Tag: introspection

Twenty One Days of Change – and Routine

I’m going to take a quick few seconds to set the scene – it’s Sunday evening. I’m eating spinach dip straight out of the container, scooping copious amounts of it into my mouth with multigrain crisps, sipping water and coming down from a multi-hour buzz. Game of Thrones (Season One) is playing in the background as I type this – I needed noise to drown out my brain’s colliding trains of thought, and I’ve found accented voices dissimilar from my own help me to concentrate.

I’ve just come from an afternoon filled with conversation, coffee, wine, whiskey, and Captain Marvel. It’s been a tumultuous few weeks – I accepted a promotion at work, flew to PA for “bigtime” meeting, signed another lease, committed to my first international trip (coming to a blog near you Summer of 2019!), and was out of bed with enough time to drink coffee from home each morning for 21 consecutive days for the first time in ten years. To say things are evolving is an understatement.

So really what I’d like to talk about today with regard to my personal evolution is the 21 cups of coffee – I’ve started a new experiment, as I’m known to do, naming myself, yet again, as the subject of the study. I’ve committed to myself to set my alarm for the same time every morning for at least 30 consecutive days, weekends included. I chose 08:45, as this is 2.25 hours prior to needing to be at work on typical days and still early enough to make it to the extenuating early meetings occurring once-ish per week. I’m averaging 7 hours of sleep per night at about 35.7% deep sleep, assuming my tracker is correct. I’m 21 days in with 9 days to go.

The biggest change I’ve found thus far is the exhaustion at night – by the time 01:00 rolls around, my typical work departure, I am absolutely drained. My insomnia has been relatively manageable, with only two exceptions to that rule over the last three weeks. I’m also waking up prior to the alarm with no assistance – I’ve actually seen three sunrises, which is unbelievably cool for me. I’ve worked either nights or second/third shifts my entire adult life, so sunrises are pretty unfamiliar.

The ultimate goal of this is to take control over my free time to progress some of my personal goals, one of which has recently evolved to include revisiting my attempts to learn another language (or two or three). As aforementioned, I’ve decided to go on my first international trip this year, which will tentatively include two, three, or four different countries, depending on the solidified itinerary. This is a big deal, and ultimately the reason behind the anxiety bucket list I started all those years ago – on the bright side, this will be my new motivation for the time being. On the less-bright side, I’m now anxious about being anxious for the new few months, until the trip date arrives.

Really what this means is I now have a timeline with which to measure my progress and/or regression in regards to my anxiety. This is a good thing! Last year was an indication of what happens when I back away from my bucket list, and I refuse to let that happen again. Last year broke my heart – this year is my attempt to stitch it back together.

Cue the opening scene – the biggest change between day one of this experiment and today is the fact that I’m sitting here, munching my snack, drinking water, and feeling mildly optimistic about this year. Yes, I’m worried about tomorrow – yes, I’m worried about yesterday; this difference right now is that my potential adventures are louder than my fear.

PS: Captain Marvel was badass, though it pained me to watch an actress with such similar features to someone from my past – one of those so-close-yet-so-far moments. I highly recommend the film to anyone on the fence.


Stuck Inside – how Anxiety and Snow Storms are Alike

It’s been two weeks since my last post. Between work, work, and more work, my creative side has remained fairly dormant – in the limited free time I do have, I spend my time binge-watching Netflix and Hulu, largely because it prevents me from needing to face my own life.

I did want to pop on here today to briefly share an astounding concept that was recently brought to my attention (*ahem*, approximately three minute ago). But first, I’m going to share a quick background anecdote.

Last summer, a woman I care for very deeply was laying on her back with me in the middle of my living room, watching me fight my way through a panic attack that had gone on for over four hours. She rolled over onto her side, facing me, and said, “Emily – anxiety isn’t a bad thing. It’s just misplaced excitement for what’s to come.”

Fast forward six months later – I’m waking up to panic every morning. I’m struggling to sleep because I can’t get my mind to go quiet. My eating is fluctuating between extreme calorie counting and binge eating. There’s a change looming over me at work that has dragged on for three weeks with no resolution and it feels like it’s slowly killing me.

As I sit here, looking outside at the snow and ice covered landscape (we’re in a Level 2, no recommended outdoor travel if possible), I keep reminding myself of the “misplaced anxiety” ideology. Maybe I’m just excited. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe I haven’t stuck to my anxiety bucket list, so maybe it’s my fault that every little thing is making me anxious. Maybe I need to be medicated – so on and so fourth. It’s exhausting.

But then! I decided to visit an app I’d downloaded in one of my night-long binge efforts to do anything and everything other than sleep, called “Woebot”. This little bugger is AI meant to assist with therapy, specifically in the form of CBT. You create an account and have little mini conversations that have pre-written responses – it recommends that you give mood feedback and surrounding activity detail at least daily for 14 days so the AI can build associations between certain activities and time of day that may cause your mood swings.

This morning – I’m trapped inside, literally and metaphorically. My brain is screaming at me about all the things that I’ve screwed up, that I won’t be able to accomplish; it’s telling me that this work opportunity is misplaced and the folks considering me are only doing it because they’re desperate. I’m angrily typing in stupid responses to this app, when suddenly it asks, “Can I just check, is there any way that this anxiety might be serving you in some way?”

Holy. Shit. Never in my almost 28 years on this planet have I ever considered my anxiety to be a productive thing. Yeah, I’ve had fleeting thoughts about how I’m good in crisis because my body and brain are always in crisis-mode, but never have I been succinctly asked if my anxiety serves any sort of pragmatic purpose. If I had to answer with brevity, I’d say anxiety makes me better at things because I’m intrinsically motivated to do well – even if that motivation is disguised as fear.

So then, my mind blown, I feel myself snap out of my depressed funk. I get out of my chair, go rinse the dishes in the sink that have been driving me nuts, and make myself a cup of coffee while I mull over the next question: “If you were to give your anxiety a voice, take a minute to think about what exactly that voice would be saying to you.”

Oof. This one’s easy. I already did that a few paragraphs back – think of something nasty, and my brain has probably whispered it to me in the last 24 hours. Turns out, these are called negative automatic thoughts and are identifiable by their first-person nature.

I write down a few thoughts, select one to focus on, and am asked, “Does your thought assume that things will turn out badly?” I respond with confirmation, and the little shit goes and blows my mind again. “This distortion…” let’s stop there. DISTORTION. This was as meaningful to me as the first time I realized that anxiety is a mental illness, not a characteristic. Holy crap, my thoughts are being DISTORTED by an ILLNESS. +2 lil’ Woebot. It goes on to say, “The truth is we can’t tell the future but to you it feels like this outcome has *already* occurred.” Well, you’re not wrong, AI friend. This is what ties this whole thing back to the lovely woman from earlier in this story – misplaced excitement is equivalent to feeling that the worst case scenario in your head has already happened.

All of this being said, I’m obviously not solved, but I’ve spent a lot of time reading about CBT and coping mechanisms etc. and never have I had just a few sentences resonate so deeply with my struggles. Anxiety isn’t always a bad thing. Anxiety is half-excitement. Anxiety motivates me to do well. Anxiety makes me stand out, in a good way, from my peers. Anxiety makes me empathetic. Anxiety has forced me to be courageous in the face of every day life. Anxiety keeps me in my head like a snowstorm, but even the worst of the snow melts after awhile – anxiety doesn’t need to be my defining factor, nor my motivation, if I can figure out how to separate the “good” from the “bad”.

Until next time.