Thank you. Yeah, I am very introspective and, lemme tell you, this has been the reason for a good chunk of my anxieties and, at times, profound sadness. I’ve learned to balance it, but in the past my over thinking and over analyzing led to lots of unpleasant moments that could have been avoided by just taking it easier.
That’s by far the hardest question to answer. I wasn’t able to do it even when my therapist asked me.
I’ll start by saying that, nowadays, I don’t have as many thoughts as I used to in the past, when these anxiety rushes happen. I mostly just get ticked off, and my inner talk goes like, “stop being a bitch and lemme just relax,” or, “great, here we go again. You’re silly for getting anxious about things that don’t matter, grow the fuck up.”
In the past, something different would happen. I would get submerged with emotions. Everything felt like it was under magnifying lens. I literally couldn’t listen to music at night because it would get me so emotional, in a way I still cannot describe today, to the point of crying.
All my nostalgia and memories, all that mattered the me and even things that didn’t, thinking about them would trigger strong emotional responses. I once went out for a walk at 3am because getting physically away from my bedroom felt like it could help, in that instance.
Anyway, bottom line is at night, everything became a potential source of emotion, anxiety, and worry. I felt “empty” in some way. The only thing that would carry me through was thinking about the next day, and how waking up would take all of that away from me. In fact, none of those feelings ever propagated to the following day. They lived and died at night.
The only exception was the very first night this happened. I wasn’t equipped to handle that. I completely fell victim of panic, and didn’t get a minute of sleep. The next day I skipped school in hope I’d sleep a bit in the morning, which I didn’t manage to, and the whole day was spent dreading the night that would come.
Now, should I spend a whole night awake, I wouldn’t feel compelled to not do anything the next day in a desperate attempt to make up for the lost sleep. I’d feel the opposite in fact. When I get little sleep now, the will to go about my day and show myself that I can function even without 8 hours of sleep powers me through. So something has changed.
Exactly. Some of those episodes really had me feel like I was on the verge of a panic attack.