5 things anxiety makes difficult (if not impossible!)

There are a number of things – normal, everyday things that are a part of life, or at least modern life – that are made very difficult, if not impossible, by anxiety. Perhaps this is anxiety in conjunction with other issues as well – OCD doesn’t help, certainly, depressive periods make it worse as well – but anxiety seems to be the root of most of these problems.

(1) Getting to sleep

Maybe the most obvious one, but my mind races at night. Problems that need solving. People that have treated me badly (and this can go back decades!). Things I should have done or said differently. The exact categorisation of what a shitty excuse for a human being I am in every respect. All of these are things that my mind apparently needs to go over in detail the instant I turn out the light.

(2) Replying to mails

This really should be the easiest thing on this list to do. After all, it’s emails. Somebody mails me something and I have to reply with a polite yes/no, click a link to tell them whether my child is going to show up for a football match a the weekend, or maybe it’s something personal like keeping in touch with an old friend.

For some reason though, I can’t do it. Emails sit in my inbox for days, weeks, and even months before I feel able to respond to them. Twitchy child #1’s team don’t always know if he’s showing up at the weekend because I couldn’t bring myself to click that “accept” link. Constant reminders come in that I should have paid a small amount of money to school for some trip or other, and friends probably think I hate them because I don’t reply.

Of course, I then feel more anxious and useless because I can’t complete these simple tasks, and the cycle continues the next day, and the next, and the next …

(3) Making phone calls

This is a problem I’ve always suffered from. I despise having to call people. Doesn’t matter if it’s friends, family or a company. Doesn’t matter if the call is a simple “hi” or a a complicated complaint I have to make. Picking up that phone and calling a person is torture.

Answering the phone is just as bad. These days I use a couple of apps to filter spam calls so at least I don’t have to talk to the constant stream of salespeople that used to make my life hell on a daily basis because their shitty company has bought some list of numbers that includes me.

I think this is a common issue, and perhaps it’s not connected to generalised anxiety, but it’s certainly not helped by it!

(4) Wishing people “Happy Birthday” on Facebook

You probably wouldn’t think this is difficult, but it creates a whole raft of worries that simply wouldn’t exist without Facebook and its stupid birthday reminders.

It’s so-and-so’s birthday today, wish them happy birthday! Write on their timeline. 8 million other people have wished Joe Bloggs a happy birthday, why are you such a useless curmudgeon that you can’t too?

I started by putting the obligatory “Happy Birthday” onto friends timelines, then I’d miss one or two and feel bad. Then I’d see reminders, and freeze. I couldn’t physically type the words “Happy Birthday”. I don’t know why – my brain simply wouldn’t let me.

In the end I put out a blanket disclaimer stating that I don’t “do” happy birthdays on Facebook. I repeat this every now and again for the simple reason that – of course – not saying happy birthday creates anxiety as well. I worry that people think I’m an awful person because I don’t do something that (for 90%  of them) I wouldn’t have done anyway because I never knew when their birthday was in the first place.

I still despise the daily birthday reminders. If I could turn them off, I would. Mind you, if I could ditch Facebook and still retain contact with the people I want to be in contact with, I would.

(5) Paying the bills / doing paperwork

Yet another one that is basically a problem feedback loop that usually ends up in me having to force myself to sit down and deal with everything in one massive, stress-inducing session.

Paying bills should be easy. I log into the bank, scan the invoice with my phone, and set the payment date. Job done. Can I do this? Unlike Bob the builder, no, I can’t. It’s multiple small tasks that build up, sometimes cause me extra costs in terms of late fees, always generate extra stress because I know I need to do it at some point, but somehow just never can.

Most of these are basically the same problem: my brain refuses to let me perform some simple task, so that the number of incomplete simple tasks builds and builds, I feel stressed out and incredibly anxious, assume I’m just a useless excuse for a human for not being able to deal with everything, and suddenly I can’t deal with even simpler tasks. 

I’m sure I’m not alone here, but it certainly feels like it sometimes. 

How to ruin a party for an anxious introvert

So I was at a party last night with Mrs. Twitchy and the boys. I knew 2 people – the parents of a friend of Twitchy Son #1 – and while they are nice people and I am friendly with them, I wouldn’t call them friends (though perhaps this is down to my strict definition of what constitutes a “friend”).

Anyway, a friend of the host (who I’ve met once before, at another party where I knew nobody), decided to call on everybody to introduce themselves. I didn’t know about this, as I’d gone to the bathroom, so when I got back I was suddenly put into the spotlight in front of 50+ people, and told that I had to reveal personal information about myself.

Now, consider that all of the following are true for me:

• I am an introvert
• I have had a stress related “breakdown” within the last few years, from which I haven’t fully recovered
• I don’t like talking about myself to strangers
• I don’t like parties where I don’t know the majority of people fairly well

When I was obviously reluctant to talk, this person then began revealing things about me that I don’t tell anybody other than those close to me. Presumably this info came from Mrs. T originally. Nothing anybody would consider embarrassing I don’t think, but that’s not the point. They were things that I would not have revealed to this group of random strangers.

In the end I was a bit abrupt, got them to move on to the next victim guest, and then snuck off to try and fight off the invisible golem that seemed to be sitting on my chest making it difficult to breathe.

Mrs. T came around shortly looking for me, and after some initial sympathy, began quizzing me on why I couldn’t return to the party, as my “part” was now over and I could just listen to others, because how did I make new friends anyway (answer: infrequently, and with difficulty); how was it OK that I would go to meetings with people I’d only ever met online, while this caused me problems; and finally, what right did I have to be angry at the person that humiliated me in public and brought on a severe anxiety attack?

This is a tale without a happy ending really. It’s more to make you feel less alone if something similar has ever happened to you. If you’re reading this and you identify with one of the other players in this somewhat minor and insignificant (to them) drama, then I have 2 things to say:

1. Don’t assume that everybody likes being put in the spotlight. I know we live in a world where it seems like everybody want’s to be a celebrity. Let me assure you though, everybody most certainly does not.
2. If you are trying to calm somebody who is having a panic attack, then questioning the validity of that attack is not the way to go. If you have opinions then keep them to your damn self. If you have questions, then save them for the day after when the victim is (hopefully) feeling better able to answer them. And when you ask them, please do it an a non-accusatory fashion.

MTotD #8

If traditional planners and agendas don’t work, have you tried bullet journaling? https://t.co/mvYxZc9bcT #ocd #biztips #productivity pic.twitter.com/4t3YuWTO8P

— hitContinue (@hitContinue) July 5, 2017

No, being organised is not the same as having OCD. Furthermore, to link OCD to being productive is a slap in the face to all the people with OCD that simply can’t get anything at all done because their condition gets in the way.

Crawling out of my skin

It’s been a long time since I posted here. Largely because I didn’t really think I had much to contribute to the discussion or the community. I’ve just kind of been trying to get on with life. Perhaps I’ll update you all with some of that in another post.

Today though, has been awful, and I just feel the need to write it down.

Today I have not been able to sit still, yet neither can I do anything.

I don’t mean that I’m jiggling my legs or twitching a bit (or a lot). I mean – quite literally – that it hurts me to sit still and try and work. Like, physical pain. And mental pain of course in the form of anxiety.

Because … and here’s the kicker … I can’t actually do anything either.

Again, not that I’m not physically capable of doing something, just that I … well, can’t. Something in my head isn’t letting me. I should go out for a run, or a walk, or stand on my head, or something. It’s just that this ridiculous brain of mine seems to have something against taking action.

This conflict between needing to take action and not being able to seems to lead to me wanting to rip off my own skin to get to whatever is crawling around underneath it.

I don’t want to minimise anything that addicts might go through with withdrawal symptoms, and I have no experience of that (beyond giving up caffeine many years back, which sucked for a few days), but I can kind of imagine that this might be what it feels like.

An army of microscopic ant-like things crawling around just under your skin. Close enough to the surface to make you think that perhaps … just perhaps … you might be able to get rid of them if only you peeled off a the top layer or two.

Put this together with a heart that feels like it’s trying to escape from my chest, and a kind of numb left arm (no, not the heart attack/stroke kind of numb – this is … odd. It feels more like it belongs to somebody else, even though I have full control. I actually suspect it’s some form of RSI from too much time working at the keyboard – I use my left hand for the mouse due to earlier RSI type injuries brought on by excessive mouse usage, so … ).

 

Thrown out of therapy – a modern Catch-22

So, my CBT therapist basically told me she couldn’t help me and threw me out. In a polite way, that is.

I’m pretty sure this is due to my OCD, though that’s not what this therapy was for.

To recap: I had a CBT therapist to help with Tourettes tics and OCD issues, then when I hit the wall last October we put that on hold. I then got a referral to another CBT therapist to see if I could get help with stress and anxiety problems. It is this one that couldn’t help me.

I think the problem was pretty simple really. I understood the concept – that I need to make changes “within myself” so that I am better able to deal with external situations. I understood that I get myself into stressful situations in my head by being too hard on myself when it comes to what I expect myself (and others) to deliver. I understand that I need to embrace the concept of “good enough” if I am to make any headway here, and that the black-white thinking of “that works” vs. “that’s wrong” is not doing me any favours.

The problem is that I just can’t see any way to make a change. It’s as though she’d asked me to tell her that the sun was blue.

She called me a 120-percenter, meaning that I expect 120% from myself and others, and that I should be able to drop to 100%. Of course being a mathematician at heart, and an OCD sufferer, I pointed out that I certainly don’t expect more than 100% from anybody, since this is impossible, and that I find the phrase “giving it 110%” rather offensive. I don’t think I did myself any favours with her there …

The issue for me is that things are pretty black and white. Either I (and others) do the job that is expected of them, or we don’t. Saying something is “good enough”, when really it’s incomplete and will come back to bite me or somebody else on the arse later on is far from good enough. I can certainly appreciate that people make mistakes. I can appreciate that I am part of a big organisation. I can appreciate that people are pushed for time and sometimes things happen more slowly than I would like. I understand all these things – they annoy me, but I understand them, and when you get down to it they cause me only low level stress.

No, it’s the things that do take time (either because they’re big tasks, or because I need to to somebody else’s job as well in order to get them done) that are the problem. If I could drop these things halfway through and say they were good enough, then perhaps I would experience less stress. Then again, I would feel bad because I hadn’t done a decent job. This isn’t fair to my team (who a lot of these things directly affect), or to anybody else that has to come along and sort out my mess later on.

So I’m left feeling like Yossarian:

I am stressed because I feel I have to do things properly, but don’t have the time or the resources, and if I don’t do things properly, then I will become more stressed.

Anybody got a solution that doesn’t involve saying things like “it’s just work, don’t worry so much about it”?

 

Anxiety as a feedback loop

Douglas Hofstader has claimed that “I am a strange loop”. While I’m not sure I agreed with everything he was saying there, I do think that feedback loops play an important part in our mental health.

We live in a society where everything is not only measurable, but measured. We know how many friends we have (eg. Facebook), we know how many work contacts we have (LinkedIn), we know how big of an impact our words have (eg. Twitter and other platforms). There are various aggregators which can score us based on all our social media accounts and tell us how much of an overall influence we have on the other denizens of the webbynets.

Then we get to all the apps that we influct upon ourselves: how far have I run recently, and how quickly did I do it?; how many steps have I walked today and does it meet my daily goal of 10,000? Should I walk around the block if I’m on 9,200 at 11pm?; how often have I been to the gym?; how many calories have I consumed?; how many units of alcohol did I drink last week?; how may times did I defecate last month and what was the average consistency?

OK, the last one is not an app as far as I am aware. But it could be! Health apps are huge right now, and getting bigger by the day. Smart watches measure your heart-rate, how well you sleep, how far you walk, how many steps you climb and give instant feedback on how active or slothful you are.

Face-slapping with the wet fish of inadequacy

This is all well and good if you manage to fit all these things in. For those of us who don’t, which I suspect is around 99% of us – you know, people with jobs, commutes, children etc., this is simply a constant reminder of how naff we are. It’s repeated slaps in the face with the wet fish of inadequacy.

The woman next door manages to do yoga five times a week, why can’t I? The guy across the street gets up at 5:30 to go for a 10km run every day – what’s so wrong with me that I can’t do that?

Now I work in IT, often with processes. And there is a general understanding that if you can’t measure something, then you can’t improve it.

This is bollocks.

What you can’t do if you don’t measure something is know exactly how much you have improved. But if you have a genuinely crap process that fails at every point and you manage to change something so that the customer actually gets their product on time, then you have improved it.

Sure, you haven’t measured the customer satisfaction level before and after, and you don’t know how much less time they spend ringing in to customer care and costing you money that way, but you do know that it’s better than it was.

It’s the same with our day-to-day life. Or at least I think so.

If you are a marathon runner, and you calculate your VO2 max for every training session, have 5% bodyfat and would like to get your marathon time down to under 2 1/2 hours, then I think there is a point in you measuring all your various health parameters.

If you are a couch potato or simply never have time to exercise, then you know if you’ve improved simply by the fact that you remember putting on your running shoes and jogging to the shops and back. It doesn’t matter how fast you did it or what your maximum heart-rate was. You got out and exercised. 10 points to you!

In this instance, measuring how well you’re doing will likely just make you feel bad. You can’t run more than a couple of km without feeling like you’re having a coronary, and you have no idea what VO2 max even means. Measuring all this stuff – and worse, linking Runkeeper to Facebook so that everybody sees those measurements – is just a way to compare yourself to people that are much further down this particular road than you are, and we all know that comparing yourself to other people is not the route to a happy life.

I got a Samsung gear fit for my birthday last summer. It’s great. It measures loads of stuff and stores all the info in an app on my phone.

I stopped wearing it in October, a couple of days before my body gave in completely and I crashed for 3 months.

I’m pretty sure I should have seen this as a sign that something big and bad was coming.

I’m seriously considering selling the Gear Fit now, and perhaps running an unknown number of kilometers in an approximate time with no knowledge of my heart-rate, maximum and minimum altitude or any of the other bits that I seemed to want to store away before.

Any buyers?

Misconceptions about the Severity Spectrum of OCD

I really have no thoughts to add to this post that the original author doesn’t already express!

My OCD Voice

Every once in a while I will search on YouTube for videos raising awareness about OCD. In some videos the person making it will interview people without OCD, asking what they think OCD is. (Here are two prime examples: 1  and 2). I find these interviews fascinating.  Not only are there huge misunderstandings held by many people about what OCD is, but there also seem to be general trends within these misunderstandings.

I noticed a lot of the misconceptions about OCD were about what the spectrum looks like. The misconceptions revealed in these interviews kept painting in a picture in my head about what people seem to think the spectrum looks like and what it actually looks like. I decided to finally make an attempt to draw the chart I was imaging.

Many people seem to think everyone is a little OCD and a few people they may have heard about in the news…

View original post 211 more words

Finally … something that worked!

It’s been a little while since I wrote anything about my personal journey here, so I thought I’d get back to it.

My last post on the subject – Side Effects – detailed what happened when the psychiatrist I was referred to decided to throw a boatload of random medication at me because he didn’t have a clue what to do otherwise (oops, sorry, perhaps I should have put a cynicism warning in there earlier …). This post picks up where that left off.

So, I’d resolved to give the fluoxetine a chance, but when I saw no effects other than being overly tired and being less able to focus on things, I quit taking it in February 2014. One of the last things that the psychiatrist did was to refer me to a CBT unit that deals with OCD, ADHD and other related issues. I’ll talk about this in another post, mainly because it’s still ongoing – albeit on hold due to the recent problems with stress.

This time I would like to tell you what happened when my original referral to the neurologist finally came through.

The appointment itself was pretty quick, so I’ll summarise it for easy reading:

Neurologist: So, you’ve been referred for Tourette Syndrome. Tell me about the problem.

I describe my history, along with current symptoms, and the reason I sought help in the first place – the tooth touching/grinding tic that had manifested itself about 6 months previously.

I also describe my experience with the psychiatrist, and the side effects of the medication. There is a good deal of eye-rolling from the neurologist as I tell him this bit, but he’s obviously too polite to say anything about it.

N: Yes, I’d say you have TS, and OCD. You know there’s no point medicating you since anything I give you that will actually stop the tics will also stop you doing pretty much everything else.

Me: That’s fine. I don’t want medication if I can help it. I just wanted to talk to somebody that knows about this, and get an expert opinion and some advice.

N: There is one thing I can do for the tooth problem. Botox.

He then goes on to explain that he would inject me in the jaw (lower jaw, and also upper jaw between my eye and ear). This would weaken the muscles and hopefully reduce the ticcing compulsion.

Not me after Botox!

I give it a bit of thought and say OK. He does it there and then. I say thank you and leave.

That’s about it. The neurologist suggested that it would take about a week to take effect, though I found it was closer to 2 weeks, but that specific tic seemed to go into remission.

It hasn’t disappeared completely and does come back a little from time to time, but it doesn’t seem to stick around like it was doing before, and I’m no longer worried that I’ll destroy my teeth. The permanent headache I had also disappeared.

A few people I’ve mentioned this too have denigrated the botox approach for various reasons. I can only say that it seems to have worked for me. Here’s my theory as to how it works:

Firstly, I had only had that tic about 6 months, not a lifetime, so it may not have been as deeply ingrained in my neural pathways as it is for some people. This may or may not have made it easier to treat in this way.

The Botox weakens the muscles, which in turn reduces the intensity of the physical movements involved in the tic. This in turn means that there is less feedback when the tick is performed. Less feedback means less reinforcement for the tic in the brain, and the whole process that solidifies these tics in our neural pathways (whatever the hell that is!) is undermined, and the tic sort of fades away.

That’s my theory anyway.

 

Internal Monologue

Everybody has some kind of internal monologue. I think. At any rate xkcd had a strip about it, so I know it’s not only me …

xkcd: Internal Monologue

For my (Aspergers-slash-OCD) part I can certainly relate to the mouse-over text on the cartoon:

Oh right, eye contact. Ok, good, holding the eye contact … holding … still holding … ok, too long! Getting weird! Quick, look thoughtfully into space and nod. Oh, dammit, said ‘yeah’ again!

It’s part of the reason that I’m not so keen on parties with a lot of people that I don’t know very well. I spend all my time trying to pass for normal and none of my time actually enjoying myself. The alternative is to drink too much, but I’m pretty sure that would produce a worse result …

What I wanted to talk about though was how I think my internal monologue differs from other people’s. Or at least other neurotypical people. And here I’m not sure quite which one of my conditions causes the differences – probably a combination.

Problem 1:

I get stuck on a thought in my head, much like a broken record. It can be absolutely anything, but more often than not it’s something it’s something I was considering saying, or wished I had said in a specific scenario. That scenario doesn’t need to be current, or even recent. I can—and frequently do—drift off and get stuck on a response to a situation that upset me several years ago.

What happens then is I repeat the thought over and over in my head, possibly with minor variations, to the exclusion of all else.

If somebody happens to be talking to me at this point then it can be pretty embarrassing as I have no idea what they are saying. I have become a bit of a pro about covering this up, but it has got me into some sticky situations both at work and in my personal life.

Problem 2:

This is also a “stuck record” problem, but far more noticeable. I can end up actually vocalising sounds.

This can happen with any sound, but seems more frequent with “explosive” sounds like “p”, or “b”. I’ll be just sat there going “puh, puh, puh, puh …”, my lips moving and emitting these small sounds.

On the plus side, if you want a seat to yourself on public transport, this is the way to get it.

On the downside, I tend to feel like a complete idiot.

These 2 problems are, I think, really just one problem. It’s just that I sometimes get the compulsion to vocalise it. I think it’s when my brain gets stuck on sounds, rather than meanings that this happens.

It’s almost like my OCD fixates on something to the extent that it turns it into a temporary tic, but since OCD and TS are so bound up in each other it’s rather hard to be sure.

Problem 3:

This one is a different problem, and can basically be described as Intrusive Thoughts. I think this is deserving of it’s own post at some point. I’m also pretty sure this is pure OCD related.

So, I’m wondering. Is this just me? Is it just TS and/or OCD sufferers? Or is it perhaps everybody that has these problems and I’m just wildly blaming my disorders for something that’s perfectly normal but just bugs the hell out of me?

 

Why I dislike “The Rosie Project”

I’ve been seeing Graeme Simsion’s “The Rosie Project” in various Amazon lists for a while now, so when I saw it in a charity shop in the UK over Christmas I picked it up.

Since the main character (Don Tillman) has ASD of some description (in the book they are insinuating that it is Aspergers), I thought it relevant to talk about it here a bit.

The book itself is well enough written. It’s a boy-meets-girl romcom. Unfortunately most of the “laughs” come from the fact that Don himself is socially inept. The author also manages to seriously misrepresent Aspergers, even to the extent that he seems to be confusing it with sociopathy!

Don is painted as (and even explicitly described as on a couple of occasions) somebody incapable of feeling love or empathy. At one point near the beginning he is giving a lecture on Aspergers to a group of children with the condition and their parents (there is supposed to be irony here I think, as he is not aware that he has it himself for some reason). He uses the (rather tired) example of trying to keep a baby quiet to stop the Nazis discovering the hiding place of a Jewish family, but the reasoning is based on a lack of empathy.

To those non Aspergers sufferers, let me be clear: Aspergers sufferers do not generally lack empathy. The problem is that they have serious trouble reading social cues, and often do not realise when somebody is in distress, or react or respond in an inappropriate way because they haven’t spotted the subtext.

Aspergers sufferers would not randomly kill a baby as the first choice to solve a problem. They are not socio- or psychopaths.

I think the worst faux-pas of the book comes near the end though. Don decides that in order to get Rosie-who he has logically deduced he is in love with-he will give up many of his routines and obsessions (pretty sure Don is also OCD), and become more flexible.

Oh, good. I didn’t realise that curing Aspergers and OCD was as simple as just deciding not to have the symptoms any more. Right, job done, tell the doctors and we can all go home and live a much simpler life.

I’m not saying don’t read it. As I say, there is some decent writing in there, and some genuinely amusing/touching moments. I do wish that the author would take the time to learn about a condition properly before he writes about it though. Perhaps this will be rectified in the second book, though I don’t think I’ll be reading that one I’m afraid.