Check-In : Extended-Release Anxiety

Man, this week has not been the best.

Started out Sunday where I had that weird little twinge in the pit of my stomach that usually indicates anxiety is just around the corner. Ended up going to the Y and walked three miles which helped that twinge. It went away, thankfully. But once I got home and cleaned up I could feel it again, waiting to pounce. It’s like that intuition you get when you see a situation rising that’s not going to be great, except I guess in anxiety’s case it’s nothing but your own brain creating situations. Your brain starts smoking and then the whole system starts to panic.

Went to bed tired, but I never really dropped into that good sleep. It was surface sleep, where you know that you’ve slept because you remember bits of dreams. Yet, when you look at the alarm clock maybe an hour has passed. You continue this throughout the night and get increasingly more panicked because you keep inching closer to that time when the alarm clock is going to go off and then you’re completely screwed.

It’s never a great way to start a work week out.

Everyday at work it’s been variable levels of mild panic; walking to and fro and all of a sudden you feel like your head is in a vice and all this pressure forms. Then your stomach begins to tighten like it’s contracting, and if you don’t get that in control that’s when the hyper-ventilating starts. The hyper ventilating is a new symptom for me. It started back in December around the time my grandma died. It also coincided with them telling us at work that they were going to start moving us all around in the area to cross train.

When you do the same job for nearly 27 years and you’re over 50, the prospect of starting all over isn’t great. Well, not great to me. My co-worker and very good friend whom I’ve worked with the entire time I’ve been at my current employer decided to retire early because of it. He leaves in May, so I guess that also has been jangling around in my brain for the last couple weeks. As far as doing the job I’m being trained in(Shipping), I guess I’m doing okay. This will be the third week I’ve been over there and I’ve gotten a lay of the land. It’s not “hard”, but they’ve complicated it enough to make it super easy to make a mistake. I like knowing everything in and out with my job, and working in my old area for close to 30 years has made me pretty damn good at it. So going from that to feeling completely helpless is a heavy thing for me to haul around on my shoulders.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Sunday nights I’m finding to be my insomnia nights. I don’t look forward to going to work anymore, but I’m too young to retire, so I won’t be retiring anytime soon. So I’m either going to have to just suck it up and find a way to manage the stress of work or I quit and find something that would last me 10 years. That’s not what I want to do, but if anxiety is going to follow me around for the foreseeable future I’m going to have to make a change.

I was told if I wanted to go train somewhere else next week I could, given I’m apparently doing okay in the current situation. So that’s promising I guess.

I have been dealing with some sort of bug for the last several days as well, so that might be playing into how my head has been(that head in a vice feeling). But I do know that my mental health has been sketchy because of work, so I’m not letting a flu bug take all the credit.

So that’s why I’ve been a little quiet this week. Here’s for better days ahead. I’ve been self-medicating with some proper doom metal…Yob to be specific. I’ll talk more on them later.

Hang in there, folks. I know I’m trying to.