Dear friends,
For the last week or so, I've felt like I have an iv in my arm feeding me essential oil of adrenaline. This is not a good feeling.
I haven't been this stressed out for years, and maybe not ever: I'm tired but can't sleep, or else I have moments of crashing where all I can do is sleep. When that happens, I have uncomfortably vivid dreams so when I wake up it's like I haven't slept at all. I'm sitting perfectly still, have been for hours, and my heart is pounding. I feel vaguely sick pretty much all the time. Not sick like having a cold sick, but that horrible pit-of-the-stomach sick feeling you get when you know something really bad is going to happen soon. This is a brand new kind of stress, and friends? I don't like it one bit.
I realized last night, tossing and turning in bed, that this is not sustainable, so I'm going to try to deal with it. I'm hoping to actually drag my sorry butt to the gym today, for one thing, and I'm trying to manage my time more efficiently, since the slow accumulation of things checked off the list is one of the better stress relievers I know of. But I'm not sure it'll be enough... what do you do when you're so stressed out it's making you sick? Put another way, what is your stress-relieving nuclear option?
Seriously. I really want to know.
I have never struggled with insomnia... until recently. I've been sleeping more fitfully in general since moving here, but for the last few days it's been really bad. Ross falls asleep almost immediately, and I lie there thinking about, oh, everything. Money. Marriage. Religion. What I'm going to put on my Rally To Restore Sanity sign (I'm thinking "Grad Students for a Hermeneutics of Reasonable Discourse," although I think that might be redundant...). Stuff I didn't get done that day. Stuff I have to get done the next day. But it gets worse. For the past few days, at least, I've been having incredibly vivid and anxiety-producing dreams. Last night I was failing grad school. And then I wake up at 4:30 or 5:00 (although thankfully I'm able to go back to sleep). The sum total of all of this is that I wake up feeling like I've been thinking the same stressful thoughts all night long. The irony is that I usually have time for at least a quick nap during the day, so I'm not physically tired. But mentally I'm exhausted. Maybe I'll take up classy, Netflix-style yoga again.