When my CBD flares up, it can be like negotiating a narrow causeway that divides two unsane and ineffective ways to deal with negative experiences. One side is the dark quicksand that makes all the world's craziness my problem(s), and the other is a superficial, escapist flight from responsibility and effort.
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Do an Internet search on "too many choices" and you'll find, well, too many choices about which article or study result or video TED talk or book review to click. There's a fairly copious body of media accruing on the issue of how choice- particularly "too much" choice- can have a negative impact on our mental state. If they'd-a asked me, I coulda told 'em. Who likes anxiety? Not me, baby. I hate the "hammer about to drop" feeling, the troubled sleep, hyperactive startle reflex, hair-trigger exaggerated emotional responses, the restless sense of something wrong, the grinding strung-upness of it all. I won't even go into the long-term physiological problems of having that much ACTH, cortisol, and unnecessary adrenaline circulating in my system. Yesterday was weird. I'm grateful for the experience, I think it'll come in useful, but it was pretty peculiar. I was fine when I woke-- not great, but nothing's been really bad the last few weeks. Sunday can be a bit iffy as I do some of my least-favorite chores. But things seemed normal. I'm eating breakfast, and all of a sudden I realize that the (metaphorically speaking) barometric pressure in my head just plummeted. Bang. I love my Autopilot. It’s such a useful tool. For the (comparatively) unimportant things, it’s easy to program. You figure out the optimal way to accomplish something— break it into steps, figure out the best order to do the steps in, what needs to be arranged where and how to facilitate the task, set that up, do it a few times, integrate it into your routine, and there you go. You never have to think about it again. I'm very lucky to have a woman--more than a friend-- who does cleaning for me. When she comes to clean, we usually chat for a few minutes, then I vanish into the office to work, and she interrupts me only if she has a question, or when it's time to clean the office. (That's when I get some errands done.) This works well, for me. It hasn't worked so well for my mother, who's elderly and uses (or used, until recently) the local Community Center's cleaning service. They assigned her Edna. At first, I heard good things about Edna. She was friendly, mature, competent. Because it’s always there. Something Awful is always about to happen. How awful it will be, is in proportion to two things: 1) How bad I am; and 2) How much pleasure I’m experiencing. The irrationality of this belief is easy to concede. I have cognitive scripts targeted at this belief. I know some of where it came from, which helped make good cognitive scripts to fight it, but knowing where it came from, in and of itself, isn’t helpful. |
AuthorIn lifelong recovery from a chronic brain disease,Terry lives in the U.S. Southwest, and actively pursues several hobbies, including confounding assumptions, extreme semantics, and damage control. Subscribe to Teritas
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*"Teritas et factum convertunter"-- roughly translated, "One can know Terry only by interpretation." (More literally, "Terry and reality are interchangeable.")
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