a practically non-phobic lunch

I had a fantastic day. I went out to lunch again, and I did not feel "sick" before, during, or after eating. I did have an uncomfortable full feeling at one point, but I didn't get anxious about it, and it went away within five minutes. I also finished my meal when usually I have to take half of it home, because I get "full." (My wife jokes that I have an "at home full" and a "restaurant full" that are wildly different.) And I got dessert and almost managed to finish that too!

I have no idea why this meal went so well, and around the time I was waiting for my dessert, I actually started worrying about my lack of anxiety, thinking about how strange and uncharacteristic it was. But even that didn't lead to anything bad. I just tried to remind myself to be appreciative of it. I know it's weird that I needed to tell myself to enjoy this, but my mind usually starts racing just as much when I have oddly perfect experiences like this. It drives me a little crazy, because I want to know why. I want to know what I did this time that was so right, what led to me having the experience I wish I had every single time. But obviously it's one of those questions I'll never be able to answer. I can only make guesses, and quite possibly it was just luck, just a good-feeling day.

I have pretty bad social anxiety that competes with the emetophobic anxiety, and trying to work around both of them is really annoying. I try to only go to restaurants at off-times when I think there won't be a big crowd, 11am or 2-3pm. But it's really an off-time for me as well, and it leads to me badly planning my earlier meals / snacks so that I show up at the restaurant and am either not hungry or so hungry that I feel "sick." I didn't do that today. I went at a normal time, around 1pm, so I wondered if that had something to do with it.

Also, the decision to go out for lunch was a little spur-of-the-moment. I didn't have days to think about it and figure out exactly what was going to happen. Basically, I'm wondering if all the planning and preparing I'm trying to do to make sure these meals are successful is having the opposite effect. My therapist was saying something similar to me the other day, something along the lines of "if you are putting all this effort into planning events and still feeling sick during them, maybe it would be better to stop planning and just accept whatever happens." It's much easier to go along with that when "whatever happens" is amazing, like it was today. I need to get to the point where I can have a more challenging day and be accepting of that too.

In any case, people without this phobia don't do all this planning, so I'm sure it is something I should try to stop. It's not really getting me anywhere, and it takes so much mental energy.

irrationality, exhibit A

This morning while I was still sleeping (about twenty minutes before my alarm was set to go off), one of the neighbor's kids started coughing right outside the window, and it woke me up. I wasn't alarmed at first, but it kept going on and then started sounding more like choking and gagging. I pulled the covers up over my head, covered my ears, and started humming really loud. I could still sort of hear it in the background, so I hummed until I wasn't catching snatches of it anymore. I have no idea if anything even happened or if the kid just coughed for a while, but I've still had about a thousand worries today related to this 15-20 second event, starting with the ridiculous idea that the germs might come through the wall or window. Almost every real or far-fetched way illness could reach me is running through my mind. I've been doing so well this winter, not obsessing over contamination, and I'm finding it really annoying. I guess I always hope the thoughts are gone, but really it more seems like they just settle down temporarily. Like the thoughts are leaves and anxiety is a wind. The wind's picked up again, so the leaves are flying around all over the place. It's such a pain. Even if the kid did actually get sick, I know I have no more reason to think and worry about this than I do on any other day, days when other kids in other places might be getting sick without me there to see or hear it. It's just been a while since any of my senses have been exposed to it. If it even happened!

And the tune I hummed to myself was pitiful. In my fear, I couldn't think of one specific song to commit to, so what I came up with barely qualified as musical at all. It got me thinking about how maybe I should pick a song now to use if this ever happens again, which then got me thinking about the movie My Girl. Remember Vada and her "do wah diddy" meltdowns? Maybe I'll just steal hers, it's a pretty good one.

Joking, by the way. Believing I'll be able to handle the next situation is probably a better idea than picking a "panic song."

reframing thoughts

I went to a restaurant to have lunch yesterday. It's been a while, and I was feeling nervous about it for days beforehand. In light of that, I think it went really well. I was able to keep pretty calm before and throughout the meal. After I finished eating, I felt (or imagined I felt) a little queasy, and then I was anxious for a while. This was during the drive home. I kept mentioning to my wife that I felt sick. Yes, repeatedly, because it's not enough to just mention it once, right? She kept telling me to rephrase what I was saying, telling me that it was better to say "I don't feel well" than to say "I feel sick." In the moment, with the anxiety and whatever the physical feeling was, I was exasperated by this. It seemed like it didn't matter what words I used, the situation was still horrible. The whole "just semantics" argument that doesn't make any sense because the words a person chooses do matter.

It reminds me of a quote from Cormac McCarthy's The Road: "Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever, he said. You might want to think about that." You can change the way you think, and by doing so, you can change your entire perspective. You are always in control of that. The idea of this scares me, because right now I am not that skilled in using the control to my advantage. Telling myself and others that "I feel sick" is almost as bad as saying "I am sick" or "I must be sick" when I'm not (which I've done many times). With this phobia, I really need to keep a clear head when it comes to the word "sick."

Pretty much all of these statements should be avoided: "I feel sick," "I am sick," "I must be sick," "I feel like I'm going to throw up," "I feel nauseous," etc. They are all going to be inaccurate or exaggerations most of the time, and they will only heighten the anxiety. There are so many other statements to use in their place: "I feel anxious," "I feel full," "I feel digestion," "I feel hunger." Sometimes I don't want to use these more accurate statements just because it feels like it trivializes the very serious / intense worry I have in that moment. And it will trivialize it. But not in the sense of you having a huge problem and the rest of the world not noticing or caring. The worry itself will start to become trivial so that it doesn't affect you as much. Just from you making the effort to use the most accurate / truthful words possible. And if none of the "true statements" seem true to you, go with the most optimistic one that you can imagine being possible.

internal weather

At times, this phobia has made me feel hopeless. Only when it is at its worst, thankfully - those periods where I am feeling sick and anxious all day every day. It doesn't take much of that before I feel like I am living in a state of despair and that there may not be anything that exists outside of that state. Then feeling and thinking that way starts to scare me in itself. I spent a lot of time online during these moods, searching for anything that could make me feel a tiny bit more hopeful. I came across this letter one day, which had a huge impact on me, and now I always think of it when I'm having a hard time.

I just love the metaphor of the weather and the idea that the best course of action is to wait it out rather than fighting it. You don't stop living your life when it's raining, but you also don't run out and yell at the rain to stop or try to come up with some crazy involved plan to control it. You don't ever say to yourself, "well, that's it. I'll never see the sun again."

In my mind, I was absolutely convinced that my personal "sun" was gone forever, but it came back, because it will always come back.

the comfort zone

Things have been going extremely well for me. I've been eating almost every meal without feeling really sick and/or anxious. I think I'm finally back to the point where my anxiety is pretty much non-existent as long as I am just hanging out at home. It's only an issue if I go out anywhere or if someone comes to visit us. That doesn't sound like much to celebrate, I guess, but I'm loving it. Pretty much all of last year (and some of 2010), for the first time in my life, I felt like there was nowhere that was safe. It was horrible, and I'm so happy to have a "refuge" again and to be feeling more in control of my anxiety.

On the other hand, I don't want to spend all my time at home, which is what I've been doing. Clearly it's time to get out more and see what happens, see if I can manage to feel anxiety-free other places. I think I am going to start trying restaurants again. Sometimes my experiences with them are fine, sometimes they are awful. I'm hoping with practice that the awful times lessen.

Unfortunately, there is some possible unidentified problem with my car right now, so I am sort of stranded until it gets checked out and fixed (or given a clean bill of health). Hopefully it gets resolved this week. Until then, I can't deny that I'm thoroughly enjoying my comfort zone. Right now I'm making my way through the Hunger Games trilogy.

eat!

A friend from college is visiting for the weekend, and we're having an amazing time. I've been looking forward to his visit for weeks, and I've also been having pretty low anxiety overall, so I was expecting only a mild increase. But my anxiety kicked into high gear over-drive craziness yesterday before he even arrived. Because I had been so sure this wouldn't happen, I was even more convinced than usual that it must not be anxiety, which meant I could be actually sick with something. Big surprise, that assumption was incorrect. And thinking that way led to me eating much less than I should have yesterday.

For years, I was fanatic about avoiding eating whenever anything stressful was going on. I always thought that was the safest course of action, not just "in case I am sick" but also "in case I get anxious about being sick." I could just tell myself it wasn't possible for me to get sick, because I hadn't eaten (which is not even true, I know, but it's still an idea I cling to even today). My wife started to break me of that habit from the moment we started dating. At that point my usual pattern was to eat one big meal a day (a lunch/dinner after getting home from school) and to avoid eating around any anxiety-producing situation, including going out anywhere. I was also so picky that bagels were an unfamiliar food to me that I wouldn't eat. I'm not sure I had ever even tried one.

It took a while, but eventually she got me into the mindset that it was important to eat (at least) three meals a day, and it's amazing how much better I started to feel. I'm betting most of the stomachaches I got back then were caused by my horrible irregular eating patterns. It probably also contributed to me feeling anxious / depressed / moody in general. When I eat too little now, it makes my anxiety get out of control. It's strange, because I still have that instinct to avoid food, but at the same time I am always trying to remind myself now 'no, avoid eating too little. It will lead to you feeling like everything around you is surreal.'

I see all the time on blogs / forums that people with emetophobia are not eating and feel like they can't. But you really can, and you should force yourself to do so. Not eating is a really big deal, even if you are not technically in the danger zone of "starving yourself" yet, because it will keep you feeling a lot more balanced. It makes a huge difference there. And it also will definitely lead to your stomach feeling overall better after a while if you continue eating regularly / well.   

affirmations

Affirmations really work. They help so much in reducing anxiety. For anyone who has tried them without seeing any improvement, I'd say chances are you only need to give it more time. It took months for me. I'm not sure how many months exactly, but it was at least half a year before I noticed them having even the slightest effect, which felt like an eternity given how high my anxiety was during that entire time period.

I could not sleep through the night. I would wake up at some point every night feeling "sick" and have to get out of bed. Sometimes I would watch TV or do word searches, but I also had a little notebook where I would write affirmations. At first, I found them pretty useless as just thoughts in my head or even words spoken out loud. I needed to see them written, and I would write them ten times in a row, pausing each time to really think about the message and let it sink in. Even before they actually began to resonate with me, writing them out was a calming, repetitive, hope-filled activity that would make me feel a little better and help me get back to bed.

After a while, I started keeping four of the most calming ones right next to my bed. My initial goal was to stay in bed, even if I did wake up feeling "sick" and anxious, and having those affirmations right there to look at sometimes allowed me to do this (rarely at first, but more and more as time went on).

I also now have a set I carry with me in my purse, affirmations written out on index cards. I pulled them out pretty frequently on our long road trip and during the high anxiety times in the hotel.

When I first started using them, I worried it was just a form of brainwashing, but it's pretty much the exact opposite. I already am brainwashed with anxiety, and these are correcting that. When you come up with your own affirmations, or if you are choosing them out of a book, you just have to make sure that logically you can see the truth in them, even if they don't feel true (it helps if you create/choose them at a time when you are not extremely anxious).

Probably my go-to affirmation for times when I feel "sick" is: "This feeling isn't dangerous - it will pass." It is true whether you are sick or not. Of course, I always try to tell myself I'm not, and that the "feeling" I'm referring to is anxiety. Since I started using the affirmation a little over a year ago, I have been right about that 100% of the time. That just proves to me even more that it is undeniably the thought my mind should be having when I don't feel well.