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I kind of feel the same way, except instead of leaving the situation I move into a mode of challenging myself to be a better person. I start to very deeply look at myself and understand myself on levels most people can’t come close to grasping. It’s one thing to analyze others, it’s an entirely different challenge analyzing yourself in any given situation, modifying your behaviour and then further analysis.
This has helped save a number of my relationships because I can disconnect from people who are very close to me very easily. Seriously, it’s almost scary. I had to start deciding wether I want to shut out everyone who I have out grown, bores me, annoys me, makes me feel uncomfortable, ect OR do I want some form of companionship that can trust me to not drop them like a hot potato.
Trust me. 7 years with the same person and a year from a wedding, it has not been easy, but it’s worth holding onto people that challenge you to be back on earth with the boring people because that’s where we are.
If you can find someone that is willing to put up with you while you learn to do this then don’t let go because you are probably challenging each other in more ways than either of you realize and it’s probably not a bad thing.
REPORT ABUSE@redarno,
Something that has recently helped me to get out of the vortex of doom is getting out of the mindset of trying to fix what’s wrong with me and really focusing on how I can get even better at the things that are right with me.
I suck at what I suck at and I’m going to be amazing at what I’m good at. And it’s just too damn bad if anyone has a problem with the things I suck at. Sure I will work on them, but I have no problems if I’m not perfect at them because I’m the only one that I need to impress. No one else is in charge of getting my body and mind to do things so I’m not going to worry about what they think in regards to what I can and cannot do.
Try to lay off the drill sergeant and give yourself credit where credit is due, even if its simply getting out of bed today. I find that when I celebrate the little wins, like getting out of bed or preparing supper instead of eating out, I am much more likely to do more than if I constantly tell myself that whatever I do isn’t good enough.
So my advice sums up to forgetting to fix what’s ‘wrong’ with you and excel at what’s right, screw other peoples judgements because they don’t know what it takes to run your mind/body and don’t treat yourself any worse than you would treat anyone else because your just a human too.
REPORT ABUSEThat’s great! Any progress is progress and that alone somedays is worth celebrating. I’m glad to hear that your trying to take care of yourself and you are respecting your limits.
Good luck with your last call and I hope it will go adequately. Try not to stress more than is rationally required.
REPORT ABUSEI find that my ADHD can make my anxiety worse when the ADHD isn’t treated. I feel that when my anxiety decides to get out of hand my hyper focus on it can make it way worse to the point of crippling attacks and spiralled out of control thinking. With medication I find that I can more easily pay attention and notice when my anxiety is building up so that I can deal with it before it gets out of hand.
Medications specifically I find that a concerta (a long lasting, slow release ADHD drug) works really well for me from about 8AM until about 2 PM. If I have to last longer with attention I will take an afternoon ritalin SR no later than 4PM. I found that it took me about 6 months to get use to feeling like to completely different people in one day. There was the medicated me with a clear, energetic, relatively quiet and focused mind. Then there was the after meds worn off me with the mental cob webs, no patients, and confused me.
I’m not use to it and my partner has gotten use to it. We know that there is no point in serious conversation in the late evening because I won’t remember and can’t logic as well. He has also learned that if I say ‘I’m tired’ it’s code for I have no patients and I will rudely inform you when you act like an idiot.
Hang in there. Once you figure out what works for you the abrupt changes you are experiencing now will totally be worth it.
REPORT ABUSEI was a little apprehensive posting advice because what works for me isn’t always appreciated by others.
I’m glad it was helpful!
REPORT ABUSEWhat is the worst possible thing they could say, keeping in mind that most people are reasonable human beings that don’t appreciate conflict?
Could be what your avoiding is a false perception of what is required of you and is made worse by habitual inaccurate anxiety and anticipation for this type of situation?
Perhaps it would help to accept that you can do what you can do and only you can decide what or how much that is. With that, there is no doing any more than you feel you can and wether others choose to accept that is their choice.
You are worthy of limits and you are the only person in charge of maintaing/running your body so you are the only one that can understand when its had enough, and that’s ok, as long as you put in what effort you understand is acceptable for yourself with out overdoing it.
Maybe try understand your perception of the situation and whether it should be re-defined or no. Then do what you can do today and leave what you can’t for tomorrow.
This thought process really helps me when my anxiety flairs up. Good luck!
REPORT ABUSEI had the same problem my entire life. I now am able to sleep and be a functioning human being during the day, it’s a complete 180 and I cannot go back to sleepless nights. For the first time in my life I sleep and don’t move for up to 6 hours at a time instead of needing complete dark, complete silence and complete motionlessness from my environment and still waking up every hour or two to roll over. I go to bed and I am asleep with in 20 min not the usual 3 hours, two movies, a chapter or two, a soothing sound track and one major problem solved.
I have accomplished this through
1) taking my meds in the MORNING, EVERY morning. Im talking like ‘normal people’ morning. Anywhere from 6-8AM EVEN on weekends. If not I am super laggy, lounge around all day and don’t use my brain during the proper parts of my day so when 10PM comes around my brain still has the ‘go’ as though it was noon.
2) routine! I really try to take my meds, even on weekends. I also really try to go to bed around 10-11, even on weekends. One late night or one missed med day and I immediately revert back to the no sleep, light sleeping, and solving the worlds problems as I watch my fiancé slumber peacefully at 2AM. This is enough to ruin my up coming week. Monday I’m exhausted and miserable, Tuesday I dedicate to still trying to rebuild my routine and make up for the monster I was yesterday. About Wednesday I am almost back to my good sleep routine.
3) NO NAPS! Yes I said it. All it takes is one afternoon nap for my body to become laggy and crave it for a number of days to follow, which completely ruins my next number of afternoons.
4) be on the ball with med renews. HA! This is a tough one, especially when my pharmacist doesn’t tell me that I’m on my last bottle and am up for a renew, or she has and I have again misplaced my mental note pad. Again all it takes is for me to miss one dose and I’m right back to my typical inattentiveness in class, fidgety (rocking, bouncing a leg, wanting to poke my partner in the face when he is talking to me, ect), and above all I’m right back to not sleeping.
Oh and I forgot to mention the only thing that is worse than missing my meds, is allowing myself to become overtired when I have taken my meds. Routine! If I force myself to stay up later than when my body says ‘bed time’ even though my brain says ‘but I want to party’ then it is like I haven’t taken my meds at all. I have found that a solid bedtime routine really helps calm my brain down, if I listen to when my body is ready for bed IF I have taken my meds earlier that day.
REPORT ABUSEOn my Mac I have one called time out. It covers your screen at a time you predetermine to remind you to take a break. Another I really like is called self control. This one locks you out of predetermined web pages for a predetermined amount of time so that I can work on my paper for 3 hours instead of random internet.
REPORT ABUSEThat is awful. I didn’t enjoy starting concerta either. For the first week or two I felt so odd. I was emotional, and no one told me that I would feel like two completely different people or how to deal with it. I was anxious and that didn’t help the stress, but I can’t say that it made my sleep any worse than it was before I started on the med. Actually, after being on it for a little while I had actually started to sleep for the first time in my life, now I can’t miss a day or me sleep goes right back to no sleep at night.
REPORT ABUSEI also suffer from being too cold. I’m on concerta and I’m pretty sure I have been like this much before I started taking meds. I completely understand what it’s like to be unusually cold when everyone else is boiling. You should have seen the looks on my in-laws faces when I strolled out of our room in Mexico wearing a sweater. Or my parents faces when I bought winter mittens in Southern Texas, we are from Saskatchewan.
I find it difficult when I get nervous or stressed or sick. My body gets so cold that I start to shiver. Shivering while in a normal room-temperature building makes me sweat. Well, normal people sweat to cool down, and I am no exception to this rule. So now on top of being cold and am now even colder, sweaty and all hope of warming up any time soon is lost.
I also have a hard time being out in the cold for any length of time, lets define ‘cold outside’ as below freezing. I hate being in the cold because my fingers literally stop working. Pockets, gloves, mittens, it doesn’t matter and it gets even worse when I come into the warm because then my fingers swell and hurt so much.
I have always assumed it has been because of my lower than normal blood pressure compounded with my weak/fussy mast cells causing inconvenient histamine reactions.
REPORT ABUSEI think I have figured it out. I have spent a lot of time over the past two days trying to figure out why relationships are such a huge energy suck and why it is easer for me to downgrade a relationship than it is to not have communication.
I want to point out this is my mind blowing break though and has really relieved any and all anxiety that I feel with people and relationship that I have felt my entire life. I also want to point out that I really don’t want to offend anyone, but this is how the world makes sense to me. Also for sake of making this easier to type out, I am going use the term ‘normal’ people to describe those who don’t share my thought pattern and I have had conflict with my entire life.
A friend has recently pointed out that I am a problem solver, which is probably my greatest strength, but also my greatest weakness. When I say problem solver I don’t just mean i am good at logic based assignments. I mean my entire life revolves around every aspect of it being approached in a problem solving way and I am relentless at not letting go of a problem until it is solved. This is because I can’t. The world doesn’t make sense to me with out understanding it in its entirety and this is because most of the ‘normal’ world isn’t logical, reasonable and black and white. My world and reality is. So I have to communicate with the ‘normals’ to understand how/why they do/think the way they do because with out it I will never understand because it’s not logical.
I have very recently realized that I live on an entirely different planet than most people. Most people have a small argument or disagreement and then can move on. We are going to call these relatively small bumps in relationships leaves. Sick with me here.
Now leaves are small and annoying but compared to the rest of the day they are not even on the radar for most people. Compared to their feelings to each other these leaves aren’t worth the uncomfortable conversation.
I have realized that normal people only ever see leaves. I am a problem solver. I very much understand that big leaves or commonly occurring leaves are attached to a twig, that twig is attached to a branch, which is attached to a bigger branch and that branch is attached to a huge freaking tree.
Now the ‘tree’ is what the real problem is. I very much understand that most larger arguments or recurring smaller ones don’t just happen. They are symptoms of something much larger. And this much larger something is something that most people are completely unaware is present. In their reality, only leaves exist.
For most people long uncomfortable conversations aren’t worth it to simply not be brushed by a leaf any more. But for me I didn’t understand this. I didn’t understand that people don’t look for, recognize and then tend to the tree. For me in a large conflict I’m am very seldom bothered by the actual surface issue or emotions and this is because I understand that the surface emotions are only a sign/symptom of a much deeper problem.
I am a problem solver. My life up until this point would get hung up on a problem and I would be physically, mentally and emotionally tied up to remedy the problem. Seriously, I could do nothing but to fixate on the problem because by not understanding the problem I don’t understand the world around me.
Relationships were hard for me because it never occurred to me that people don’t recognize there is an entire tree to be dealt with. People are ok day by day week by week brushing off leaves. I see this as annoying, repetitive and a useless waste of my time and energy because if we would just find and fix the tree, people would stop sucking my energy on the useless tiffs in a day. I need conversation. I need others perspectives to get me thinking in other ways. I need to talk through the leaves, twigs and branches so that I can tend to the tree and shape it as my own instead of having the tree shape my landscape how ever it happens to. Me VS problem, not a problem. I will not let up until that sucker is solved and I can move on. PROBLEM: Me——Person——-Problem. Relationships are hard because people get in the way of me finding the real problem, understanding it and then fixing it.
It would take so much energy from me to live with the tree in every relationship that I would get frustrated that the other person never seemed to care to match the energy that I was putting into the relationship. It would be very easy for me then to down grade the relationship (love aside, I would always still love the person), but I would no longer hold any expectation to them in any capacity and they just would become another person instead of being in my ‘inner circle’.
Here is where I really don’t mean to offend any one as I understand that this is not going to sound nice, but I have no way of understanding people otherwise. I have a new freedom in seeing most people as emotional toddlers compared to me. AGAIN I know that sounds horrible, but let me explain. Toddlers are people you are with and need to show affection. Toddlers also cannot be reasoned with and they cannot understand the world as you see it through adult eyes. Most normal people won’t be reasoned into thinking there is a tree and most normal people who are going into and out of arguments don’t understand there is this unexplainable tree.
I now find a lot of freedom in understanding that to most people there is not tree to see. There are only day to day leaves that mean nothing to them and just happen because they happen. They accept it as no more than a knot in the cables behind the TV, small, insignificant and minor.
I now no longer expect people to fix what they don’t see exists. I feel really bad that I held this unrealistic expectation to people before now because I never realized they didn’t see the tree or are unequipped to deal with it. For me just talking is so logical and worth it to up root trees, but I now understand why normal people don’t want to put in the energy to up root a tree when all they have to do is brush a leaf off their shoulder.
Sorry this was a long one and I hope it makes some sort of sense I am in kind of a rush, but i felt that I really need to get this out there. I have very recently realized this and it has opened my world to relationships and toleration for people where other wise anxiety, stress, frustration and lack of understanding would be.
REPORT ABUSEWhat if the thing you chose to change off the start was to make more beneficial decisions and then finer focus it later once it becomes habitual? What if to start simply face every decision and attempting to choose what works best for you over all. For example: snooze vs 15 more minutes, water vs juice, smoothie VS PB&J, take the stairs VS elevator ect.
After this becomes more habitual then would it be easier to apply new things into it? Such as an exercise time if you don’t have one or a reading time before bed or whatever that you want to implement, so that when it comes to making the decision to exercise or not you are already fuelled with the satisfaction you will feel from making the healthier/more beneficial decision.
Maybe you will find 500 of the 1000 things to change just fall into line because they are simply the better choice day to day and don’t need to be forced into your day.
REPORT ABUSERecently I have had a change of thought process when it comes to committing to new things such as exercising, eating right, staying on top of things, doing chores, ect. Previously I would make a plan with an end date and a way of measuring my progress. I would go with the ‘for one month I will work out daily and then measure my results’ or ‘Every Sunday I will do X chores and my house will be tidy’ or ‘I will walk every day for a week and I will have walked everyday for a week’.
I was finding that all it took was for one miss and the whole thing would go up in flames. I couldn’t stick with it long enough to make it a routine and I would beat myself up for not putting in the energy to stick to a simple one week goal. Over and over again in every different way this process would fail me.
My new thought process ‘screw measurable goals and deadlines’. Everything I want to improve on my life is now on a day to day choice making basis. What I have to do tomorrow and what I have done yesterday are completely irreverent to the choices I make today. I simply look at my options today and pick the one that works best for me today, regardless of a bad or good day.
I am having a bad day and I don’t want a freaking veggie smoothie for lunch, not a problem. I want to eat healthier is my baseline feeling. I cannot do that for a week straight, but I can make the healthiest choices I can today and if I mess up it doesn’t matter because tomorrow is a clean slate!
I also now refuse to punish myself and play the ‘catch up’ game for yesterdays lag on all things not essential for today. IF I work as hard as I can today on what needs to be done today then there is no way I am going to be able to get all of todays demands done AND all of yesterdays. If I daydreamed, sat on the couch all day, ate nothing but junk food, ect for most of yesterday that is irrelevant to the choices i make today.
I find this new thought pattern very freeing. I encourage myself to only focus on how well I am doing at making good choices in whatever it is that I want to improve right now. Its fantastic to not have yesterdays failures and the pressure of continuing tomorrow loom over me. I am finding that overall I am making better choices and sticking to new trends in behaviour that previously I would have already abandoned. I feel that I am constantly winning by being conscious of every good choice I make instead of constantly feeling like a failure at missing the one big end goal to eat healthy, exercise, clean my house daily for a week or which ever.
This may seem obvious to a lot of you, but for me this is ground breaking and I wish it would have dawned on me sooner.
REPORT ABUSEThanks for the suggestions. I have taken a few days off and it seems to have really helped.
REPORT ABUSEI think I have maintained a consistent level of interest so I’m not sure board with it is the right descriptor. I feel that even if I’m super interested in something finding the brain space to deal with more information or to simply make sense of it is severely lacking. It feels like the energy required to maintain simply at a cognitive functional level is a struggle not let alone the mental energy required to learn and expand ideas.
I don’t think there is other things I would rather be doing. I have gotten a taste of what is like to be studious and driven to get things accomplished. Try as I might over the last few days it seems to have simply left. The drive my brain had earlier this week is just gone no matter how much i try to convince it otherwise.
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