What am I looking for?
Every so often my anxiety (which I have very much under control at this point, comparatively) spikes. I literally call my mood 'spiky'. My one braincell is ricocheting off the sides of my skull.
The two main symptoms are: I imagine everyone hates me - even if I had a perfectly reasonable conversation with them moments before - and I start checking things. Not like locks or windows being closed. Checking for things.
Checking my email too often. My messages. The rota. Bank balance. RSS. Sometimes - shudder - the news.
What am I looking for? What do I actually need? I can pretty much guarantee it's not in my email.
This is a downside of having virtually no notifications. I do actually need to look into my email once in a while. But not like this.
I cannot imagine how much worse this would be if I had social media. Heaven help me.
It creates this sinkhole, a vicious cycle of actually making everything worse. Feeding into it. So I have to notice and I have to stop.
It started earlier this week. Why? Well any British person knows at least part of why. It has been dismal. I also had a very fun, very action packed, very social weekend that I needed to recover from. My back has been extra painful and I'm still getting over a cold.
So I stopped checking things. I got a new jigsaw puzzle from the charity shop. The epitome of slow living. Read a dense book. I did my back exercises with renewed diligence. The sun came out and I made sure I was in it as much as possible. Even if it wasn't out I tried to get outside as much as possible. Sat in the greenhouse in the rain sowing seeds.
Which has worked. I caught the spiking early and cut it off. And also got lucky with sunshine. But, reminder to self, nothing I needed was in my email inbox.