That last post I made was sort of enlightening for me. For some reason, seeing a visual interpretation of my feelings, and trying to rework my neural pathways from “anxious” to “content” has really, really helped.
I still get weird little moments where like… my dog will be slightly more tired than normal and I’ll think, “welp, guess he’s dying.” Which is an insane leap to take, I know. And I realized that I do this because it’s like I want to prepare myself for the inevitable bad things that will happen. “Well if I think about these horrible feelings now, I’ll be prepared for when they actually do happen.” But what that actually does is rob me of the time I could be spent, ya know, happy.
So I’ve just been trying to be mindful of that. My mom went to the doctor because her heart rate is fast. We’re pretty sure it’s tachycardia which is a common and relatively harmless condition, triggered by anxiety and stress. She said herself she was very nervous for this doctor’s appointment, but her heart rate since than has been 65-70 since. This definitely eased my mind, and I’m trying to use this as a little test of working with my anxiety. Not jumping to the worst case scenarios and not letting it take up my entire brain.
I’ve also been trying to not jump right to “Avoidance” as my main action. Basically any time I feel slightly anxious and I’m ready to run to my distraction, I do one thing that’s actually productive. Might mean doing a little drawing, or writing up a script for a video project, but just do SOMETHING. Even after 5 or 10 minutes of this, I actually feel like I’ve reworked that neural pathway that happens after “fear,” which feels great.
So yeah – despite feeling a lot better than when I started this journal, I want to make sure that I also log the times when I’m feeling good. Maybe for the good days I’ll start doing a gratitude section. Here, let’s start now:
GRADITUTIONAL THOUGHTS
- I thought my chicken sausage went bad, but it didn’t!
- COVID numbers are down! (wow, I can’t believe that was second after chicken sausage)
- My uncle is set to get the vaccine soon!