cpe1978
24-01-14, 11:35
Hi All,
I hope you are all doing ok. I dont pop by here as much as I used to. In part because I am not entirely sure it was doing me any good, but also i had sort of run out of sensible things to say :)
However over the past few days I have found myself pondering whether or not it is possible ever to reach the end goal I aspire for.
Six months ago I was a mess. I could barely function, I would go to work and do the bare minimum, meanwhile googling frantically amongst a whole host of other negative behaviours. I took a whole host of steps to resolve that which I won't go into detail about now as I have written extensively about them here before. In reality, were you to tell me six months ago that I would even be thinking about this as a problem i would have told you, that you had lost the plot. Moreover, if you were to tell me that I could have got myself to a place where i work hard and play harder from someone who wanted to stay in bed all the time and await there fate then I would have said the same.
But.....I am stuck. I have dealt quite effectively i think with strategies to prevent the panic and anxiety response. I can as a general rule cut that off at the pass, and whilst I will always be slightly highly strung, I now have gone a number of months without any sort of melt down.
I am still anxious though. I feel like I have the sort of background insidious anxiety that just gnores away at you. I dont feel anxious, but then when I reflect on a day and think about how many times my health has featured in my thoughts I realise that my mind is still phenomenally active in that regard.
I have always been quite an optimistic person, a planner, someone who is always looking for great things to do and enjoy, but in the past year or so that has gone. And although I dont call 999 every time I see a new scratch or funny coloured stool, I do have a constant underlying concern that holds me back in a much more subtle way than the crippling panic response I once experienced.
Most of the strategies that people talk about in terms of HA respond to the panic, and in the main are about coping with that, learning to relax etc. I want to understand how to recalibrate my view on life - maybe that is expecting too much, maybe I am impatient and that will come with time.
I know statistically that there is something like a 998 in 1,000 chance of me reaching my 60th birthday. In any other field i would take those odds and be betting heavily on it, and not expecting to be disappointed. But I cant shake the feeling that i will be the 2 in 1000 and then feel horrendously guilty about the people who are.
I want to alter my initial response to things even though there are not laced with panic. So for instance, at the moment I have a bad back and it is getting worse. In the old days my brain would have ignored it completely and would only have viewed it as a problem when i basically could no longer walk through over doing it. In the old days my brain would have said I have a rubbish mattress with a new one arriving Monday. My current brain says, I have a bad back, what horrible thing could that be? Again - not in a panicky way, but in an intrusive way which then leads to negative thoughts and scenarios spending too long in my head!
I hope I have explained this ok and I have a follow up CBT appointment in a few weeks when I am going to talk this through, but I wondered if anyone had any thoughts or experience of what I perceive to be crossing the final hurdle.
Stay well everyone. Even though I havent been posting much I have been popping by to see how everyone is moving forwards.
I hope you are all doing ok. I dont pop by here as much as I used to. In part because I am not entirely sure it was doing me any good, but also i had sort of run out of sensible things to say :)
However over the past few days I have found myself pondering whether or not it is possible ever to reach the end goal I aspire for.
Six months ago I was a mess. I could barely function, I would go to work and do the bare minimum, meanwhile googling frantically amongst a whole host of other negative behaviours. I took a whole host of steps to resolve that which I won't go into detail about now as I have written extensively about them here before. In reality, were you to tell me six months ago that I would even be thinking about this as a problem i would have told you, that you had lost the plot. Moreover, if you were to tell me that I could have got myself to a place where i work hard and play harder from someone who wanted to stay in bed all the time and await there fate then I would have said the same.
But.....I am stuck. I have dealt quite effectively i think with strategies to prevent the panic and anxiety response. I can as a general rule cut that off at the pass, and whilst I will always be slightly highly strung, I now have gone a number of months without any sort of melt down.
I am still anxious though. I feel like I have the sort of background insidious anxiety that just gnores away at you. I dont feel anxious, but then when I reflect on a day and think about how many times my health has featured in my thoughts I realise that my mind is still phenomenally active in that regard.
I have always been quite an optimistic person, a planner, someone who is always looking for great things to do and enjoy, but in the past year or so that has gone. And although I dont call 999 every time I see a new scratch or funny coloured stool, I do have a constant underlying concern that holds me back in a much more subtle way than the crippling panic response I once experienced.
Most of the strategies that people talk about in terms of HA respond to the panic, and in the main are about coping with that, learning to relax etc. I want to understand how to recalibrate my view on life - maybe that is expecting too much, maybe I am impatient and that will come with time.
I know statistically that there is something like a 998 in 1,000 chance of me reaching my 60th birthday. In any other field i would take those odds and be betting heavily on it, and not expecting to be disappointed. But I cant shake the feeling that i will be the 2 in 1000 and then feel horrendously guilty about the people who are.
I want to alter my initial response to things even though there are not laced with panic. So for instance, at the moment I have a bad back and it is getting worse. In the old days my brain would have ignored it completely and would only have viewed it as a problem when i basically could no longer walk through over doing it. In the old days my brain would have said I have a rubbish mattress with a new one arriving Monday. My current brain says, I have a bad back, what horrible thing could that be? Again - not in a panicky way, but in an intrusive way which then leads to negative thoughts and scenarios spending too long in my head!
I hope I have explained this ok and I have a follow up CBT appointment in a few weeks when I am going to talk this through, but I wondered if anyone had any thoughts or experience of what I perceive to be crossing the final hurdle.
Stay well everyone. Even though I havent been posting much I have been popping by to see how everyone is moving forwards.