Hyper-vigilance

Why do these thoughts come to me so late?  Often, I’m getting ready to go to bed, I’ve shut down the computer and suddenly a blog post thought arrives.

Tonight my mind was boggling.  I was marvelling at the long path, the really long road I’ve taken to get here.  Not that here is the destination, I’m just here.  It’s coming up for 18 months since I first felt different.

If I dwell too long on that timeframe I start to feel really angry, so I try not to, because there’s nothing that can be done to change the past is there?  I don’t know why my body wasn’t able to recover from the virus or why the virus was the last straw that knocked me for 6 and I never got fully back up again.

Every day now I think about my health.  I take notes on my diet and look for correlations between my symptoms and food, sleep, stress and general femaleness.  I’m constantly aware of what’s happening to me.  The aches and pains have been bad lately too, ever since I’ve been doing stretches in the morning to attempt to combat them.

Is it when you focus on something you make it more real?  How can I stretch without noticing how tense and sore my muscles are?  Or without questioning the reason why?

I’ve heard this state of being called hyper-vigilance, the description of which is “an enhanced state of sensory sensitivity accompanied by an exaggerated intensity of behaviours whose purpose is to detect threats.  In some cases it can be extreme enough for the person to become almost entirely preoccupied with scanning their environment for threats.”

I know how ridiculous it will seem for me to say, that just doesn’t sound extreme at all. When you have experienced lack and ‘poor outcomes’ from certain behaviours, foods or activities, then it seems only reasonable that you will set the mighty power of your brain to detecting ways to be certain they don’t happen again.

I think a lot about going back to my doctor, who is unknown to me, due to the first 2 leaving, to ask their opinion on the latest symptoms.  I think a lot about re-reading my blog from last year to see how far I’ve come, if indeed I have.  But I don’t do any of that right now.  I try to not entertain the thoughts and just carry on living because I know visiting the doctor shakes things up.  It’s like inviting someone to come look at your systems and take an educated guess.  By going to them you are asking for something to be done.  And then there are more consequences to deal with (is that a form of hyper-vigilance, having experienced negative outcomes from visiting the doctor before makes me reluctant to do so again?).

The point of this post is that I am thinking and using my thinking to stop thinking. Carefully suggesting to my mind that its time would be better spent thinking about other things and not focussing on all the things wrong with me.  And perhaps I’ll avoid the stretching for a while too.  I never liked exercise much any way.