Published on 12, July, 2020
Hello. Does anyone else find it nearly, no actually, absolutely impossible to relax? I've tried so many things. Baths, Meditation, TV, comedy, music... Anything to just allow a person to 'wind down' Meditation originally I thought was working. But now by far I know meditation to be the worst thing for me. It makes so extremely aware of every breath and heartbeat that I actually just become anxious and end up with something called 'air hunger' where I end up trying to take deep breaths when I clearly don't really need it. And then when I can't take as a deep a breath as I feel I needed I then think it's because I can't breathe and thus the anxiety continues in its cycle. I find this to be the case with almost any 'relaxing' thing. I become way too aware of my breath and heartbeat. It's just with meditation it's intensified. I don't even relax in my sleep! I often wake up from anxiety dreams where I've clearly been hyperventilating in my sleep from the dream. How can I ever relax?
"Does anyone else find it nearly, no actually, absolutely impossible to relax?"
I've not found it easy/very possible to relax. It sounds like your anxiety is higher than mine has been getting but the similarity is in how constant the anxiety is.
My anxiety has gone down when I've been in the company of others, however, this has been a rare occurrence this year.
I can lower my anxiety through watching films (and watching baseball has helped lately). It doesn't prevent the anxiety and I can still get twitchy and anxious whilst watching, but it does lower the anxiety compared to if I weren't engaged.
Silence feels deafening this year so I put music on when I'm doing things like making food, eating it, moving from one room to another. Distracting or drowning out some of the anxiety.
One question. Are quite an empathic person? (as in a bit more than the average person)
I think I a more empathic than 'average' but it often doesn't look that way because of my lack of ability to cope, communicate well enough. But, yes, I seem to absorb peoples negative emotions. And feel great relief though don't empathise to the scale I do with negative emotions when a person is 'okay' or 'good' just a massive sigh of relief.
Yea, it can feel you're carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders. I do try to keep it in mind.
I only recently 'remembered' how I'm more empathic than most. When this hit me, it made sense why I was carrying so pain anxiety and so much pain. I am reasonably certain that I'm not just carrying my own uncertainty/pain/worries and whatnot but a whole chunk of other people's -and not just the folks I know, I feel like I'm carrying the pain of half a nation to a degree.
Realising that has helped a bit in the last two days. I don't think it's a cure for the anxiety but I'm going to try and remember, the next time my anxiety levels super-spike, that a proportion of the worry is possibly not all of my own.
I don't know if that'll help either of us but I'll track how I'm feeling, with this in mind, over the next week or two.