Anxious as a Mutha

I'm having a hard day, one of the hardest days I've had in a long time. It actually started last night, in the wee hours of the morning, when anxiety often likes to strike its vulnerable and exhausted prey. After a few nights of not being able to fall asleep and laying awake to swim around my head, last night became the crescendo to a song that's been building for a while, albeit beneath the threshold of my hearing.  Last night I had a panic attack while laying in bed next to my husband after what was a wonderful day.  Sometimes I feel the symptoms rising and can take measures to avert a full-blown attack, but other times I am taken by surprise and have to weather the storm as it whips and rages around my shaking and prostrate form. "Panic attack" is an apt description of what occurs when anxiety peaks and your body aggressively enters fight or flight mode. Simply put, you are attacked by every fear in your mind, all of which are magnified tenfold by the cortisol ...

We all have personal thought patterns, neuro-pathways in our minds that are well-traveled and familiar.  These thought patterns act as lenses, coloring our perception of the world within and around us. Like most of our behaviors, our thought patterns actually become habitual. We fall into them because, well, we always have. Habitual, however, does not equate to healthy. In fact, habitual is usually more closely associated with detrimental outcomes than beneficial. As I'm learning, one of my most detrimental thought processes is also one that I seem to apply to every situation in my life. I engage heavily in what's known as "all or nothing" thinking. In other words, I deal in absolutes. I'm either skinny or fat, employed or worthless, successful or a complete failure. Unfortunately for me, if I fall short of the upper limit of these dichotomies, I immediately classify myself as completely missing the mark. My mind simply ignores the space between, the gray area, th...

I took a protracted break from writing. It's therapeutic but can leave me feeling overexposed and vulnerable after bearing my soul to the world. As much as blogging is liberating, it requires a lot of introspection, which can feel suffocating at times. Living inside your head isn't always comfortable, so I made the decision to just, well... live for a while. I've been reading and exercising and trying to really take care of myself with intention. I'm trying to live intuitively and really listen to what my body and soul are telling me I need. It's new and foreign, but I think I like the change.  I needed a break, but I've found myself drafting paragraphs in my head again, so here we are. I've always done that, by the way. Written whole drafts of pieces in my head while in the shower, or brushing my teeth only to put pen to paper when I had time to sit. My frontal cortex works the graveyard shift and every one leading up to it. It simply never stops. Sometime...