Anxiety: A Day In The Life

Anxiety.
Sometimes it starts with a bad night of sleep. I will pass out way to early, like before 8PM then wake up WAY too early like 1AM. I try to go back to sleep right away but usually this is futile, so I stay awake and listen to music or stare at the ceiling or close my eyes and toss and turn for a few hours, then just before 5AM I fall back to sleep. I wake up just before 10AM and I feel pretty good. Not great, clearly because my sleep was broken, but OK. Then I make myself a really good breakfast. I throw on some distracting movie on Netflix and drink coffee, in this instance it was too much coffee. I usually never have more than two cups in the span of an entire day and never after like 6PM because it will definitely keep me awake which would just cause me to repeat the cycle of poor sleep. Today I just drank too much coffee period. It didn't bother me right away, in-fact shortly after I felt kinda tired, that caffeine crash almost caught me but I didn't take a nap. Now, I've been awake for something like 8 hours or so, on some pretty broken sleep, on the back side of a caffeine high. This is prime real estate for anxiety and here I am. I am anxious. I am a little woozy, a little uncomfortable, a little uneasy. I'm tired and wired. I'm easily agitated, but I've been here before. Not in a while, but this is still very familiar territory. I took a shower earlier today and in the shower noticed I was definitely shaking a bit. My heart was beating fast and I had to stop myself and breath. Deep, counted breaths. I even had to rinse with cold water for a few minutes at the end of the shower to keep myself calm. I did a pretty good job. My legs were weak walking up the stairs to my bedroom, but I kept it together and calmly, slowly put on some solfeggio frequencies (If you're not sure what that is I'll put a link below, they're all over YouTube and do help ALOT.) and laid on my bed and did some deep breathing until I felt completely calm and relaxed. Deep breathing works!

*Deep Breathing:

1. Take a deep breath through your nose, breathing in with your stomach, for about 4-5 seconds.
2. Hold breath for same amount of time, 4-5 seconds
3. Exhale through the mouth, exhaling with the stomach muscles, for twice as long as the inhalation. So if you inhaled for 4 seconds and held for 4 seconds, exhale for 8 seconds.

Repeat this about 4 times. Longer if you think you need to. There is no such things and too much deep, cleansing breathing. It will make a huge difference. Simply because on a physiological level you cannot be both breathing slowly and deeply and be anxious.
There are a TON of YouTube videos on deep breathing as well. Take a look if you haven't already.

This worked for me today. I did this and I felt better, for a while. I laid in bed for a while then got up and dressed to go to the store to buy cigarettes. A necessary purchase of course. As I arrived back in-front of my house I could feel my body was off again. Nothing too overwhelming, but off nonetheless. I went and drank some water, seltzer to be exact, because I felt like there was a chance I might not have drank enough water today and part of my anxiety revolves around gas in my stomach. I think and feel like if I burp I will relieve pressures and feel better. This is part fact and definitely part hypochondria. I know this, but I will continue to do this until it no longer serves me. After some epic burping and sitting and relaxing in the den listening to my family talk, which alone makes me anxious sometimes, we sat down for dinner. I ate, but slowly and with apprehension. The sensations of chewing, tasting, swallowing, etc kind of feed the anxiety a bit. Again, nothing too overwhelming. I got through that. Poured myself more water, because dehydration, and now I'm sitting alone listening to music and tying this blog. These actions seem to be helping pretty well. I'm distracted by writing about my anxiety, for myself for sure, but also for you the other person going through these same patterns. Maybe today, maybe yesterday and maybe everyday. This is for you too. The music is another level of distraction all it's own. 1. Music is comforting in general. 2. If I fill my ears with controlled noise, like a song, I won't be negatively distracted by the noises in my house, my breathing, my heartbeat, the typing of the keyboard, etc. And of course I'm no more than 1 foot away from water, the life giving hydration fluid of this planet. This works for me. It's not a surefire, foolproof system, but more often than not this works. It took me a long time to figure this out. Despite how simple these activities may seem to be, when you're in an anxious state you are not thinking clearly. I'll write that again in capital letters to denote it's importance.

WHEN YOU'RE IN AN ANXIOUS STATE YOU ARE NOT THINKING CLEARLY!

Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point.

So, in the past when I was in a n anxious state ALL that I did was fight it. I would dive head first into those horrible ideas. You know that play going on in your head where everything comes at you at once and you're both the star of the show and everyone hates you? AND it's all your fault and you're also dieng. That play. Well that still happens but my reactions to this have gotten a lot better. Breathing, practicing acceptance, not indulging those thoughts, not focusing on every single bodily sensation, etc. These may vary for general anxiety and health anxiety (Hypochondria) I definitely have both. So, I'm not doing great right now, but I'm fine. I am fine. I'm not flooded with fight and flight chemicals. I'm not pacing, I'm not crawling out of my skin. I'm tired and a little wired. Not too bad. I've had anxiety for as long as I can remember and two years ago almost to the day I had my worst anxiety of my life. That caused me to become a real hypochondriac. I was back and forth to the doctor almost weekly for months. The whole year was up and down, then down, then up a little, then down again. On new years eve I was genuinely emotional, not cryin, but really happy and surprised that I lived through the entire year. During that year I started a VLOG and documented my anxiety experience almost everyday for about 6 months. I will put a link down below for that as well. It really, REALLY helped me when I recorded those videos and I actually got some great feedback from other people who watched them who told me it helped them as well. THat was my one and only goal. Sure becoming internet famous would be awesome, but my 47 subscribers were there just to hear what I was going through because I think we can all relate pretty well when it comes to anxiety. Check out my channel if you're curious.

I'll leave you with this:

Sleep is the number one most important thing that affects anxiety in my opinion. I say "my opinion" because I'm sure if you do some research you will see that there is a myriad of experts with a myriad of theories, but sleep feels like the most important. If you don't get enough sleep you will be tired, tired becomes exhausted, exhaustion leads to a lot of issues and anxiety is on top of that list for anyone so if you have chronic anxiety it's going to be an issue. My method, if you can call it that, is trying to be in bed on the "right side" of midnight. Meaning, if you go to bed before midnight you've ended your day on the same day. If you go to bed after midnight you're in a totally new day. So, the way that I look at it is, if you're going to bed at 12:30AM or 1AM or later you're already into the next day. You're trying to go to bed on the same day you have to wake up. You stayed awake through a whole day and didn't go back to sleep until the next day. Even if you don't have to wake up until after 9AM, you're still going to bed in the new day. This is not a good idea. Again, in my opinion. SLEEP!
SLEEP, SLEEP, SLEEP! Even I have trouble sometimes following this advice.

I hope this helped, even just a little bit.

LINKS (as promised)
Solfeggio Frequencies
My Youtube Channel

Be well!

Lou
AKA The Louniverse