Stress

I am not sure that I could accurately describe when I feel stressed. I think at this point it was more like a state of being than anything. After some recent education into the stress response and what it can do to your body, I can now confidently say for the 5-8 years I have almost certainly been under a constant level of stress. I was the physical embodiment of stress. For every minute I existed in that state my resilience (another vocab word!) decreased – slowly chipping away to the state I was in very recently. My resiliency was like wet toilet paper. The slightest motion even and it shreds apart – I was totally maxed out. Everything was a mountain, everything was impossible, my mind torturing itself with thoughts. For comparison it wasn’t until these past 2 years that I could accurately identify when I was anxious.

Its so bad that I actually do not remember what a relaxed state is. This has been my baseline for the better part of a decade. I started at stressed and only made my way higher. Cortisol is a chemical I learned about recently as something that releases from the brain when needing to “fight or flight”. It can do some serious damage to your insides and basic functioning. I don’t think it is possible to poison yourself with something your body makes but it is probably the best analogy I can think of. My whole existence was tainted with cortisol.

I never knew what the effects could be, I wasn’t educated in it enough. It didn’t even occur to me that it was something that could disrupt your body like this. I just always assumed I was tired – worked too hard.

• Anxiety
• Depression
• Digestive problems
• Headaches
• Muscle tension and pain
• Heart disease, heart attack, high blood pressure and stroke
• Sleep problems
• Weight gain
• Memory and concentration impairment

This is what cortisol can do to you. I have had every SINGLE one of these things. I already have ADHD and baseline anxiety – I was setting myself up for failure in a big way.

Obviously.

I have only been out of work for 9 days. I have lost almost 10 pounds and all I have been doing is sleeping, eating and zoning out. My face has thinned out. My muscles aren’t as bad but they used to always feel like I just came back from a workout – everything totally engaged. I don’t have motivation to do much but my thoughts are clearer and it is easier to recall things. Sleeping still sucks, my digestion is still messed up, and my anxiety is still pretty high – not nearly as bad as 2-3 weeks ago. I was the human personification of anxiety at that time.

This shit is REAL. On top of my poor decisions and lifestyle this has played an active role in ruining my quality of life. I totally believe it.

Ironically when in college I used to meditate and exercise and had things to release stress – I didn’t tie it to stress release but it was there, it was part of my routine. I was literally working 50% of the number of hours I was recently. I could build a healthy routine even if I didn’t understand why it was a healthy routine. It was just like something you were “supposed to do”.

I have decided to make a pact with myself. I don’t plan on taking any job without having some sort of built in balance in place. I am trying to build a certain level of hobbies – just signed up for singing lessons (had my first one!) something I have wanted to do for years but always made excuses. I take my first intro class to European Medieval Fencing in 10 days – another thing I have had years of excuses on why I “can’t”.

I don’t want to be where I was a month ago ever again. I was to the point where I was contending if I wanted to go to the hospital – it was that bad. A genuine crisis. Probably preventable with the right tool box. I was not equipped for that job.

My therapist says that studies have shown that people with as much of an intense level of burnout as I have had can take almost 2 years to full return to a baseline level of normalcy in their body chemistry. That right there is stressful.

It is not much of a coincidence that I feel a certain level of stress on thinking of methods to DEAL with stress. Just need to keep going.