Self-Soothing

Anxiety makes me want to clean or fix or get ahead on work or do something productive.  Long to-do lists make me anxious. Chemotherapy makes me anxious.  Not keeping up makes me anxious.  The thing that makes me not anxious is getting stuff done.

I get a lot of comments in my life that I shouldn't work so hard.  In many ways, I see the merit in that. Absolutely, my life has been out of balance.  Absolutely, I need to find time to see the spaces around the tasks, rather than have all the tasks themselves piled up chaotically waiting for them to be checked off the checklist.  I totally get that.  But I get hung up on it as well.  It's like, sure, I get it, I shouldn't work so hard.  But the daily tasks, and the job, and the stuff I do with my life starts then piling up.  And I like to knock the to-do's off that list, because it makes me feel better.  But then I start working too hard, which means I feel anxiety... and we go down the rabbit hole.

You can call this a lot of things.  You can call it perfectionism (which, I assure you, it's not... there are many things I produce and tolerate and sometimes even nurture in grossly imperfect states.)  You can call it OCD (although I balk a little at that because it implies a lot of hand washing and checking of locks and obsessiveness to the point of dysfunction, which doesn't really happen.)  You can call it attention to detail, being a Virgo, a radically good work ethic, or merely a product of a life lived with a certain amount of passion and involvement.  You can blame my early years when I was on my own at 18 and living hand to mouth for so long that I never fully was able to relax.  You can blame me or my brain chemistry or my inability to correctly prioritize my involvements, but with managing a household with kids/dog/cat/spouse/and currently broken sprinklers, a techjob, a non-profit arts organization, my writing and theatre endeavors, and (currently) cancer treatment -- the bottom line is that I have a long to-do list.

I have found that one of my most stressful times during this process are the days when I'm just starting to feel better.  When I'm sick, I'm OK in terms of stress.  There is only one urgent item on the to-do list: get through it.  I manage my symptoms, I try to sleep, I Just Get Through.  That part is awful, but easy.

Then I start feeling a little better.  I have 50% energy: what to do with it?  Do I do the household bookkeeping and make sure all the money is in the right accounts?  Do I check in with work and start chipping away at the mountain of stuff waiting and accumulating for me there?  Do I proceed with the list of self-care items that I really should be doing as a priority -- walk the dog, walk in nature, write a blog, take a moment to sit outside and just relax?  Do I call my mom and assuage her anxiety?  Do I start on my overdue taxes?  Do I spend time with Roger or my boys and share some quality moments with them?  Do I just read a book, or indulge in some visual content?  How about keeping up with the blog? Suddenly, the second I'm feeling better, the options widen out incredibly and I feel absolutely bombarded.  It's like peeking up over the foxhole and seeing fifty incoming missiles heading right towards me, all labeled URGENT."

I get immediately stressed.  And so I write everything down, which helps.  I then try to figure out which will be best for ME, and I get stymied again.  Am I talking about what will be best for my body?  My mind?  My soul?  Remember those Unavoidable Other things I talked about awhile ago?  Where does doing the taxes fit into the holy triumverate body/mind/soul? Well, it's a little bit of a mind satisfaction, that's true.  But kind of also an Unavoidable Other.  As is balancing the checkbooks and paying the bills and calling the termite guy and refinancing the house.  Sure, all necessary.  But low in caloric value when it comes to feeding the soul.

I have been struggling with this for years.  It's, frankly, harder to juggle this while there are lots of people in my life, because I get (I feel) a lot of judgment about what I tend to do (which is take care of the Unavoidable Others and the Mind lists before taking care of the Body and Soul lists).  I can't stand a long list of Unavoidable Other stuff hanging over my head.  My thought process is usually to just get all the yucky stuff out of the way first, and then work up to the good stuff.  I know it's backwards, but it's how I do things.  It keeps me way on top of stuff that could otherwise cause problems (like overdue bills), it keeps the decks cleared and clean for other activities, and basically I just don't perform or think well when there are a bunch of niggling things to do that can just be gotten out of the way and never thought about again.

I'm like this with the house.  If it takes less than a minute to do something, like wipe down the counter, I do it.  Every time I pass by, if it needs it.  I put stuff back where it belongs.  I keep things swept up.  I move stuff from one room to another.  I am constantly replacing and restoring, and it keeps order (ish) in the household so we don't spend huge amounts of time either doing massive tidying, or looking for things that are lost.

So, my inner monologue goes, shoot me.  I'm sorry that I do things in this order.  I feel guilty for sweeping around and cleaning up when everyone is kicking back and relaxing.

But, thanks to a small throwaway comment from my therapist, I have finally come to realize something profound about myself.  This IS how I relax.  This IS how I self-soothe.  I make order and it makes me feel better.  This is the fact of ME.  To other people it looks like work.  And work, everyone agrees, is BAD.  And too much BAD WORK makes people sick.  Which is why I'm sick.  This is the grossest of all extrapolations, but it is the message I get subliminally (and give myself consciously).

I DO run around too much, and stop too little.  I feel it.  But there's a very subtle, but huge, different between running a life and a life running you.  Many times before I was diagnosed I just felt crushed by the amount of details that were expected from me, from my various commitments.  If you're ever bored and don't have anything to do, get highly involved in a struggling arts organization: you will never have a spare moment for the rest of your life.  Jobs are a good source of a to-do list.  Having a household of four drivers and four cars, one of which is always in the shop, it a good way to spend a lot of time talking about who is taking what to where and who is dropping off whom at the train station.  How about a dog with a skin allergy?  HOURS of fun.  And there are bills and money and household repairs and all that.




Add to that the NEW stuff I need/should/want to do.  Exercising a half hour a day.  Taking some soul time to write, and to go outside and look at nature, and to eat a little more thoughtfully, and to put space around my activities so I'm not just screaming from one thing to the next.  These are good things to put on the list.  REALLY good things.  Important things.

The problem is, they are just now added things to the list.








I am crushed by the to do list.

So how to deal with it?

Obviously prioritization helps.  And balance.  But the takeaway I got from my therapist is that it's actually just OK to do it.  That I don't have to try to force myself to find peace and serenity by scrambling around looking for a mythical pause button that will force it all to go away for awhile.

It's OK to knock things out.  It's OK to pay the bills.  It's OK to fix the door handle and vacuum up the dog hair.  It's ALSO OK to write a blog, or take a walk, or read a book.

The point is that it's ok to do (with caveats) whatever it takes to self -soothe when the anxiety is high.

My self soothing for anxiety means working.  I work, I get stuff done, I feel better.  When I force myself to stop and ignore those missiles marked URGENT coming at me, I feel worse.

It's OK to feel better.  In (with caveats) any way that works.

The caveats are obvious: you can't safely self-soothe with stuff like, say, chocolate in large doses, or complete avoidance of the Unavoidable Others, or just channel surfing all day hoping that watching Swamp Drillers will make it all go away.  You can't self soothe by sheer avoidance of all reality, at least not indefinitely.

But you can self soothe by working.  Or by exercising.  Or by writing or creating.  Self soothing, when done non-destructively, is a good thing.

The key, I think, is to try to find that balance again.  If you've self-soothed by working on a project for 12 hours, maybe you need to switch it up and find something else that will feel good.  It will help feed the well springs, and it will give you a little break from all the mind work.  If you've just gone on a long hike, maybe writing that blog will be a good way to coast down from that endorphin high.

Maybe there are ways I can train ourselves to self soothe in a more balanced way, so it's not all Unavoidable Others first, but maybe some soul stuff first, and then maybe some physical stuff, with a promise to myself that the anxiety reducing to-do list slashing will come afterwards.

That's what I've been thinking about this last week as I've been feeling good, going back into work, and trying to watch how I'm juggling the list and the missiles.

Today is chemo #2.  I am managing anxiety by writing (and, yeah, cleaning the garage and trying to fix the sprinklers) (and walking the dog).  Afterwards, the to-do list is put on hold for awhile and I"m planning on binge watching House of Cards until my eyes bug out.

The problem occurs when the anxiety and the to-do list recedes only when I'm feeling sick.  Certainly a big Life Lesson I want to learn while I'm doing this thing is how to relax when feeling good.  Thanks for listening to these rambles as I try to figure these things out.