Bad student, anxiety, Xanax, depression, boxes. Great title isn't it?

I’m a bad student. I should be doing school work. However it is spring break and I also got five assignments back in the last three days and they were all A’s. Soooo, I’m taking a couple days off. It means working a lot more to make up for these days. But oh well!

I feel really on edge. I keep being hit by an anxiety feeling for no reason. It doesn’t last long, usually not more than 30/45 minutes. And I really do not know where it’s coming from. I will feel fine and all of a sudden my heart rate goes up, I feel dizzy, and just very panicky. It’s strange. It’s happened before, but still strange. Maybe I’m worrying about something that I don’t realize I’m worrying about. But I’m also getting anxiety from small things. My husband was watching The Walking Dead last night and even though I wasn’t actually watching (I was internet shopping), I still felt anxious about this show.

And even though I keep having these mini anxiety episodes, each time they happen I don’t feel like it’s something that is going to go away in half an hour. I pace the house in a panic trying to ignore my Xanax yelping at me from my purse. I hate taking Xanax. I still take it once in a while, but I hate the stuff. Better than Ativan though, which I had a very love/hate relationship with. People, if you can avoid taking these medications just stay away from them.

Saying that is really going against how I usually feel and voice my opinion. They are bad news for me, but if they help you and you can handle them, do what’s best for you. In general I try not to tell people to do something, or take something, that has worked for me in the past. Or to stay away from something that didn’t work for me. What works for some people may not work for others. That’s really what I should have said above. I could have erased and edited what I wrote previously, but I try not to do that on this blog.

Anyway. I’m just now wondering if my anxiety is trying to be full on anxiety but I’m doing things to tame it. Does that make sense? I’ve been exercising really well, I’ve been eating a very good diet (at least compared to the past). I’m doing things like listening to music I like (instead of whatever is playing on the Disney Channel). I’m watching old shows I used to be crazy about. I’m sure all these things are really helping me, and possibly kicking the anxiety away.

If these things are helping with anxiety, they will possibly help with depression. I wrote in a post, possibly my last post, that I needed to start doing things to help my depression. One of the things my therapist urged me to do was make an “in case of emergency box” (it doesn’t actually have to be a box). Basically I would put in a box, or make a list (or both), of things that could help me feel better. Movies, CDs, a nice smelling lotion, names of people to hang out with. You get the idea. Like everything else my therapist suggested I did not do this. I wish I could say I’ve been working on this idea for a while, in fact I only thought about it two minutes ago. But I think I’ll do both. I’ll make a box and put in things like lotions, books, magazines, CDs, maybe chocolate, and then make a list of other things that can help.

There is a good chance that I won’t do this any time soon. My aim is for my husband to read this and push me to do it.

I’m running out of things to say. And I’m multitasking this with watching YouTube. So I’m going to go and focus on that.

Geodon is making me sleeppppyyyyy

I get very tired, pretty much every day around 11am and then around 9pm. Like extremely tired. I fell asleep in the library today at about 11:30am. Most nights I can’t make it past 10pm. It just really hit me that it is the Geodon I’m taking (the antipsychotic). I take it most mornings around 8am and then in the evenings around 5-6pm. I did a little research online and found some reporting the same problem, that they get unbelievably exhausted a few hours after taking this medication.

Night time is not a huge problem. I do need to stay up later for school work though. So I’m going to start taking it later at night. Simple fix. Mornings are going to be tough. The obvious solution is caffeine, but I hate coffee and I gave up soda. I can drink tea but there is not much caffeine there. I may have to bring soda back. It did always help wake me up. Maybe diet soda won’t make me feel that bad about drinking it again. If anyone has any ideas PLEASE share. If there is a coffee out there that does not taste too coffee-like, please let me know. I’m desperate. I have no intention of going off the medication but I seriously have trouble functioning because I get so exhausted. And I hate that I’m considering caffeine because caffeine is not good, especially with these types of medication. I just don’t know what to do.

Before anyone suggests it, taking both doses at night is not an option. The medication does not stay in your system that long. Also if I skip a dose I start having manic symptoms. This makes me forget my next dose and then things get a lot worse. So I need to take this both mornings and at night.

Moving on. I’m feeling much better than I did last week. After a couple days of a depression hangover I snapped back and have been feeling fine since. I really should accept that this is probably the best it can get in terms of medication. I shouldn’t try changing anything because of a side effect that I could live with. Acne sucks, but at least I’m stable. For the most part.

I need to focus on the next step of treatment. The medication is helping enough so that I can function while depressed, and the hypomania has pretty much disappeared. So next I need to work on ways to cope when I am depressed. The medication is not going to take care of it completely, I’m going to have to put some work into it. I also don’t want to rely on weekly therapy. At this point I should be able to have ways to cope myself.

So that is my mission. To start finding ways to cope. Everything my therapist has discussed with me in the past three years… I need to actually try them.

Lamictal withdraw hell

I’m in a depressive hangover. Probably not a real term but that’s what I call it. I’m not exactly still depressed, but I’m exhausted and teary. It takes a lot to focus on my breath. I’m functioning much better though.

Apparently I need to stay on this mood stabilizer. I cut my dose in half for a few days and then cut it out completely. The first few days I was moody with periods of depression. Then when I had stopped taking it I was hit was a crippling depression. I stopped doing school work, I haven’t showered in days. I’ve been doing the bare minimum. It was a pretty normal depressive episode for the most part, but then last night it turned really bad. I didn’t want to think but I didn’t want to go to sleep cause that meant I had to wake up. I kept thinking that I just wanted to go to the hospital but I didn’t want to be an inconvenience to everyone. Eventually I had a Xanax and went to sleep.

When I woke up this morning I felt like I was still sleeping. I woke up at like 11:30a, brought my daughters to school, and went back to sleep. I woke back up at 2:30p and went to see my psychiatrist. When I got there he asked me what was going on in my head and I told him I felt like I was dying. I felt like I came as far as I could and I wasn’t able to go on any further. He put me back on the mood stabilizer and upped the dose of the antipsychotic (his care summary I got after talked about an “outright psychosis”. I’m still not sure what the “outright” actually means). I went home, went back to sleep. Woke up at some point and took my meds and slowly I started coming back.

I’m so tired. I feel like I’m not capable to do anything. I wish I could sleep for a really long time and then not have to worry about picking up the pieces. I need to find the energy to shower.

Things to do instead of self-harming

Exercise

Art project

Write

Hang out with others

Watch TV/Movie

Read a book

Think about how you don’t want scars

Do your make up

Do your hair

Do your nails

Cook

Eat

Listen to music

Play an instrument

Go outside and look at the clouds/stars

Snap a rubber band or hair band on your wrist

Cover yourself with band aids where you want to cut

Go for a walk

Sleep

Play with a pet

Clean the house

Punch a pillow

Knit

Meditate

Go somewhere public

Chew gum

Rip paper into really small pieces

Talk to yourself

Hug a pillow

Scream as loud as you can

Dance

Play with play dough

Count to 100

Learn a new language

Go for a drive

Origami

Garden

Rake leaves

Throw snow balls

Throw socks against the wall

Call your therapist

Re-arrange a room

Play a board game

Watch fish

Go shopping

Browse Amazon/Ebay/Etsy

Hot shower or bath

Pop balloons

Take pictures

Play a video game

Youtube

Or....

Do what I’m doing now and make your own list of things to do instead of self-harm

Appointments

I saw my therapist yesterday and my psychiatrist today.

I made the appointment with my therapist last week when I was having the anxiety. I wanted to see him to help stop the issue snowballing. And even though the anxiety went away I decided to keep the appointment because he had said at our last appointment in November that we should stay in touch some way. The session was good. We talked about the anxiety and he said pretty much the same thing that I came to, that only a small amount of the worries I had were valid. And he said some of the worries were good worries to have. We talked about the episode a few weeks ago with the ups and downs. He was concerned about the level of rapid cycling. Concerned about my bipolar getting worse. I need to be careful if this happens again. We talked about if I was going to keep coming back. I told him that even though I don’t need to come as often as I was, I would like to still come in once in a while. He agreed that was good and said if I had another episode and needed an emergency appointment he would fit me in his schedule.

My appointment with the psychiatrist today was also good. Like all psychiatry appointments it was very short. He asked if I wanted to keep my meds the same as I have been doing so well. And while that makes sense, I wanted to change my mood stabilizer. The one I’ve been taking for two years causes acne and I’m just sick of it. Unfortunately that was the only mood stabilizer that pretty much guaranteed no weight gain. So we’ve decided to come off the mood stabilizer completely. The antipsychotic I’m on should be acting as a mood stabilizer especially for manic symptoms. So I’ll stay on that and the antidepressant and see how this goes. He said if I start having bad episodes again I should go back on it and treat the acne in some way. I’m happy with the plan.

Hope everyone is well. I’m going to get back to school work now. Jazz history… fun stuff.  

Getting through anxiety

I’ve had some really bad anxiety the past few days. I think it started small but then it got to the point where I couldn’t handle anything. Wasn’t depressed yet but was getting close. I worked really hard to fight against it and I did pretty well. I wanted to avoid taking any Xanax because that is just a temporary fix. I wanted to just deal with the problems instead of just putting it aside for a couple hours until the effects of the medication died down. I want to share what I did.

Halfway through the day today I felt like I had enough of feeling like this. So the first thing I did was sit down and made a list of everything that was making me anxious. This already helped because seeing everything written down it made me realize there weren’t as many things wrong that I felt there were. I looked closely at the list and thought about each one and if it was something I could control now. A lot of it wasn’t something I could fix so I pushed those aside. For the ones I could fix now I wrote next to each one what I could do to make it better. Some of the things I had was:

How messy my house was- Stop thinking about how messy the house is and start to clean it. Don’t do it all at once but start off small. This worked very well because once I got going it was much easier to keep on going.

The amount of school work I have- Again, stop thinking about it and actually do it. Make a schedule and stick to it. When I think I want to do something else like watch TV, stop and think about what my options are and what should be a priority. Making a schedule already helped because it made me see that what I had to do was doable, whereas before I just kept sitting around thinking about all the things I had to do.

Dinner time- This has been a major stress for me. So I thought about what exactly was making it stressful. I figured out that I was deciding what we would have for dinner at the last minute. It would be too late to make anything that took a while. I need to plan, plan, plan. I’m telling myself that by lunch time each day I need to decide exactly what to have for dinner and figure out right away what time I need to start making everything.

This was not everything but I think you get the idea. After I thought through all these I went back to the list of things I could not fix. Instead of focusing on the fact that I couldn’t do anything, I tried figuring out why these things were causing anxiety. Just thinking about the cause helped me see that there is no reason to be anxious over them.

40% of things you worry about will never occur

30% are things from the past that’s can’t be changed

12% are needless worries about one’s health

10% are petty worries

8% are real legitimate worries.

Only 8% of your worries are worth it. Focus on that 8% and what you can do about it.

Skipped my meds

It was around 5am this morning. After staying up all night doing homework, writing, looking on YouTube, laundry, I noticed I had a headache. So I decided to go take something for it. Walked into the kitchen, opened the medicine cabinet, and realized I never took my meds last night. Well that explained a lot. I’ve skipped taking my medicine a few times, but I found out the hard way that I shouldn’t do that with my new medication. I start to have manic symptoms. Hence the staying up all night doing multiple things at once. So at 5am I took my meds and within 20 minutes I was passed out. Of course I ended up being absolutely exhausted and had such a hard time getting up. I slept all morning. I couple hours ago I finally got up, got dressed, did my make up (didn’t need to do my hair, did that somewhere around 3am). I’m still very lethargic. I have no energy and would love to just sit all day watching TV. I almost took my daughters shopping. I have no idea what I was thinking, that was a stupid idea and I’m so glad I didn’t do it. So I think today is just not going to be productive. My house is a mess. Thankfully I’m all caught up with school work and can afford not to do anything today.

I don’t have much more to say. I haven’t been that inspired to do much blog writing lately. I have a list of things I want to talk about but I’m just not getting anywhere.

I have an acquaintance on YouTube, Sammi (I’ll link her channel below). She discusses many things including her history with a mental illness. Recently she shared some of her hospitalization records with her viewers. It really interested me and made me realize how much I would like to read mine from my first hospitalization. So I requested to get my records sent to me. I don’t know how long it will take but once I get them I will share them with you all.

Check out Sammi's channel! https://www.youtube.com/user/rawsammi