The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I had the stitches removed last Monday, and I'm starting to feel more like a human being again.
At the moment my biggest issue is that I'm apparently one of the small percentage of the population who can experience raging panic attacks after taking antibiotics.
As someone who has never really had anxiety disorders before, this is equally unpleasant and fascinating. I'll wake up at 5:30 am, feeling like a have a steel rod jammed down my torso, with the impression that the only reason that my jackhammering heart doesn't launch itself out of my body is because I have an enormous weight sitting on my chest.
My first thoughts on attaining consciousness are that I'm going to lose my job, and everyone is going to abandon me, and I'm going to die homeless and starving in a roadside drainage culvert. Rationally, I know this is insane. I have gotten glowing reviews at my employer every year for years now, and I have enough cash on hand to go two full years without a job without any lifestyle changes at all. Eventually I can talk myself out of those automatic thoughts, but the physical symptoms are incredibly persistent. Thankfulky, they do seem to be slowly diminishing over time.
At present, I've mostly been coping by going for a long early morning walk and then taking a nap over my lunch break to get through the rest of the day.
Has anybody else experienced anything like this? If you have, or you're a more chronic panic attack-haver, what can you recommend to help deal with the physical symptoms?
Not so useful in the wee hours of the morning, but you can dunk your head in a bucket of ice water for 15 or more seconds and pretty much stymie such attacks. This is the dive reflex, which stimulates the vagus nerve. My youngest son used to have concerning anxiety right before going to elementary school, and he'd spend minutes in the toilet, sometimes making his classmates who were waiting for him late. I'd rig up a tub of ice water for him to dunk his face in, and he'd calm down, dry off, and be fine. Although my wife thought this was coddling it worked, and eventually he didn't need it.
Problem is it will also probably wake you up pretty effectively, and that may not be what you want at 5:30 a.m.
Wait, she thought shoving a kid head first into ice-cold water counted as coddling him? Is that a Japanese thing?
"You gotta stop waterboarding the kids, George, you'll spoil them rotten!"
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