helen-louise's journal

I'm feeling well enough to restart my PhD again this term. Spoke to Philip on Friday about changing my project to something more manageable with my physical limitations, and that actually went remarkably well. I'll write more about it when it's all been approved by the Graduate Committee.

There are various Things to deal with this term: the Graduate Symposium and the Retreat, both of which terrify me. I still don't know how exactly I'm going to get to Mill Hill for something that starts before 10 am, or how I'm going to manage for a whole day in a strange place without anywhere to go and collapse if necessary, but I'll work that out later. The Retreat is in Cambridge and involves an overnight stay, and is no doubt fully catered, which fills me with utter horror. I have a long-term phobia of Other People Controlling My Dietary Intake. It started when I was a teenage vegetarian and people thought I would eat chicken, or chilli with the pieces of meat fished out (eww). It's only got worse as I've developed quite genuine food intolerances. Traces of dairy make me really very unwell in the digestive department for an alarmingly long time.

Perhaps in preparation for this, I am doing something on Wednesday which terrifies me. They picked six random students and invited us to lunch with the visiting speaker at College. I'm not sure if it was random or if they looked for people whose work was vaguely relevant to hers. I wrote back and said that it isn't that I *can't* go, but that I have lots of food intolerances; but apparently there is no prebooked menu, and you can choose anything they sell. So I agreed to go because I've become way too good at avoiding things which make me anxious. At a time of mental health crisis, it's reasonable to avoid extra stress, but in the long term it isn't healthy - you can't get through life by avoidance.

I will no doubt regret this decision multiple times between now and Wednesday afternoon, but what is the actual worst that can happen? That there's nothing I can eat apart from a bit of salad and fruit? No one ever died from missing one meal! I have to keep my fears in perspective.

Eh. So, I sat down to work on some stuff for my cognitive behavioural therapy this evening, and instead spent something like 4 hours dealing with some epic wank online. Given how great my health and energy levels are, you can bet it wasn't the kind of wank that I had spare spoons to deal with - but I had to, because it was making me angry to the point of physically shaking.

I also found out what the weird thing that happens to me when I'm trying to get to sleep sometimes is called. A hypnic jerk or hypnagogic jerk, apparently. I was always worried that was some sort of seizure-type thing, but apparently it's completely benign and normal. However, it's more common in people with irregular sleep schedules.

My sleep schedule the past week has been completely fubar. I've been trying to get it sorted, but it's actually got worse. Joy and bliss! This may be due to the fact that I've run out of the high dose vitamin D capsules. I'm under the impression that I'm supposed to give it a few weeks and then have another blood test (so they can see what my vitamin D levels are when I'm not taking it as a supplement), but the pain in my legs is so freaking bad that I may have to start it up again to avoid screaming.

I've found another place that does vegan afternoon tea - this time with cream - and for only £9. Are you interested, nitoda? The scones still look a bit flat, but the cakes are impressive.

Right... back to my worksheets on "Overcoming Avoidance". (Yes, really).

There were two articles in yesterday's Evening Standard that I thought warranted a wider audience, and as is typical, whenever I find a newspaper article I really like, they're not visibly on the web site. Grrr.

One is by Liz Hoggard, and is an interview with Linda Kelsey, who used to be the "high-flying" editor of Cosmopolitan and She magaines, then suffered a bout of serious anxiety and depression that "destroyed" her career. Apparently she's written a novel called Fifty is Not a Four-Letter Word that is, at least, in parts, autobiographical - although her character in the book only has "a mini breakdown" not "a major, major depression". There are some very interesting quotes in the interview. I particularly liked the description of cognitive behaviour therapy, and her insistence on how exercise can fight depression.

Gradually, the "menacing fog" lifted. Her medication started working. But her real saviours were cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which taught her to challenge negative thoughts and stop turning crises into catastrophes, and exercise. Today, she walks an hour a day. She still takes a minute, placebo-sized portion of antidepressant -- but walking is her "chemical-free and cost-free wonder drug".

She talks about walking the way I talk about cycling. "For the duration of the walk my head would clear and my anxiety would recede. ... Getting out of doors stops you obsessing and silences that awful inner critic."

Of course, it's difficult to get out of doors and do the exercise when you're anxious. In the past few weeks I've had several days where it's taken me over 3 hours to get out of the house from the time I first wanted to until I actually managed it, and some more days when I haven't managed to leave the house at all. But every time I have dragged myself out, I've felt better for doing it. Walking doesn't work for me - I can brood and obsess, and even have panic attacks while walking, unless I listen to music loud enough to drown out the negative thought voices (which doesn't work when I'm truly anxious, as then I worry about not hearing important danger warning noises because my music is too loud). But cycling does clear my head in the way she describes - and I need to remember that, and force myself to do it more often.

( Read more... )

I'm sitting here waiting for a woolly Liberal to turn up to drive me to the polling station. Yes, we have an election today, where we=Canbury Ward, a small bit of the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames. One of our local councillors had to stand down because of ill-health.

I was thinking about the positive things I have got out of the Gallstone Experience, because, weird though it might seem if you've been reading all my moaning, there have been some. I've already mentioned how scarily high-fat my old diet was, and how I've learnt where fat hides in convenience foods. When I'm able to eat anything again, I do intend to keep up low-fat supplemented with occasional sausages, fake cheese and ice cream, which'll be healthier for me in the long term. For example, pretzels are easily as crunchy and salty as crisps, but even regular pretzels have a smidgeon of the amount of fat in even "low fat" crisps, and reduced-fat pretzels have all of 0.5g of fat in a packet. Less eating of complete junk has to be a good thing.

Another thing is that I have actually lost "weight". While I still don't want to be congratulated for it, shifting 12kg aka 28 lb aka 2 stone has got to be good for my joints, provided that when I'm better I exercise properly again.

I have learned that it is a Good Thing for me to take painkillers when I'm in pain. This is something that really surprised me. I really did have all this wiring in my head that painkillers are bad for you and should be avoided wherever possible. But actually, being in intense pain is far more stressful for your body than taking painkillers carefully, as directed. I now need to get that tattooed on my forehead, so I remember it.

The most important thing which I realised today is that I have miraculously gained the Ability To Say No. I was "famous" all the way through school and at college for taking on too much - in particular, pointless causes that few people cared about. ("But I have to do it! If I don't, no one else will!" with the unspoken assumed belief that that would be Bad). Somehow, I have learned that, even if I am being offered money to do something, if it could potentially make me too exhausted to do something that I have already committed to, I should refuse it. Honouring my existing commitments is more important, and taking care of myself is even more important than that.

I would, of course, have preferred to have learnt all this without the pain, antibiotics, trips to hospital at 3am and having to give up cycling (grr!), but do you think I'd have paid attention to the lessons then? Hmmm.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently.

Last night I made the mistake of reading the livejournal of someone with a far more serious medical condition than mine. While it was interesting, it was singularly unhelpful for me to be reading about that person's experiences. Because then I started making comparisons between their medical condition and mine, and worse - between the level of bravery that person must have compared to me. And as we should all know by now, comparing your levels of pain or bravery to other people's is rarely a good idea... You never come out feeling positive about yourself.

Myth 1: Fear is Binary
Yes indeed, there are two sorts of people in the world: brave people (also known as strong), and cowardly people (also known as weak or wusses).

What a load of bullshit that is! Everyone is brave about some things and cowardly about other things. The reason why it seems as though people can be divided into brave and cowardly is really due to myth number 2:

Myth 2: Fear is Commutative
Everyone in the world has the same fears. So if someone can do something that you're afraid to do, they are braver than you.

To illustrate why this is rubbish, let me use two examples:
1) Removing a spider from the bath
2) Getting a burger out of the freezer

Now, I am sure that at least 1/4 of the people reading this feel a frisson relating to the need to remove a spider from a bathtub. I could make it even more scary by saying it's a large spider, and you're in a country where some spiders are poisonous to humans, and you don't recognise this one to know if it's poisonous or not. Are the arachnophobics cowering yet? Now, I quite like spiders, and certainly in my country where there are no poisonous native spiders, it's completely trivial for me to remove a spider from, well, anything.

I am not afraid of spiders. So is it brave of me to remove one for someone who is afraid? No. It's completely mundane, or routine. It might be kind for me to do that for them, but it's not an act of bravery on my part. But: it would be easy for the arachnophobe to assume that everyone in the world shared their phobia, and some people were just better at hiding it than others. And it would be easy for that person to assume that I am braver than them, because I'm not afraid.( Read more... )

Myth 3: Fear has Levels To Master
It's certainly true that within a particular fear, there are levels of scariness. Going back to the spider in the bath, the spectrum would be something like:
Small, harmless spider < Large, harmless spider < Big hairy tarantula
(there are probably lots of sub-levels, but I don't actually want all the spider phobics hiding behind the sofa instead of reading this)

The problem is, suppose one day you manage to pick up the small, harmless spider and get it out the window. Maybe there was no one else around to help, so you had no choice but to confront your fear. What can happen then is that you develop some positive thoughts about your fear. Having managed to move a small, harmless spider once - you've done that. So you can do it again.

But along with these positive thoughts, you can get some neutral, or even negative thoughts. Like the thought that you don't need to be scared this time. Is that necessarily true? Certainly, you don't need to be as scared as you were before, but that doesn't necessarily stop you being scared. And supposing you are still scared despite having already done it, then bad voices at the back of your head can start up, telling you that you're pathetic and useless.

Another not-necessarily-positive thought is the idea that having "graduated" from the "moving small spiders" course (Spider Management 101), you are automatically entered into the "moving larger spiders" course. Having successfully moved the little spider, you can now try bigger ones! And you really don't need to be scared, of any of them! OK, again, that could help some people - but it might not, depending on your self-esteem. Because if part of your mind is deciding that you're ready for Spider Management 102 while the rest of it is still freaking out about Spider Management 101 (I did it once! And that was terrifying!), part of your mind can decide that you're a wuss, and a bad person. And then you start believing that.( Read more... )

Myth 4: Brave People Feel No Fear
Let's just jump up and down and shout BOLLOCKS to this one. What did I just say? I'm brave for feeling afraid, yet doing the scary thing anyway. If I felt no fear, I wouldn't need to be brave - we'd be back with Myth 2, and me, who likes spiders, taking the beastie away for the arachnophobe.

It's not bravery if you're not afraid. I don't know what it is. I suppose it could be bravery if you used to be afraid and you've managed to learn not to be. But it's certainly not brave to be able to do something if you weren't ever afraid of it.

I'm sure there are other Myths. These are the ones that have been biting me in the arse.

( Redux )