In And Out Of My Mind

by ComputerBob

January 16, 2008

During the past several weeks since I reached my weight-loss goal, I've noticed that I've been feeling a lot of stress. It's like I've been constantly "on-edge." Lately, even minor things that would normally be little annoyances — like forgetting to buy something at the store or having trouble opening a child-proof prescription bottle — have made me feel very frustrated or even overwhelmed. I haven't been sleeping well at night, and during the day, I've almost constantly had the same adrenalin-filled "fight or flight" feeling that I get when I'm running late to an important appointment. And even while "relaxing," like when I watch TV with my wife at night, I haven't felt relaxed at all.

A few days ago, my wife suggested that maybe I should take a stress management course. Back in college, I took a stress-management course, and after I was assaulted (more on that below), I received more stress-management training from a psychologist. So I know that many stress-management techniques are actually time-management techniques. They're extremely helpful for those who need them, but I'm already an extremely efficient, effective person.

Yesterday, while I was driving around, doing several relatively unimportant errands, I felt that familiar sense of extreme urgency. From experience, I knew that I needed to take a deep breath, hold it, and then let it out very slowly, to help me relax. I did that several times, and it helped, but it didn't answer the question of why I've been feeling so "wound up," even when I'm running some dumb little errands.

As soon as I started asking myself, "Why am I feeling this way?" a number of reasons immediately came to mind. I realized that, in just the past year, I've had to deal with a lot of extremely stressful things:

My stroke, which put the entire left side of my body to sleep.
Learning that I had serious diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol and weight problems.
Having to inject myself with insulin several times a day, despite the fact that I've always been extremely needle-phobic.
Enduring many expensive, painful and invasive medical tests and procedures.
Enduring several painful periodontal surgeries, to repair problems that the diabetes had caused.
Educating myself about all of my medicinal and nutritional options, as well as how they affect my medical conditions and each other.
Completely changing my eating habits and lifestyle, to gain complete control over my weight and all of my medical conditions.
Several traumatic events that affected 3 of my 4 pets.
Starting two new part-time jobs.
My wife having to find a different job.
Going without medical insurance during the transition from my wife's old job to her new job.
Doing all of the above with very little support from other people.

As you can see, it was pretty easy to find ways to "give myself permission" to feel stressed. In fact, I think I'd be pretty surprised to hear that anyone has been able to go through all of that without feeling pretty stressed. But as I thought about it more, I realized that it doesn't really help me to find a whole bunch of really good reasons for why I'm feeling extremely stressed unless doing that somehow helps me find ways to stop feeling that way.

As I continued to think about it, I came to understand that, for nearly a year since my stroke, my medical and personal breakthroughs have been the direct result of me personally exercising an incredible amount of control and discipline over nearly every aspect of my life. In other words, I've worked really, really hard every single day, to get myself into shape and take complete control over all aspects of my health. But the need to take that much control over my life has come with a price: I no longer have the freedom to eat or do anything I want whenever I want to — everything I eat and everything that I do has had to be extremely goal-oriented. So when things happen to me that I can't possibly control, even small, annoying things, I suddenly feel frustrated, like no matter how hard I work to try to keep everything in my life safely under control, the universe is working even harder to try to take that control away from me and make me fail.

So there it is: the universe is working against me. No wonder I'm feeling stressed.

Then it hit me — I've felt this same way before. In fact, I've felt exactly this same way before. Back in the early 1990s, my wife and I made friends with a single mother who was an abuse survivor and a recent divorcee. For 6 1/2 years, we helped her build a new life and raise her two young daughters. The more we helped her, the more her dangerous ex-husband hated us, until one day, he tried to kill me, causing me to suffer permanent injuries. For a few years after that, I suffered from PTSD (Posttraumatic Stress Disorder). There were times when I'd be in a crowd and I'd find myself jumping every time someone took a step toward me, as though I was getting ready for them to try to kill me. Once, in a crowded airplane, I felt like I was going to faint, and quickly realized that it was because my body had literally "forgotten" to keep breathing. I had to "manually" breathe for a minute or two, to get it to "remember."

I'm no psychologist, but I'm convinced that what I've been feeling lately is PTSD, brought on by the traumas of this past year.

Any good computer technician will tell you that accurately defining a problem is often the key to solving that problem. And I'm a good computer technician.

The real problem is all in my head. I'm a man of faith, but I've been acting like a man who has no faith. God loves me, and wants me to do my best, but God doesn't expect me to try to control everything that can possibly happen in my life — that would be like trying to be my own God. Instead, I need to just do my best, but accept the fact that I can't possibly control everything, and trust that God is in control. In other words, the stress that I've been feeling has had both physical and spiritual roots, so I'm going to need to deal with both of those in order to feel better.

I feel a little better already, now that I know what I'm dealing with. From now on, I'll need to remember to do the breathing and other relaxation techniques that I learned years ago. And, more importantly, I'll need to remember that I need to do my best, but God is in control of my life.

And pretty soon, I'm sure that the universe and I will be back on speaking terms again.