Tag Archives: anxiety

anxiety, Buddhist life

Dealing with Post-Break Overwhelm + Anxiety

I had friends in town for a few days last week. I worked while they were staying with me but let most everything else slide. Within moments of them leaving, I was overwhelmed with all I had to catch up on. My mind seemed to instantly fill with tasks that felt urgent: vacuum up all the dust bunnies, clean out the fridge, pull the weeds in the sidewalk cracks, read all the texts that came in, reassemble the pull out couch, figure out what the packages are that arrived (WTF did I order?).

Every time I tried to turn my brain off, it just generated more items for my to-do list. I hadn’t done laundry in days or checked my personal email. I needed groceries. A lightbulb needed replacing.

And then my anxiety kicked in. My brain said, “I think I noticed a bit of mold on a lemon in the fridge last night. What if it touches the lettuce and the lettuce gets all moldy? And then what if the mold spreads beyond the lettuce?” Then my mind jumped to the washing machine—it made a scraping sound—what if it’s spinning too fast and catches on fire?

Just like that, the feeling of being behind morphed into fear of a deadly mold infestation and a fire.

In these moments, I know I need to calm down but telling myself to calm down just makes things worse. When I’m upset, if someone tells me to calm down, it has the opposite effect. When I tell myself to calm down, the same thing happens. I want to scream, “How can I calm down when the house is a disaster and about to explode into mold and flames?!”

Decision paralysis takes over. I can’t identify what to do first. Planning a trip to Africa for some future point seems equally important as having to pee right now. It all must get done now!

At some point, I finally remember what works: I tell myself, “Take a deep breath.” Zen Buddhism brings everything back to the breath. All we have is this breath, and then this one, and then this one. The breath is all that really matters. Focusing on my breath calms me. Each deep breath slows my brain down a bit. Sometimes it takes just one breath and sometimes it takes a hundred, but when I let my breath become my focus, all the mental clutter fades away.

I have a tendency to hold my breath when I’m exerting myself, whether mentally, emotionally, or physically. My personal trainer is always cueing me to breathe, reminding me that when I hold my breath, lunges and squats are harder. It’s true for everything: holding my breath makes thinking harder, sleeping harder, conflict harder.

The simple act of breathing with awareness reminds me that none of those things I think need to get done actually need to get done. Life will go on, whether the laundry is done or the email is answered. I can make choices about where to focus my energy.

I remind myself that I will never be caught up. The expected outcome is that I will die with things undone. My husband died with things undone. My mother died with things undone. It’s ok.

Life is not about getting things done. When I remember my husband or my mother, my mind goes to my love for them, the moments we shared, not the things they left undone.

anxiety, grieving

Identifying a New Secondary Loss, Nearly 3 Years Out

The death of a loved one has a ripple effect. There’s the loss of that person and then there are the secondary losses—the shifts in routines that make a day feel off, the friendships that fade because the person who held them together is gone or people are too uncomfortable to maintain them, the end of hobbies that depended on the person who died.

I count my anxiety and panic disorder (APD) as a secondary loss. Although I wasn’t diagnosed with APD until after my husband died, now that I understand what it is, I realize I’ve had panic attacks since I was a teenager.

My late husband had such a calming effect on me that I only had a handful of panic attacks after we met. With them going unrecognized by me as a symptom of APD and then them fading away during my marriage, by the time I was diagnosed after he died, it seemed like a new condition.

Now through the lens of hindsight, I see the reemergence of my panic attacks as both a reaction to his death and a response to the loss of his calming effect on me.

Throughout our relationship, when I felt panic rising in my chest, I knew that a hug from him or hearing his deep unwavering voice would steady me. I came to count on him whenever I was navigating a personal or work situation that felt overwhelming. He seemed to always be in control, which made me feel completely safe.

One time, for example, I was driving in a snowstorm on a busy highway before my vision impairments were diagnosed and it was the phase when my doctors were just telling me I wasn’t “trying hard enough” to see. The light gray of the sky, the white of the snow, the surrounding dirty vehicles, the asphalt all blurred together into a mottled smear. I wanted to pull off the highway, but I couldn’t see where the lanes were. I started hyperventilating in panic and realized I was on the verge of passing out while I was driving.

I called Tom and he talked me through the rest of the drive, settling my breathing so I didn’t pass out. As long as I could hear his steady voice, I knew I would be ok.

Even with the stress of his stroke during the COVID pandemic, holding his hand steadied me. Even when he was asleep, I found comfort in simply being in bed up against his body.

And then he died—and my entire APD coping arsenal was gone. The thought that he’s gone forever adds to my anxiety and panic. My learning to manage it on my own has been messy.

I’ve had a lot of anxiety lately as the three-year anniversary of his death in June looms on my calendar. One day last week I left to catch the bus to my dance lesson in a hurry and forgot my water bottle. One of my go-to strategies when I’m feeling anxious is to very deliberately drink some water, taking a sip, feeling it in my mouth, swallowing it, and being aware of it moving down my throat. Once I realized the bottle wasn’t in my bag, I could feel the anxiety tightening in my chest—a tell tale sign that a panic attack is rising. That’s when I realized I didn’t have my drugs with me either.

I held it together on the bus, telling myself the fresh air when I got off the bus would help. Once I got off the bus, I knelt on the sidewalk, gulping air. My hands were shaking and it took effort to think. I knew I needed to get some water. There is a water dispenser at the dance studio, but I knew the studio would be buzzing with people and I needed to avoid that. Physical activity helps, so I just started walking and came to a coffee shop a few blocks from the studio, where I bought a bottle of water.

I sat outside the studio, ritualistically taking sips of water between measured breaths. By the time my lesson started, I was on edge but not on the verge of a panic attack.

The dance lesson helped, too. I’m working on tango right now and hearing the familiar music activated my muscle memory and my body started shifting its resources from fight or flight mode to the work of holding my upper body in the tango frame, which is also surprisingly mental. I’m early enough in my work on tango that it takes a tremendous amount of focus for me to maintain the form (shoulders down, elbows up, head up and left, arms strong yet flexible, back arched yet tall).

The secondary losses hurt and nearly three years out, I’m still identifying them.  

academic life/work, anxiety, Buddhist life, failure, mental illness

Befriending Overwhelm

I spend a good part of my time at the intersection of Depression, Anxiety, and Grief. When overwhelm hits, which it often does, and a wave of panic rises up in my chest, I take a deep breath.

I find my Buddhist practice very helpful when I feel that panic. Panic makes me feel like I should be hurrying—doing something, anything, and fast! But Buddhists aren’t known for hurrying. When my impulse is to move fast, I consciously slow down. With each deep breath, my panic subsides a bit until it is manageable. Sometimes I have to go through the process of taking a deep breath and letting my panic subside multiple times in a day or even an hour. It’s ok, I tell myself, take your time.

I was at a conference last week that put me into overwhelm. I was surrounded by brilliant, energetic, competent people and I felt dull, slow, and outdated in their company. Each session I attended left me feeling more overwhelmed by the feeling that I could never perform my job the way they perform theirs.

For me, overwhelm is often quite sneaky and I don’t always recognize it for what it is. I often notice that I feel a heaviness I can’t quite identify for hours or even days before I realize, “Oh, I’m feeling overwhelmed!” Once I label the feeling, I say hello to it. Really—I say out loud, “Hello, Overwhelm, my old friend.” That may seem ridiculous, but greeting it as a friend helps me not react to it with fear.

Then I sit down with it as I would with a friend having a tough time. If possible, I do this over coffee or tea, just as I would with a friend. “What’s going on?” I ask it. Here’s how my conversation with Overwhelm went last week at the conference:

Me: What’s going on?

Overwhelm: Everyone here is doing such amazing things! I’m so far behind—how can I do cool things with antiracism and undergraduate research and STEM support and all the other things I need to do?????? And I’m behind on publishing and . . . It’s a hopeless situation.

Me, speaking to Overwhelm as I would to any friend: Hmmm. I wonder if being at an academic conference is kind of like scrolling through Facebook. Presenters are showing their best work, just as most people on Facebook are showing their best moments. Just as the happy family photos don’t tell the whole story of a person’s daily life, a brilliant conference presentation doesn’t tell the whole story of an academic’s work.

Overwhelm: Huh . . .

By that point, Overwhelm started to lose its energy.

Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. The next day I went to a session where I heard about an amazing and elaborate program that I would love to replicate. Afterwards, I was overwhelmed with thoughts that quickly led me to a downward spiral: I will never be able to replicate the program, but I should try, but I can’t ever do it like she did, I will fail, I suck . . . and I’m behind on email and . . .  So I took a deep breath. And another one. I’ve learned I must regulate my breathing before I can regulate my thoughts. Another deep breath.

“Hello again, Overwhelm,” I said in between deep breaths.

Once I was breathing in a non-panicked way, my thoughts were already a little more manageable. I wrote them all down in a list. All the thoughts went on the list: I’m behind on email, I have a report due in November, if I don’t stain the back fence before it gets cold it will rot away this winter, I will never be able to replicate the program I heard about, I suck . . .  Giving each thought its own line on the list gives it some space. It can exist. It is an ok thought. When all the thoughts were on the list, I gave one breath to each thought, taking the length of one complete breath, an inhale and an exhale, to acknowledge the thought and linger on it. Sometimes that lead to more thoughts, which went on the list.

Sometimes all the thoughts want is a little space to be acknowledged and then I can let them go. The thought that whatever I come up with will never be as great as what this other woman came up with was one I could easily let go of once I gave it a breath. No, what I do won’t be as great as what she did. I’m not in competition with this other person, who is at a different institution in a different state. OK. Good bye, thought.

Other thoughts are useful and become items on my to do list or bucket list. The report due in November and staining the back fence went on my to do list.

Thoughts like “I suck” just want space. I give that thought a breath and then cross it off my list. I know it’s not true in any meaningful way. I used to have to fact check those thoughts—do I suck? I’d ask. And then I’d write down the evidence for and against that verdict. There was always more evidence against the verdict. Now I don’t have to do the actual fact-checking, I just have to remind myself that I’ve held this trial many times before and always the verdict has been, no, you don’t really suck.

Buddhism tells me that any time I want to hang on to a thought, hold it in a tight grip, I should instead open my hand and give it space, let it float away if it wants to. It usually wants to float away. Thoughts that float away sometimes come back, but if I again loosen my grip on them, they float away again. Sometimes they float back and I let them float away several times a day for years and years. It’s ok. I can keep letting them float away. Once I learned how to let them float away, I began to trust that they will float away if/when they return.

Letting the thoughts float away doesn’t “cure” me of my grief, depression, or anxiety. All it does is make the overwhelm go away. And I’ll take that.

Accessibility + Dis/ability, anxiety, grieving, mental illness

How to Be Gentle with Yourself

Twice in the last week I’ve told someone I hope they can be gentle* with themselves. They are both dealing with tough situations beyond their control—one’s mother is slowly dying and they are experiencing the heartbreak of anticipatory grief; the other has significant health challenges and just had a second bout with COVID.

It’s easy for me to identify situations where others should be gentle with themselves. It’s a bit more challenging to figure out when I need to be gentle with myself, but it’s something I’ve been working on and getting better at.

I’ve been struggling with a round of depression and anxiety for about a month now, sleeping much more than usual, feeling constantly fatigued and drained. There are days where I get nothing done beyond walking and feeding the dogs and myself and working out (I learned long ago that working out is a basic daily need for me and I almost never skip it, although I do sometimes allow myself to work out for just a few minutes—see #1 below).

For the first week that I felt crappy, I told myself I was wasting my life. I told myself I couldn’t have dessert or a glass of wine with dinner unless I accomplished certain items on my to do list. I told a friend I was being a loser. I asked myself repeatedly, “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” I rolled my eyes at myself in the mirror with the derisive, dismissive, contemptuous air of a teenager.

None of this made my depression and anxiety easier to cope with. It did not motivate me to stop sleeping so much or to fly into action, completing tasks on my to do list. It just made a difficult situation worse.

I wish I could tell you that when I stopped being mean to myself, my depression and anxiety magically disappeared. Alas, that is not the case. But when I stopped being mean to myself, I was dealing only with depression and anxiety rather than depression and anxiety and the cruel torment of a bully. Taking away the bullying made the depression and anxiety relatively easier to bare.

Want to be gentler to yourself? Here’s what I do:

  1. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good. Working out for 5 minutes is better than not working out at all. I’ve been chipping away at writing projects in 15-minute increments, and while I’d like to be putting in more time, I’m not able to right now.

2. When I catch myself saying something to myself that I would never say to another person, like, “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” I take a step back and apologize. I remind myself that I am a kind person and that I am kind to everyone. Even myself.

3. Refrain from bad-mouthing myself to others. My form of self-deprecating humor can get a little out of hand sometimes and I’m trying to reign it in. When I am about to tell a friend I’m a lazy ass, I remind myself I am depressed.

4. Continue allowing myself dessert, wine, and other treats rather than making them contingent of achievements. Everyone deserves pleasure in their life.

5. Remind myself that depression and anxiety are illnesses, and just as I would cut myself slack about sleeping a lot if I had the flu, allow myself to act like a sick person.

6. Accept what is possible under the current conditions. Although I’ve gotten by with 7.5-8 hours of sleep a night for many years, lately I seem to want more like 10 hours of sleep. It’s very inconvenient. I can’t possibly get done what I normally get done with two hours a day less to do things. This is where guideline #1 really comes in handy. And it turns out that a lot of things I normally do in a day don’t need to happen or don’t need to happen every day. What does need to happen every day is me taking care of myself.

7. Hold space for myself to be depressed or anxious. That means no fixing.

Being depressed and anxious still sucks, but at least now I know I have my own back. I don’t look in the mirror with self-loathing—instead, I look with compassion, as I would for anyone else on the planet.

*I no longer tell people to be strong. I think being gentle is both more difficult and more effective.

anxiety, grieving

Trying to Reason with My Own Brain during a Panic Attack

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Sunday is the 2-year anniversary of making the decision to take my husband off life support and Monday is the anniversary of his death. I call the two back-to-back days “the d-days.” The first d-day is also my birthday, and this year it’s Father’s Day, too, so a real doozy of a day.

I’ve been giving these dates on my calendar the side eye for a while now. A few months ago, I arranged to spend the Friday night and Saturday at my sister’s, both to low-key celebrate my birthday and to not be alone, and I made plans to be with another widow on the evening of my birthday.

Once I made all those plans, I largely put the dates out of my mind, but I was vaguely aware that they were getting closer. In the meantime, I went about my life as usual, which has been pretty wonderful lately. I’m back at work after a very rewarding sabbatical, I’m surrounded by supportive, generous people, and I’m just generally feeling happy and optimistic.

Yesterday was a particularly lovely day. I spent time with my sister and then later had dinner with my mother-in-law, her husband, and my daughter. I spent most of the day laughing. When I went to bed, I was feeling very loved and connected, so I expected to fall asleep blissfully.

Just as I was about to drift off, right in the middle of a deep breath, there it was—panic. Suddenly I was kicking the blankets off, sweating, unable to catch my breath. My body reacted as if I were being physically threatened in the moment: my hands were in fists, my whole body ready to spring into action to thwart an attacker. Only the attacker was my own thoughts:

My husband is dead and I will never be with him again, I thought. I will be alone for eternity, my brain continued. He’s alone in the dark crevasse of death and eventually, I will be too, my brain told me, delivering the coup de grace.

These are not even thoughts I believe. When I’m not having a panic attack, I feel my husband all around me and I feel deeply connected to him still. I don’t think of myself as being alone and I have (at least for an introvert) a very active social life. I don’t normally feel that death is a lonely place—like many Buddhists, I believe our spirits live on beyond our physical bodies.

I reminded myself of this, but my brain remained convinced that I was in danger. I tried tapping and listening to a meditation. I reminded myself of the Pierre Teilhard de Chardinquote I love: “we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” I reminded myself that everything is temporary and the panic will pass.

My brain wound itself tighter into panic, swatting each of my calm reminders away.

My brain said, “You’ll be alone forever.”

I patiently responded, “Nothing lasts forever.” And “I am not alone.”

But still, my heart pounded, my legs shook, and my breathing remained shallow.

I read recently that the best way to protect yourself in a fall is to relax. This idea aligns with the concept of relaxing into difficult emotions. I tried to relax into my panic. I said out loud, “Hello, panic, my old friend. I know you are trying to protect me. Thank you for looking out for me, but I am ok.”

My panic responded with a snarl and bared teeth, and I took a Lorazepam. I consider Lorazepam a last resort because of its habit-forming properties (my mother was an alcoholic and daughters of alcoholics are more likely to become addicts, so I’ve been on high alert regarding addiction my whole life) but if I wait too long to take it, it doesn’t help me sleep. A classic Catch-22 situation. So I have to declare the situation “a last resort” a little earlier than I would usually like, but once I made that call, my panic eased a bit just from having the decision made.

This was my first panic attack since February, which is the longest I’ve gone between attacks since I started having them.

This week’s to do list now includes being extra kind and patient with myself through the d-days and celebrating the win of going almost four months without a panic attack.

Buddhist life, grieving, mental illness

Welcoming Depression Back into My Life

A couple weeks ago I realized my grief was veering into depression. Depression has been a constant in my life since I was about 8, but at that time, the world thought 8 year-olds couldn’t have depression, so I was just considered moody and bitchy. I was finally diagnosed in my teens and got on anti-depressants, which I took until my early 20s, when I was able to taper off of them and mange my depression with meditation, exercise, and lots of intentional choices about food and alcohol.

I was always aware that I was off medication “for now” and knew that I might need to go back on it at some point. Last year, when I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and panic attacks, I started taking a low dose of Escitalopram, which can help with both anxiety and depression.

Over the last few months, many of the things I’ve attributed to grief had started to happen less frequently. I was still feeling intense grief but not every minute of every day, and sometimes I could go entire days without feeling intense grief. My appetite returned. My sleep was mostly regular. The sneaker waves of grief came less often. I didn’t feel compelled to visit my late husband’s bench every day.

But last month, I started wanting to sleep all the time again. I slept through my alarm in the morning. I craved sugar. I didn’t want to work out, which is one of my favorite things to do.  

A couple weeks ago, I noticed that instead of feeling my normal grief mindset of “life is hard today but it will pass,” I was thinking “life is hard.” I didn’t have my usual sense of temporariness. I felt a kind of doom I’ve come to understand as anxiety, but it wasn’t anxiety. Anxiety shows up in my stomach and chest, but this doom was showing up everywhere. It was all encompassing, like a weight holding me down. It felt physical, as if a heavy blanket had been thrown over me and I had to drag it around with me all day. I couldn’t shake the heavy blanket or get out from under it.  

It happened slowly enough that I didn’t quite recognize that anything was different. Then I started reading Depression: A Public Feeling by Ann Cvetkovich, which is part memoir about her own experience of living with depression. Some of her descriptions of how depression felt resonated intensely with me. She uses words like “pervasive” and “relentless” and describes being unable to work on a project she had been passionate about and “the impossibility of physical relaxation.”

My first thought was, “It sounds like grief,” and then I realized grief hadn’t felt at all like that in a long time. I went back through my journal and saw the proof there that I had not always felt like I was dragging a heavy blanket around.

I’m now taking an increased dose of Escitalopram. The increase pretty much made me sleep for two days straight, but now I can stay awake all day and I’m starting to feel more like myself.

Just as I tried to make friends with my anxiety (we are closer now but not quite friends), I am trying to take a non-combative approach to my depression. It is part of me and if I love myself, I must love the depression in some way.

Two ideas have been helpful to me in this regard:

When I started grad school in 1993, nobody knew me or my past as a person with depression, so I didn’t mention it to anyone. I wasn’t consciously trying to hide it, but I also wasn’t bringing it to anyone’s attention. A few months ago, I added “I live with low vision” to my online bio, and soon after that I added anxiety to the list. A week or so ago, I added depression to the list.

Acknowledging publicly that anxiety and depression are part of my identity feels risky. Mental illness is still stigmatized and often seen as opposed to critical thinking, which is prized in academia. But I know from casual conversations that many of my students and colleagues live with mental illness. (I have tenure and am a full professor, so if I feel nervous about the disclosure, imagine how folks with less job security feel.)

Acknowledging depression in my bio is one way I am being compassionate towards myself and owning my depression.

anxiety, grieving

Scattering Ashes, Forgetting He’s Dead, and Intense Anxiety at 18 Months Out

I have been traveling for the past month. One stop in my travels was to Ushuaia, Argentina, where I scattered some of my late husband’s ashes. Ushuaia is the southern-most point of the Pan-American Highway. My husband loved riding motorcycles and read a lot of online forum postings by people who had ridden the Pan-American Highway from Alaska to Ushuaia. He wanted to do the ride when he retired. He didn’t get to retire or do the ride, so for me, scattering some of his ashes in Ushuaia was a way to symbolically honor those wishes of his.

The night before scattering his ashes, my anxiety kicked in hard. I’ve been able to manage it pretty well for several months, but I wondered if it would show up on my trip. The first part of the trip went smoothly, but as the ash-scattering day got closer and closer, I could feel the restlessness building up inside me, especially at night when I went to bed. I started dreaming about my husband being unhappy with where I scattered the ashes or not being able to find a suitable spot.

I wasn’t too worried about the anxiety because I have a good list on my phone of strategies to use to help me when it gets bad. I figured if it got very intense, I would just methodically work my way through the list until I found a strategy that helped.

The night it really hit me, my first go-to strategy, walking or working out, wasn’t available to me because of where I was in my travels, so I moved on to my second strategy: tapping. Tapping uses the same principles as acupuncture to channel energy to the body’s meridian points. I think it also helps by bringing my awareness out of my mind and into my body. Unfortunately, that night, tapping didn’t seem to have any effect. No problem, I thought, I’ll listen to some meditations on Insight Timer.

That night I was in a remote part of the world and didn’t have internet access. I had planned ahead for that possibility by downloading several of my favorite Insight Timer meditations within the app, but when I tried to find them, they weren’t there. That’s when my anxiety really started to escalate. My hands were shaking as I tried to navigate my phone. I checked and rechecked the app. I closed the app and re-opened it. I turned my phone off and back on. None of it helped. The downloads weren’t there. I could only listen to meditations if I had an internet connection and that wasn’t possible. My mind went blank and I could no longer even find my list of strategies.

I finally took a Lorazepam, which is kind of my last resort option. It felt like admitting defeat, which made my anxiety even more intense. By then, my hands were shaking so much that I spilled the pills all over my bed, leading to the kind of low-contrast situation in which I’m pretty much functionally blind: white pills on white sheets. I had to use my shaky hands to find all the little pills strewn about in the sheets. Even after I swallowed a pill, there was no relief. By that time, I had gotten too worked up for it to have a noticeable effect.

At that point, I went to a strategy I’m surprised I remembered without my list: reminding myself that everything is temporary. That the anxiety will eventually pass. That I will eventually fall asleep. That the world will carry on. And I did eventually fall asleep for a couple of hours.

I ended up finding an excellent place to scatter the ashes: at the base of a gorgeous and regal tree in the forest off the Pan-American Highway. The tree had lichens on it that only grow in places where the air is exceptionally pure.

My anxiety continued through my husband’s birthday, a few days later. but after a few days I at least had Internet access again and re-downloaded my meditations. Until then, I took a Lorazepam each night when I went to bed (it seems to work best when I take it before my anxiety kicks in, which becomes a mind-bending prediction game in itself). Once I was able to listen to my meditations again, the anxiety became much easier to deal with, although it still lingered for a few more nights.

My lack of sleep probably contributed to a mind blip while in Chile. I saw a sculptural door made out of old metal farm implements and said to my friend, “I need to take a picture of that for Tom.” It’s the first time in a year that I forgot he was dead. Somehow, for a moment my brain thought he wasn’t with me in Chile because he was back home, waiting for me. For that moment, I wasn’t a widow. For that moment, I was excited to share stories and pictures from my epic trip with him. I could see the look of wonder and appreciation he would have on his face, feel his hand on the small of my back, hear him saying, “That’s amazing, Babe.”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I had the crushing memory that he was dead. It felt like all the heartbreak I’ve experienced since he died was compressed into a single massive wave that flattened me. Luckily, I was with a dear friend who knew to immediately pull me into a hug and didn’t mind that I got snot all over her shoulder.

It was a tough time, and it was temporary.