Return of the Thing: Anxiety Chronicles Part III

I’ve been feeling tired and run down the past week or so, fending off whatever the kids have brought back from school this week and needing more sleep. I’ve started to feel more narky at people at work again. It could be my body adjusting to the medication, but I experienced something odd last week. I was asked to sort out booking a cottage for some friends and sort it. I had a few background concerns, and the fact it needed done quickly and that I was worrying about something else, meant that I ended up sitting at my desk at work with my head in my hands and felt the room was spinning. Why can’t someone else do this? Why do I have to do it, it’s stressing me out. I’m irrationally worrying about other people’s expectations. What if this place is terrible? What will people think? I noticed this and phoned my wife talked to her for a few minutes, then went out for some air and phoned and booked the cottage.

Something similar happened this weekend, we were planning for Sam’s birthday, he wants a party, though he’s fighting with some of the kids at school. He wants various things for his birthday, which will involve me taking action to do things. I’ve got Adam’s trip to France with the Scouts to sort out. All things which started piling up and I started to feel anxious about and wanted to run from and have someone else deal with. It’s the idea that I am responsible and I have to do these things and I pile an unnecessary and irrational pressure onto myself. I’m still waiting to hear back about the CPN, I’ve also got another month until I’m due back at the doctors. I need to try and manage it better, it takes 3 weeks to get a normal appointment at my docs, though I am thinking perhaps seeing about an emergency appointment, I’ll give myself a couple of days more to see if this is a blip or a genuine concern. There’s that doubt about worrying if I’m wasting someone’s time creeping back in.

It’s not all doom and gloom, I took my dogs an 8 miles round walk to North Queensferry. It was the first time in ages I felt properly focused, I got through four podcasts without my attention drifting. It makes me think about how I need quality time on my own, walking the dogs, playing my guitar, constructing something as opposed to the usual time on my own travelling to work or such. Conversely it says to me I need to balance that quality alone time with  need to be around people. I need to eradicate the “dead time” in my life, such as that hour between getting home and getting my dinner, half watching the TV, randomly browsing the internet, feeling that it is wasted time, or the time between dinner and getting the kids to bed because I don’t feel I can settle, this is something I need to work on changing. I want to take that time and do constructive, and take that 30-60 mins and make it worthwhile, even if it is just a bit of housework, tidying up or doing something with the kids.