Tag: anxiety

Stupid anxious thoughts and the cupcake wasn’t even that good.

(The frosting was amazing, though. I actually didn’t belive it was buttercream at first. It was whipped and it tasted so sweet and rich and dairy-ish that I thought there had to be whipped cream involved.)

At the gym waiting for Sparkly. Someone on Tumblr was talking about surgery so I was thinking about how I was injured as a kid. Someone just fell off the high bar (into a pit full of foam balls, so they can’t be too badly hurt) but something’s wrong and I just. I am not good at dealing with Unknown Things That Are Wrong especially not after this week. The coaches are handling it and I’m sure she’ll be okay. But ow, my brain.
———-
Trying to move my leg when my ACL was only connected to a chipped-off fragment of bone was the SCARIEST thing I’ve ever experienced. It hurt too, but mostly it felt so deeply, fundamentally wrong.

Annnnnd I was going to write more about this tonight but I should really try to not freak myself out. More tomorrow.

Ugh, brain.

I made it more than TWO YEARS but now apparently I finally have anxiety directly related to the thing that started all this. Which is: sandwiches with cheddar cheese on them.

Fuck.

I had a Thing like a month ago where specifically I wasn’t sure if the cheese we had was still good, and that was hard. But now it’s also showing  up as a generic minor anxiety thought, too.

——

Yes, I will get back to the kink thing eventually. I had a busy week.

An incomplete list of my anxiety things

Physical feelings of anxiety that I get:

  • Shaking, in muscles that I’m using– I can mostly stop it if I can lie completely limp and still, but when I try to move voluntarily, those muscles also shake.
  • Increased blood pressure (?) and heart rate– I can feel my heartbeat more strongly than usual, and sometimes even hear it in my ears, which I think corresponds to higher blood pressure? And my heart beats faster.
  • This sort of prickly, staticky, vaguely achy feeling that I described in the previous post. I think it relates to holding tension in my muscles in a certain way. Goes along with shaking.
  • Brief dizziness– like a mild version of the low-blood-pressure feeling of standing up suddenly, when I haven’t actually moved. Presumably some kind of heart thing.

 

Things I do when I’m anxious:

  • Hold my core muscles very tense, to the exclusion of breathing “properly” (at least, what I consider properly as a former singer). I’m still more-or-less filling my lungs, but I’m not letting my stomach expand at all.
  • Okay, I probably do breathe slightly more shallowly.
  • Put a hand over my chest– I find having pressure on my chest comforting. Fiddling with my necklace may be a mild version of this but isn’t always; pressing my palm flat against my chest probably means I’m feeling anxious.
  • Move less– for me, fidgeting usually means I’m thinking hard, not that I’m anxious. When I’m anxious I sit very still, and I may move my hands less even while I’m doing something functional like using the computer. If I’m anxious enough to be shaking, I’ll be looking for “stable” positions where I can relax my muscles completely and not shake. E.g. I’ll get into a position with one hand over the arrow keys, the other on the armrest, and not move them away. I also move my head less. When I’m standing I may physically brace my hands on things, like a table or the wall.
  • Speak less, and in a higher voice than usual. I usually have no trouble thinking in words, but I sometimes do have trouble interrupting my frozenness to actually speak. When it comes to my breathing, “frozen” tends to be expressed as “slow and shallow and very even”, and it’s hard for me to stop, to interrupt the pattern.

Things I want when I’m anxious:

  • To feel like I have a clear path to whatever I might need if what I’m anxious about happens. This includes a physically clear path, and things like having to explain myself to the people around me. So I may want to be alone.
  • Subset of the above: to take out and have “on hand” things I might need.
  • A physically stable place to sit/lie down, to minimize dizzy feelings and shaking.

 

And I am currently being reminded that when I’m coming down from anxiety and feeling very relaxed, I do the thing where I breathe really slowly and this may not be good for my non-dizziness.

God, I’d forgotten about this static-in-my-bones anxiety feeling. It’s like my hands are trembling even when they’re not actually trembling.

I’m about 85% sure at this point that it’s just anxiety, and therefore I will be fine soon, but. Not fun.

—–

Sparkly is sick and I need to remind myself that even if it is contagious and I get sick too, this will not be the end of the world, it will be fine. I have nothing to do the next few days anyway. It will be fine. It will be fine and I’ll get it over with, either way.

Dissociation

it is a thing that I have an incomplete understanding of.

By which I mean, I don’t know whether it describes things I do or not.

I am definitely more of a “freeze” (as opposed to fight or flight) and “shutdown” (as opposed to “meltdown”) person, in my responses to anxiety, stress, feeling overwhelmed, and even pain. Oftentimes I only show that I’m not okay when I’m forced to do something besides freeze– like, I have to talk to someone, and then my voice sounds stressed or I can’t put words together well, or I have to get up instead of just lying in bed when I’m in pain, and then I’m visibly moving slowly/hunched over/etc.

When I’m in mild pain, or mildly frustrated or distracted, I get restless and fidget. When I’m in bad pain, or really overwhelmed, or very anxious, I freeze (although there are a few exceptions to that with really bad pain.)

Sometimes it takes me a while to even identify physical feelings of anxiety. I’m actually getting better at it, so now I have times when my first knowledge of it is when I realize I’m sitting really stiff and still, and then I go “Oh, this is anxiety, I’m feeling weird and it’s because of anxiety.” But it seriously took me more than three months of worrying on a regular basis about a specific thing, and having physical symptoms that I should have been able to identify as anxiety, like shivering, even if I’d never had them that bad or in exactly that circumstance before– I had no idea, for months, that stress or anxiety played any part in my problems. I didn’t identify what was in my mind as anxiety, and even once I did, I didn’t connect it to how I was feeling in my body. I didn’t have thoughts that seemed obviously panicked to me. I didn’t feel like I was worrying in my mind any more than I had over lots of other things that didn’t cause me trouble.

That’s pretty weird, isn’t it?

—–

But then I read people talking about dissociation and saying they sometimes get so out of it you could mistake it for being drugged, or a concussion. And the whole thing of conscious feelings of “I’m not really here,” “this isn’t me,” or similar– I don’t think I ever have those.

 

Stomach :(

I probably brought this on myself, either just because I ate too fast, or because I can’t just go instantly from eating way too little, to eating decent-sized meals again.

I was doing a lot better physically, for a long while! Not skipping meals solves most of my physical problems! (My anxiety has been fluctuating a lot.)

Well, it could be worse.

Clarification

I often have physical feelings of anxiety without having, like, racing worrying what-if thoughts. Sometimes without anything to be anxious about that I can identify, at all.

Other times I have lots of worrying thoughts with slightly less physical symptoms, more like what you’d probably think of when you hear “anxiety”.