Anxiety is My Beeping Smoke Detector
If you spend a lot of time on Tik Tok, you probably have seen a video or two where someone had their smoke detector beeping in the background. If you didn’t know, that faint and occasional beep means the batteries are dying and need to be changed.
If you haven’t changed the battery, do the fire department a favor and change it!
My anxiety operates just like that annoying beeping. It is persistent, and it beeps all day long. Anxiety was described to me as an alarm system in my brain. It is there to detect danger, and although I want to be cured of it, there isn’t one. There are ways to manage and essentially change the battery so that the beeping isn’t persistent and the “danger” detector is working correctly.
I have been striving to change that battery, and yesterday was the first time the beeping got loud in a while. What does this look like for me?
Overly Committing Myself
I start saying yes to everything and let my schedule rule my day. I knew going into this week that I had over-scheduled my calendar. One day, in particular, was Thursday. Aside from personal goals like writing and posting the blog for the week, I had a ton of work things that needed to get done, and as far as appointments and meetings, my schedule was stacked with very little room for myself.
This left me dragging in the door at 8 pm, completely spent! I had a splitting headache and hadn’t eaten anything since noon. By the time I decided to try and get some rest, I tossed and turned until, finally, my body was too exhausted, and I fell asleep while my mind was still running through the events of the day.
Unable to Focus
I always say I have a focus problem and am easily distracted. It is not a lie! I have been this way since childhood. When my anxiety alarms go off, I am hyper-focused on everything, making it difficult for me to focus on the task at hand.
Even the best productivity systems often fail on me because when my alarm system goes off, my attention span takes a beating.
Changes in my mood
When my anxiety level is high, my mood is always off. I can never honestly describe it. It’s like a place between sadness and excitement, which means I want to do nothing except binge-watch Grey’s Anatomy and eat junk food, or I spend hours cleaning my apartment at 3 am.
If any of this resonated with you, it’s time to change that battery.
