Why is my sleep schedule messed up? Maybe it's to do with depression. Yeah, not only am I still working through the anxiety stuff, I've also got to deal with depression. At least the meds that work for one also work for the other. So that's one good thing.
I'm finally figuring some things out about my depression/anxiety. For example, I finally have a word to describe my fear of being out of the house by myself: agoraphobia. Strangely, most people suffering from agoraphobia have experienced a panic attack in public, which I haven't. So I'm odd there. I also finally figured out that I'm depressed, after a while of showing symptoms without actually feeling it. Yeah, did you know it's possible to be depressed without feeling particularly down all the time? I knew it, but this is the first time it's happened to me. I also finally learned the term intellectualization, which turns out to be my go to defense mechanism.
Yeah, I know that the above paragraph might be better broken down into several paragraphs because it looks messy as written. Jumping from one problem to another really quickly. But I think it sort of reads how my head feels right now.
...and this is turning out to be a difficult post to write, even though I do want to write a bit about what's going on with me head-wise right now.
The funny thing about intellectualization is that it's used as a way to keep anxiety and stress at bay, which might explain why I've been using it. A brief definition that I found at psychology.about.com was: "Intellectualization works to reduce anxiety by thinking about events in a cold, clinical way. This defense mechanism allows us to avoid thinking about the stressful, emotional aspect of the situation and instead focus only on the intellectual component." I thought it was a good way to handle things, and that I could think myself out of feeling anxiety, stress, anger, sadness...any emotion that I'm uncomfortable with. But no, turns out things don't work like that.
Perhaps proving that intellectualization is a problem for me, my knee jerk response to learning what it is and realizing it's what I do in my head all the time is to learn as much as I can about it and think about how to work around it. Yeah, think about how to not use thinking as a way to avoid certain emotions. I suspect that just accepting whatever emotions come my way, whatever they are, may be a better solution.
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| Waterfall Among Rocks, non sequitur yeah but I want something pretty here |
On a different note, apparently blogger is eating comments on my blog again. If a comment of yours isn't showing up, that's why.
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