I felt so ill that this logic was barely keeping me together. I even took Aleve for my headache, which I hardly ever let myself do.
Nothing terrible happened. After a few hours, I finally started feeling better. I don't know exactly why I felt so bad, but my guess is that it was low blood sugar. I forced myself to eat breakfast before going, but I don't think my breakfast was large enough. Especially considering I was walking around for about three hours, when I am used to sitting down in front of a computer all day. I think my blood sugar crashed, and then, even though I ate again right when I got home, it took a while for things to normalize again.
I really need to work more on eating before I leave the house for long periods of time. I have gotten to the point where I almost always do it, but I still tend to gravitate towards smaller meals or even just little snacks. I worry about feeling overly full when I leave, and in trying to avoid that, I usually end up not even reaching the bare minimum of fullness.
When I actually got to the company, my anxiety was basically gone (other than a social insecurity / awkwardness that is always there). That tends to happen when I get around people, because I become so focused on acting normal in my interactions with them that I don't have the brain space to worry about much else. My tour guides walked me around all through the building, showing me everything involved in the manufacturing process. It was fun and interesting, and even though I don't find business or manufacturing to be that exciting, I got into it a little bit. Maybe just because it was nice to be 1) moving around and 2) interacting with people for a change.
The only problem came after the tour was over, and I went back home. I'm used to feeling MUCH better as soon as I get out of a stressful situation, but I started feeling very ill instead. Mostly it was a bad headache, but then I started feeling like it was affecting my stomach too. Of course, I thought at first that I must have picked up some virus on the tour or touched some part of the manufacturing equipment that was toxic, etc. I kept telling myself that couldn't be the case, because it was so unlikely I'd already be showing symptoms. But I felt so ill that this logic was barely keeping me together. I even took Aleve for my headache, which I hardly ever let myself do.
Nothing terrible happened. After a few hours, I finally started feeling better. I don't know exactly why I felt so bad, but my guess is that it was low blood sugar. I forced myself to eat breakfast before going, but I don't think my breakfast was large enough. Especially considering I was walking around for about three hours, when I am used to sitting down in front of a computer all day. I think my blood sugar crashed, and then, even though I ate again right when I got home, it took a while for things to normalize again.
I really need to work more on eating before I leave the house for long periods of time. I have gotten to the point where I almost always do it, but I still tend to gravitate towards smaller meals or even just little snacks. I worry about feeling overly full when I leave, and in trying to avoid that, I usually end up not even reaching the bare minimum of fullness.
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