Feeling low this morning

[Sparkle1984]

I haven't been on these forums much in the last year as I've been feeling fine for most of the time. 2 to 3 years ago I was very active here, as I went through a couple of bad anxiety episodes in summer 2012 and spring 2013. I recovered from this last year and came off my medication 6 months ago, after a 4-month weaning off period.

There have been occasions in the last month or so where I've had blips, but thankfully they haven't lasted more than a day or so. During these blips, I feel jittery, have a nauseous feeling in the back of my throat, sometimes have butterflies in my tummy and also feel like there's not much hope for the future. In the back of my mind, I'm nervous that one of these days, a blip may turn into a full-blown relapse that would take months to recover from. :weep:

So this morning I woke up feeling rather low. I didn't go to bed until very late last night (this is a bad habit of mine, especially when I don't have to go to work the next morning). Last night I went out with all my best friends for a meal and 10-pin bowling and overall I really enjoyed the evening. I didn't get to sleep until nearly 3am last night, as I was fiddling with Facebook and Twitter on my phone once I'd got home. With modern technology, it feels like I just can't switch off.

I'm the kind of person who needs 8 hours sleep at night in order to feel OK, but because of my bad habits I rarely get this nowadays, even at weekends. By the time it got to about 8am, I kept waking up every 30 minutes or so, feeling bad that everyone else was out and about and I was still stuck in bed. I finally got up just before 11am, but I had some really bad dreams and flashbacks to this time 2 years ago, when I was going through a bad anxiety episode and felt really low. I dreamt that I would end up like that again, and that I lost interest and enthusiasm for all my hobbies. In the dream, I even lost enthusiasm for learning more about IT, which is one of my main hobbies and is also the industry in which I work. I remember feeling in the dream that I didn't have much hope for the future and everything felt hopeless. These feelings continued even when I woke up and I felt tearful. :weep:

Quite a lot has been going on in the last few months. A couple of acquaintainces have passed away in the last 2 months. Even though I wasn't particularly close to either of these people, they both died very suddenly and were only middle-aged, which made it come as a shock.
There has been uncertainty at work - several people in my department have been made redundant, and although my team is thankfully safe, budget cuts have meant that there is a pay freeze and promotion freeze, so I sometimes feel like I'm in a dead-end and can't progress. It often seems like the only way to get promoted in this company is if someone above you leaves or gets promoted, and you apply for their job. I am a junior developer but would like to become non-junior.
One of my best friends (who was at the meal last night) has been going through severe depression and anxiety for the last year, much worse than anything I went through, and I have tried my best to support her but it doesn't seem like she's getting any better. She has tried 2 medications so far, neither of which have worked, and she has been off work since about June last year. Last month she was let go from her job completely due to "long-term incapacity to work". She doesn't like to talk about her deepest feelings very much - she is very shy and has said she is afraid/embarrassed that she might burst into tears if she talked about her problems. She has always been a very private person, but she has admitted that she sometimes gets suicidal thoughts and she did go through a period of self-harm when she was a teenager. So I am concerned about her wellbeing, but at the same time I don't feel like I can support her as much as I'd like to. Although she has been to group Stress Control sessions, I don't think she has been offered much in the way of individual counselling or therapy. It seems like she's not getting much support from the local authorities other than medication. My friend has admitted that she can often spend whole days at home in tears, and it's upsetting for me to know she's suffering in this way. She has always been a very kind person and we've known each other since starting high school together almost 20 years ago! My friend always seems OK when she comes out with our group of friends, but I know she is hiding her true feelings, just as I did when I was going through it all myself.
On top of all these things, I must admit that negative events in the news also have some effect on my moods. I hate to think that anyone is suffering.

Also, I don't know why, but virtually all my episodes have started in the spring or summer. Spring always used to be one of my favourite seasons when I was younger, especially because of the daffodils, bluebells and warmer weather, but in recent years it seems that spring is negatively linked in my mind with anxiety/depression, kind of like a reverse seasonal affective disorder (SAD).

Last year, I felt the best I'd felt in many years, but now it feels like things are starting to go downhill again. :weep:

[NoPoet]

Hi, it sounds like your blip has come about because of a combination of things: the negative events that have happened, your tiredness and the fact that you presumably still fear what you've been though/what you're going through.

Here are a few tips:

* A common symptom of GAD is a feeling of hopelessness: This presumably comes about because we think of doing things in the future while feeling the way we do now. This is one of anxiety's most basic traps and it is not realistic - it's biased. Imagine if, instead of seeing things going wrong, you could catch a glimpse of yourself out in the countryside with family, three years from now, laughing and having fun and knowing that your anxiety was cured forever. Try thinking about that for a while. You might resist it at first because that's what we do when we're anxious. It might even make you feel more anxious at first. Relax, take deep breaths and imagine yourself beating the anxiety.

* Low mood/depression might be anxiety: In my own case, I regularly used to mistake severe anxiety for depression or low mood. Your mood will not be brilliant while you're scared to death. This is a normal reaction.

* Negative life events: Bad things usually happen less frequently than good and neutral things. This is a statistical fact. Everyone has those days/weeks where things go wrong, and every so often something terrible might happen. But as you start to take ownership of yourself and increase your confidence, you will become far better at dealing with these things if they do happen. In any case, the majority of things anxious people worry about either never happen, or cannot happen, or don't exist (such as perceived physical or character flaws which nobody else sees in you); even if they do happen, they are either less terrible than expected in most cases, or we handle them better than we expect/give ourselves credit for.

* A blip is not the same as a relapse: "Blip" implies that it is a temporary reversal. the worst blips can rage for weeks and make you feel horrendous, but eventually you get past them, especially if you can relax, breathe deeply and stand your ground even when the storm is raging. A relapse is when someone who declares themselves totally recovered becomes ill again. People who relapse seem to do so because they never really learned to handle their problems, and/or were scared of slipping backwards. This is called "return of fear". They fear the return of the illness, and that fear brings the old fears to life.

* Uncertainty is life: Anxious people feel very uncertain, and get into a battle with themselves as they try to provide certainty and stability. This is where obsessional behaviour and just plain old worrying begin. The people who suffer less anxiety and have more confidence are the ones who are naturally able to "roll with it" - they accept whatever comes their way, whether life gives them roses or flings a spadeful of manure into their faces.

* Bad days just happen: You're a human and you will have good and bad days. In many ways this is the hardest to accept as we dread/fear the bad days, but that's just the anxiety doing its thing. Some days, things just don't go right, our brains don't seem to work properly. Other days are good days, we just choose to see the one bad thing that happened and write everything else off. (Another example of the bias.) There is always tomorrow. There is always the next minute.

[HunniBee]

Hey Sparkle,

I understand how you feel at the moment as I'm feeling the same.
It's hard to try to fight all the time when it just feels so much easier to give in and succumb to it. But please don't. Please fight and show this ******* illness what you're made of!!

I'm a fine one to talk as I can hand out advice until I'm blue in the face but taking it is another matter! Lol.

Talk to it if you have too, tell it that you accept it because anxiety feeds off of you trying to fight it but that's what you are doing by accepting it, just ride it out and if you need to talk I'm always here :) just like everyone here.

HB xx

[Sparkle1984]

Thanks for your replies. :) I've decided that for once and for all, I'm going to have to fix my bad sleep habits. Yesterday I forced myself off to bed just after 11pm (instead of staying up until 2am) and got up at 8.30am. I feel a lot better for it. As I drifted off to sleep last night, I was listening to one of my meditation (mindfulness of breath) MP3s and I also imagined I was lying on a bed of cherry blossoms! :) I just hope I can stick to this routine every evening.

I feel better this morning and I'm going to try and get back into some of the things that interested me a few months ago. :)

It is very true that most of the things I've worried about never actually happen, and if they do happen they aren't as bad as I feared or I cope with them better than expected. I'll try and hold on to that thought.