As you know, I’ve been dealing with these anxiety symptoms for about a two months. I cut out the caffeine entirely. I laid off the Sudafed. I saw my acupuncturist, who gave me krill oil and some other Chinese herbs I cannot pronounce to stabilize my chi. And nothing really helped.
I was fairly certain that while the symptoms were physical, it wasn’t a physical condition, a certainty that was only strengthened by a long weekend at camp wherein, despite the emotional stress the weekend contained for me, I didn’t have a single symptom from the time I left my house at 4:30 a.m. that Friday morning until I got home at 1:00 a.m. Monday night. Nor did I feel any symptoms that whole week, and they didn’t come back until the next Monday. Since then, I’ve been feeling them on and off, although considerably milder. I was familiar with the sensation by now and realized that the symptoms match anytime I’m really anxious or nervous: stage fright, a near miss in traffic, that sort of thing. If it were a physical problem, it would’ve been more consistent. But the fact that it rarely happened anywhere but work, where the stress level has been pretty consistent in the 5 years I’ve worked here, I really didn’t think it was work-related, although I wondered if my cubicle-dwelling ways, slouching 8 hours a day, was not getting me the activity and oxygen I needed to feel my best.
I was supposed to take the herbs my acupuncturist gave me before lunch because I told her I felt it mostly around lunch time and in the afternoon. She said they were very fast-acting, and that I should take them as soon as I feel the symptoms, and try head off the problem before it got out of control and really uncomfortable. I wondered aloud to her if the fact that A and I talked every day at lunch had anything to do with it, but didn’t think much more about it until a few hours after the treatment, the anxiety was back. So I took the herbs and noted the time. It was 10:49 a.m.
The next day the symptoms were back again, so I took the herbs and noted the time. It was 11:00 a.m.
The symptoms would go away when I was physically active, or busy with something else, but sometimes would reappear in the afternoon, a couple hours before I went home. On rare occasions, I’d feel it in the evening as well. Other times I would be fine. When I was less fine, fidgeting helped me feel better. I’d bounce my leg under my desk, or take a turn around the office building. I thought maybe I just needed to burn off excess energy, so I upped my level of exercise (I’ve exercised 8 of the last 9 days. Go me!). But it was still there. And oddly, it happened to me 99% of the time at work at about 11 o’clock.
I have long thought it was psychological, but I couldn’t nail it down to anything but the obvious: grief. And yet, the symptoms are two months old, whereas the grief is 6 ½ months old and easing more all the time, rather than getting worse. And why that time of day? There had to be something to that.
I’m not quite sure when the epiphany struck, but it did. It was A’s and my habit to e-mail every morning. If I hadn’t heard from him by 11 o’clock and didn’t know why (like he was out on a job site), I started to worry. One he was late because he’d been in a car accident coming back from an appointment with a client. Eventually, he’d get around to it, “Sorry, busy, making sawdust,” and I’d breathe a sigh of relief. It was also our habit to e-mail all afternoon, and finish up with a chat right before I left work, and we’d chat every night from 8:30ish until he went to bed. The times of my anxiety symptoms were a pretty close match to those habitual times.
The body remembers things even when we don’t, and although my mind did not expect to get an e-mail from him, I think my body still worried when I wasn’t hearing from him in the morning. I also think once that internal tone was set, the rest of the day followed suit. The fact that I knew something was wrong when I didn’t hear from him via e-mail or chat, and ended up having to investigate, only to find out he’d died, is probably strong emotional reinforcement for the current anxiety: I’m not hearing from him! What’s going on??? The body remembers habits of feeling more than fact, so while my brain is clear on the situation, after two years of habit, my body is conditioned: being in front of the computer means I’m going to talk to him one way or another, sooner or later. I’m at my desk, at work, and my work is nothing if not completely routine. The stage is set for everything to be what it was; only it’s not going to be. Hence, anxiety.
I realized on my walk Wednesday night that the symptoms only happened in when I was in front of a computer. It’s 7:51 p.m. Wednesday night as I write this, and I can feel the flutter in my chest right now. It wasn’t there on my walk, nor during dinner. I’m on a computer all day at work, and while I’m not on the computer all evening, the computer is on and I use it intermittently all evening to read blogs, write blogs, and e-mail. I have never had the anxiety symptoms when I was away from a computer. A and I primarily communicated via e-mail and multiple chats during the day; that is, on a computer. The connection seems clear to me. What my mind has accepted, the rest of me has not, apparently, and when it is constantly frustrated in its unrealistic expectations, trapped in unarticulable concern/memory (“You remember the last time you couldn’t get ahold of him!”), it freaks out, and I feel like I want to jump out of my skin. The alarm is still sounding for me, 6 1/2 months later.
So, how reasonable is this theory? Well, after I had the epiphany about the timing of the morning e-mail now absent from my life, I didn’t have any symptoms at all for two days after having them every day at work for the last week, and only mild ones yesterday. But I was having a bit of a tough grief day and PMS to boot that I think reactivated it. Only time will tell, but this feels like a reasonable diagnosis.