Posts Tagged ‘stress’
Getting the mind to shut off
The last couple of nights I have been having trouble getting to sleep at a reasonable hour. I have been sleeping lightly, often waking at the slightest movement from either Ben or one of the cats sleeping in the bed next to me. I usually go to bed at a reasonable hour but have been finding that being in bed is not leading to the desired pattern of sleep. Even now as I write this it is over three hours since I went to bed.
What is going on?
Why can’t I get to sleep?
What is plaguing my mind so much that I can’t get it to switch off?
It seems lately that I have nothing much to worry about. I am looking forward to year of studying singing, traveling to France and spending a lot more time at home with Ben. Could it be that now that I am reaching a time of near perfection in my life that my brain just can’t handle it? Seeing no imminent threat has it gone into high alert waiting for the next trouble to come looming over the horizon?
What am I waiting for? I am incredibly happy but I keep unconsciously sabotaging myself. For example I spent an hour today looking for a job. Why?
1. I don’t need a job. I have a casual job already working in a theatre and I love it!
2. I don’t have my timetable for university yet so I don’t even know when I would be free to extra work.
3. My tenant in my house has just signed a 12 month lease on the rental agreement so I don’t really need any more money than I am already making.
The only reasonable solution I can come up with to all this is that my brain can not handle that everything is going along really well at the moment. I am required to sit still for a couple of weeks while I am on holidays waiting for the course to start. Instead of taking that time to relax my brain is taking that time to cause havoc.
Well no more!
I am taking back my brain and getting back to sleep.
I WILL BE MORE AWARE OF MY THOUGHTS AND WHEN I TRY TO SELF SABOTAGE I WILL MAKE A CONCEITED EFFORT TO COUNTERACT THAT ATTACK!!!
And as a back up plan I can always write on here. Writing seems to get my mind off of these things.
With that in mind…goodnight!
Image by Frankincensy (Flickr)
I have been under a lot of stress lately. There has been general unhappiness at work, the wedding, and every day life all piling up on one another and I am not coping that well. About four weeks ago little spots started appearing. First of all I had one on my face. I went to the chemist assuming it was ring worm (I do live with two cats after all), got some cream from the chemist and thought nothing more of it.
Over the next few days a couple more started appearing on my neck, this was actually funny because they resembled hickeys and I work in a highschool (for the record I haven’t had a hickey since uni). As you can imagine not many people were willing to believe that it wasn’t a hickey, so instead I suddenly felt cold enough to start wearing scarfs to school again.
Then they spread, from a couple of marks to now hundreds all over my chest, stomach, neck, legs, arms and back. I look like I have contracted plague and they are so incredibly itchy. All the doctors can tell me is it is:
- Not contagious
- Will go away in about six weeks on its own
- Is caused by stress…”Do you have anything to be stressed about at the moment?”
It sucks! So on the wedding day the spots that aren’t hidden by my dress will be covered with a good layer of make-up.
Wouldn’t you know it, I have had these spots once before in my life. Right before my year 12 ball when I also had to leave on an athletics team trip on the same night (okay so maybe I was a little bit stressed out then too). My theory is I’m just allergic to wearing expensive dresses, that, or looking pretty!
Image by Emma (my spotty belly and back!!!)
I feel like I haven’t written on here for a very long time which really upsets me because writing is one thing that I actually really enjoy doing. The last two weeks have been a mess of stress over the wedding. We thought we knew what we wanted and thought that we would get what we wanted, instead we have realised that the wedding isn’t about what we want but about what everyone else expects.
I can’t count the number of conversations I have had with people in the last two weeks which started with “What do you want?”, proceeded by us telling them what we want, then them launching into a twenty-minute argument into why we can’t have what we want (quite often for the ridiculous reason of “It’s traditional to do it another way”) and then finishing with the sentence I hate the most, “Whatever you two want to do, it is your day after all.” I just want to scream! Why are people bothering to ask us what we want if in the end they don’t actually want to do it our way but have already formulated in their heads what is going to happen.
Basically it has boiled down to the fact that we aren’t going to play into it anymore. If we are asked what we want and then the asker has a different idea, we’re not getting into the argument anymore. Some would see this as giving up. We see it as the path of least resistance and really in the end all that matters is that we both stand up on the 16th of May and say “I do”. Everything after that is a bonus.
Getting married was a good idea. Having a wedding was more than we bargained for.
Image by BrittneyBush (flikr)
“Where did you go?” That was all the message read. It sat in my inbox and I wondered what was the sender talking about? Where did I go? What did they mean? I haven’t gone anywhere, have I? Then it dawned on me, in terms of the technologically connected friends of mine, I had, for want of a better word, GONE!
It has been nearly a month since my last post on this blog, something I am really ashamed of. I enjoy writing on here. Actually I enjoy writing anywhere. I made a new year intention to write on here three times a week and I didn’t find it that difficult an intention to keep. That is until the last month. So what happened? Stress happened.
When I get stressed I begin to forget about all the things that make me happy and focus more and more on the things that make me miserable. When I get really stressed I actually stop doing the things that make me happy and slip into the body of a girl who is simple walking through the motions of life instead of living them.
Well no more! I have seen the error of my ways and am making a BIG effort to get back to where I was (or possibly an even better place) because where I am right now is not making me happy. For the last four weeks I have stopped writing, stopped singing, stopped dancing, stopped going for walks with Ben in the morning. Time to pull my socks up and get back into the swing of things.
Where did I go? I don’t know but I am back now!
Image by Laurie Liquid Paper (Flickr)
