This kind of monkey mind behaviour is something I feel sure I’ve written about before but its probably worth a revisit. Why is it that the very moment things come together, we have this tendency to start looking out for the next problem appearing over the horizon? What is it that makes us so hypervigilant in our ways that we half expect things to fall apart the very moment they come together? Is “life” really that traumatising, has it shown us this very thing play out so many times we have come to expect it, or is it a trickster element in our own brains that makes the next big problem into a self-fulling prophesy because we tilt ourselves towards trouble, braced for the next fight? How much of it is because post traumatic stress gets our wheels stuck in this particular groove, or is it the tireless search for more novelty and dread of boredom kicking in, especially when we are ADHD, that wants to shake things up as soon as they come together…and at what point does it become a learned response that constantly feeds back into more stress responses in the body, triggering off increased anxiety, worsened symptoms, thus even more things to worry about? When does chronic health become an outcome of a mindset of worry, even when you’ve done all the right things to heal and yet some part of your nervous system can’t quite relinquish this pattern of behaviour?

This topic is right on point for me. As many of you know, I’ve finally settled into my new home after a very long haul getting here and, yes, things have really come together, the Big Project is nigh on complete and we can finally sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labours. So why is it that I keep waking with the grip of anxiety around my heart, yet again, in the early hours of the morning, especially these last few days? What am I expecting to happen now? What part of me is feeling so rattled and why, is it for any of the reasons above and can I do anything about it? Because I’m so tired of always feeling that worry is never very far away, that I can never quite kick off my shoes and relax, that I always have to be expectant of yet another mountain to climb; these feelings are certainly feeding back into the feeling of “chronic”.

There are one or two niggles to worry about right now, of course, and one of them is my health throwing up some worsened and quite perplexing symptoms right now…but how much of that is to do with early morning waking and worry about health issues feeding right back into this stress response. Its not that the symptoms aren’t “real” but all my work with the mind-body connection  over the years has taught me, a zillion times, that an emotion can feed straight back into inflammation and other very real, demonstrably physical responses that can be as full of substance as anything caused by a virus or injury and yet they began with an emotional start point. For more on that, you can refer back to my other posts about TMS (tension myositis syndrome) and about the vagus nerve which, when triggered, can impact pretty much every part of the body. In my case, the merest increase in tension can feed back into increased cervical instability thus all kinds of vagus-nerve related symptoms, from increased headaches, digestive symptoms and POTs to skin rashes and heart palpitations…so then I REALLY have something to worry about, feeding straight back into the system.

How do you get off this merry-go-round? For me, the first step is to slow right down, take a day or two “off” if I have to, just to be with my ponderings (perhaps writing them down) and appreciate all that I’ve been through lately, and currently, including matters large and small. For instance, we’ve been to an awful lot of funerals lately and this has certainly triggered off a particular kind of dread of what the future holds that was less prevalent in my earlier decades; is the “c” word almost inevitable, based on the experiences of some of our family and friends lately (especially in our 60s, which we are rapidly approaching, which based on their track record can feel like a sort of field you have to get across with a sniper taking pot-shots at you)? Will we make it to the other side, together? What stands between us and ever worsening health now that the big distraction of relocating is out of the way; the thing that always stood between us and “old age”? The very fact of knowing this is the house I will live out the rest of my days has fuelled a sort of morbid awareness that I have come here to die, even though that eventuality could be 30 years or more away.  We’ve found ourselves thinking about our wills and how we want to be buried lately (a natural burial…we’ve even found the place), thoughts which are at once highly practical but also, likely, pretty triggering for that part of the psyche that gets itself into knots at 3 in the morning. I need to own up to that, in the daylight hours, and allow myself to process how I feel about it.

So there’s a balancing act between facing up to reality and outright traumatising yourself, flipping you into fight or flight…over and over again…by preoccupying yourself with such thoughts as though they are front-and-centre of what’s going on. I’ve had my work cut out trying to help my husband not to dwell too much on the topics of cancer and loss lately as its been his family members and friends that have been impacted, one after the other, this last year though I had my own run-in with this not so long ago when I lost my closest friend, her birthday last week stirring this pot all over again. There’s nothing like the “reality” of a sudden loss to make you feel like a rabbit in the headlights of things that you tried not to think about too much before it happened. What amount of vigilance is appropriate to catching symptoms early and when does it become so deleterious to mental wellbeing that it is counterproductive? As someone with years of chronic illness behind me, I tend to assume symptoms are more of the same…chronic but not life-threatening or acute…so how do I spot the difference?

In my case, I know just how much “reality” I can bite off before I choke on it so I don’t get majorly involved in the news or I will rue the consequences in my health; I learned that one years ago. With all my own stuff to deal with, which has always been convoluted (now, I realise) because of my autism and ADHD, also decades of complicated and sand-shifting health issues, I know I can’t widen my perspective too much before it overwhelms me but then there’s a proviso, being that I need to avoid making it so narrow that all I can ever see is my own crock of problems, which will always make them feel bigger and often scarier than they are. When I widen my perspective just enough, I can far more easily land in a place of gratitude and nervous system calm because I can then appreciate that I’m really not so bad off compared to a lot of people and that I do have things a lot more under control than many because that’s just the way I am wired…to think everything through and plan ahead. All of those same personality foibles that can freak me out because I am always that person to scout ahead for the next problem, running the video in my head of the next  possible catastrophe so I can better avoid it, also makes me the one that has contingency plans set up all over the place and who has thought out pretty much every scenario before it happens. By the way, I know I need to add to that a better propensity to “get things checked out” just incase, compared to my track record.

The trick is to get the balance right…and to go easy on my nervous system. Armed with the realisation that this is a weak spot for me, I can try to get better at halting the runway train of my mind before it takes me over the next precipice of overthinking and overdoing it because I never gave myself the chance to relax. Yet the ability to relax can sometimes elude me as someone with ADHD so it can also be a case of needing to find the right kind of stimulation; the kind that engages me and wets my creative tastebuds, shepherding myself towards these kinds of activities, rather than giving my worry-brain free rein.

Keeping yourself productively occupied can be a big key to the relieving of this tendency to stew in your hypervigilence, especially if you are ADHD. I’m sat here this morning in a house with two other people working remotely upstairs as my daughter is home so there is an air of quiet industry in the building and yet here I am sat in the sunshine…with nothing better to do than philosophise on this topic. That’s not a bad thing, in fact its another reason to count my blessings (tell that to my 3am nervous system) but I know I also do much better when I have a project or two to get my teeth into; something that feels a little more structured and purposeful than just sitting here rambling on in a blog (though I do find blogging useful as an outlet of how I am feeling and as a way to gain some oversight of tendencies such as the one that makes me worry-ahead, so that’s not to be knocked). Art projects have always been my “thing” in this regard and I’m eager to get stuck into all that now I have, finally, got myself a fully-equipped art studio all set up and ready to go…never having had one before…and having had all my painting and messy creating badly interrupted since we first started showing our old house to sell eighteen months ago, followed by all those months of being on the move between different houses and apartments. It’s important that I don’t procrastinate too long on getting into this (another ADHD tendency of mine) and that I throw myself the fish of some juicy art project to keep me productive and busy as soon as is practical after the easter break because that could be fairly key in nipping this feeling of free-fall into the next pile of worries right in the bud before they start to grow into anything.

In the meantime, and this is just so important (and probably the step I have the biggest  tendency to miss out because of my constant eagerness to stay busy) I need to stop and appreciate that I’ve just reached the finale moment, the sweet spot of completion, of a project that has taken years in the manifesting. While I do that, I need to protect it from that part of me that is always scouting ahead looking out for “the next thing” and pretty much insist that I get to stand still and lap up the feeling of contentment and culmination, the moment of stillness in the pond before another ripple starts to form. Over the course of a lifetime, we can become so very weak at this skillset of taking pause, taking a moment, taking the time to enjoy the view from the top of the mountain before “doing” anything else such as pulling the metaphorical camera from the pocket. Just allowing ourselves to be there, breathe it in, take in the 360° view and allow the cells of our body to drink from the water that will remind us later that things don’t always have to be “going wrong” or dying or destructing. We need to amplify such moments…not skip over them. They help us to rebalance all the other moments when things feel like they are always shifting and taking us by surprise.

A fear of demise, which tends to get stronger every year after a certain age (not helped by the “bad things” that seem to happen to some of our age peers), can be an extremely counter-productive thing since it makes the very things we dread all the more likely and swift, feeding back into systemic anxiety that only ever erodes away at our health. Mindset is everything as you approach the unavoidable factor of ageing, and so is language…the way we speak about our bodies, the expectations we carve into stone by making fun of the way our bodies start to fail us yet, in doing so, making more concrete the cultural expectations that surrounds us about how we feel, how we look, what we can expect of our creaking bones etc…more of the kind of expectations that only ever trip us up in the long run. If people in your household have a tendency to talk about age as though anything over 50 is “over the hill”, nip it in the bud and take heart from people who set the example of ageing differently, who still remain active and young at heart well into their 6th, 7th, 8th, perhaps even 9th or 10th, decades. Compared to my 89 year-old father-in-law, I’m still a spring chicken (and he still walks about, and thinks, more briskly than some people I know in their 50s) so I try to remind myself of that as often as I can.

As for me, its time to stop preaching some of these attitudes and start really living them, yes even with chronic issues that sometimes make me feel older than my years…but then they have been doing that since I was in my 30s; it has little to do with age and when I am having a good day I feel no different to the person I was in in my 20s. Whose to say that I can’t keep this kind of positive mindset going, and continue to make the good times the very best, for quite a few purposeful decades yet!