Its 230 am and I’m awake.

Again.

My mind is stuck on putting up the photos from Darkshore XIX. So guess what I’m doing right now? Yup, uploading the photos to Facebook. I’m letting it go through and automatically so it recognizes people. One less step for me to do. Even through I’m sure I’ll have to go in and fix some of them, and I know I’ll have to add some too.

I’m listening to the Piano Guys as I’m doing this. Some soft gentle music. Maybe it’ll help put me back to sleep, I don’t know. All I know for sure is that if I don’t fall back to sleep soon its going to be a long day. I have class today like normal.

So talking of class, we focused on anxiety today. Which will end up being the topic of the week. But first we checked in with the councilor. We said our name, what our high point(s) of the weekend was. Mine was my friend Laoric getting a huge award in Amtgard, his Master Rose. I also was excited because I got my first order of the rose for helping cook for WTF (Westmarch Tutorial for Fighters), with Laoric. Then we talked about a struggle we had over the weekend. For me it was being over stimulated, in which I ended up using either coloring, music, or just taking a nap in order to recharge. My treatment goals and process have a lot to do with balancing out my medication. I’m still not quite right and I noticed a side effect directly related to the increase in my Ativan. I got really restless 24/7. I did have some dark thoughts at the wee hours of this morning, but I still feel safe. There is no impulse to follow through on them. And that I was grateful for Gucci and my boyfriend.

Anyway, Anxiety.

There are multiple types of anxiety. We focused on the Worry Anxiety. This is where you keep focusing on stuff in the past. Or on stuff way in the future. I do both. The thing with worried thoughts and worry anxiety, they are only inside of us. They aren’t on the outside. We might have signs that we are anxious on the outside, but our problems stay on the inside.

The graph above is just one way to look at it. The way I got it I had a linear chart.

Thoughts are where everything starts. It’s with the dwelling and the not sleeping. The uncontrollable worry. In able to shift thoughts, negative, being stuck in the future or the past, is to shifting thoughts to what you have control over. You use the problem solving skills to help bring you back. Look at your successes verses your struggles (the reason why I started this blog), self talk, reassurance that you can do stuff, and sometimes affirmations to help you along in your daily life.

Then there is the next step, which is interchangeable. Physical tension and emotional stress. Emotional stress is where we feel overwhelmed, trapped, pressured. Its learning about how to bring down these thoughts and feelings down to size, something that we can handle. And then you challenge them. There is also a lot of self-care involved in this step. Its needing to do something peaceful and calm, having positive plans (like going bike or horse back riding), and sometime setting smaller goals.

The counciler today for the second lesson talked a little more in depth about anxiety. And we were talking about the stone age brain, and lions and tigers and bears (oh my!). So we started talking about how to fight off preditors, using preditors as an example for anxiety. So to ward off a bear in the wild, what is one of the things, you are told to do? You’re told to get up and be as big and intimidating as possible in order to get the bear to back down. Why does the bear back down? Because bears get anxiety too.

The last step is Demoralization and exhaustion. And this is where I feel that I am currently. This is the feeling of “burn out”, or hitting the wall, or breaking down. I had a break down, but I’m slowly trying to bring myself back up. Its hard and painful, but I am doing my best, day by day. With this step you need to have more help to get you back. Again, where I am. This is looking at support groups, friends and classes, getting specific help, again, classes. Having daily strategist and more ideas in which help you.

 

So I finished 2 pictures in class today. I worked on my wolf and I started a new one in color because I was getting tired of working with grey…. and my pencils were getting dull. And I didn’t take a pencil sharpener to class. whoops.

Here’s the best of photos from Darkshore XIX by the way…