Scintillating title, no? I have a lot to talk about, since I've had a lot of time to think, on account of being sick for what feels like the hundredth time this year, with another sinus infection and bronchitis (we'll talk more about that in a bit).
My Kitchen: A picture of depression
I'm spending a lot of this weekend doing massive spring cleaning. It's been slow going, both because I am sick and because I have a really lot of cleaning to do.
Looking around my apartment, I could see piles of unattended laundry, papers I've been too overwhelmed to sort, and most prominently, a disaster area of a kitchen. To put it plainly, it had become a repository for recycling and garbage. When I get very deeply depressed or consumed with anxiety, I tend not to take out the recycling, for God knows what reason, and it's... a lot right now. (Fortunately it is all bagged up and ready to bring to the recycling room in the morning, when I am not in a problematically revealing nightgown.)
The thing I realized, though, is that this kitchen (and my apartment) is literally a visualization of a depressed mind at work. When I first moved into this apartment, I was so optimistic about cooking my own meals again, chopping vegetables and using my nice pots and pans, taking pleasure in the rituals of preparing food. For the first few weeks I lived here, I made tea in the morning and sipped it out of teacups with saucers, then delighted in putting them in the dishwasher (I've never had a dishwasher in an apartment before). I cooked breakfasts, prepared lunches, and always took great care to wipe the counters and sink clean before going to bed. I have absolutely no idea when or how my life got so out of control and I lost that, but I suspect it was during the first big depression I had in October/November, which feels like a thick fog in my memory now.
A few times while cleaning the kitchen, I had the thought that I hated spending time in there. I wondered if it was because the window is jammed shut by a repair that was done to the windowsill (have been meaning to call maintenance since moving in) or that the last time I used my oven it set off the carbon monoxide detector (ditto on calling maintenance), or if it was some feng shui issue with the narrowness of the space in proportion to the ceiling height or what have you. But really, I don't think it was any of these things (at least not entirely). I didn't like experiencing a physical space where I'd let myself down, abandoned my good intentions and replaced home-cooked meals with takeout and pizza boxes. I didn't like standing around in the evidence of my mind giving up and checking out.
So tomorrow's first item on my to do list is to finish cleaning my kitchen, this time including the hands-and-knees floor scrubbing, bleaching every surface variety of cleaning. I want to get it back to the pristine, well-organized, and charming space I first set up, and I want to use it the way I did in the first month or so I lived here, as my nice adult sanctuary that let me feel in control of my life each morning and evening.
Anxiety and sickness... and am I a hostile person?
I watched another great episode of Scientific American Frontiers called Worried Sick, where Alan Alda hosts a fascinating exploration of the impact of stress, including emotional and social anxiety, on wellness.
It was startling to hear researchers confirm and explain exactly what I've known all along: the stress response halts other biological functions, including fighting infection and healing. Literally, the more stressed out you are, the less healthy you will be. It is no coincidence whatsoever that when I become utterly stressed out with exams or personal stuff, I get a terrible cold or digestive malady. While I should be a reasonably healthy person, I'm physically unable to fight off cold germs, and where my body should be able to stop things at a mild sinus infection, I more typically get terrible bronchitis and lately, borderline or full-blown pneumonia. That ain't right, and it's all me, neglecting my health, pushing my body too hard, and stressing out the whole time so it is unable to function the way it's supposed to.
The program also discussed the role personality, especially one's level of hostility, plays in the extent to which stress is experienced. I would more or less consider myself a kind, warm person, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that yeah, I can be incredibly hostile. When I am in the midst of a funk, usually brought on by some trivial emotional thing and compounded by stress from school, I become intensely misanthropic, with a short temper and feeling constantly annoyed. I try not to lash out too much at people in my daily life because obviously it's not their fault that I'm angry with a friend, but bottling it up and seething still has the same internal effect, if not worse because I'm not learning to express myself in a healthy way.
I realized that I am prone to fits of rage at people, provoked or not, if I think about them while I am in the wrong mood. When I'm not stressed out or depressed, I'm mostly fine with everyone in my life, or if I'm not, it's with a distant and fleeting sort of disinterest, as if there were a bad smell on an otherwise lovely day. When I'm down, though, everything a person has said or done is subject to mulling over and becoming a source of intense annoyance or fury. I go from basically not caring to absolute, all-consuming anger. Because I know my feelings toward people can be so mercurial, I rarely do anything active to confront others for hurtful things they've said or done, but instead decide that I am completely done with them and want no further contact ever. It's alarming how quickly and effortlessly I've cut people out of my life, and it's usually so sudden and seemingly unprovoked that most people don't notice anyway. I really don't like this about myself, and I need to figure out a more mature, healthy way to address conflict that doesn't result in the psychological equivalent of "F you, get out of my life."
Further, this tendency toward incredible and sudden anger and abandonment wrecks havoc on my system. A friend who said something carelessly unkind in February has no idea that in March I was near tears with how overwhelmingly furious I became at her for it. My stomach twisted in knots, my sleep got all messed up, and within a few days, I was in bed sick with one of a series of awful cold/flu things that I contracted this winter. Meanwhile, I never said anything to her, didn't respond to her notes that she hadn't heard from me in a while, and I wrote her out of my life. That's cruel to her and to me, and my body punished me like hell for all the stress I had over it.
Colon health and the immune response
Now, for the lengthy discussion of gastrointestinal health, which I will attempt to keep as clinical, if not entirely nonspecific, as possible. Fair warning, if you're not looking for discussions of colons and the things they do, I'd suggest skipping ahead to the next section.
I have more or less been diagnosed with colitis, which is a tricky diagnosis because it describes a number of multi-symptomatic digestive issues. I say more or less because I was hospitalized in 2006 for a massive intestinal infection, which at the time was described as colitis in the sense that my large intestine was terribly swollen and there was... blood... coming out of places it wasn't supposed to (an excruciating pain I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy). After a few nights in the hospital on IV antibiotics and a liquid diet, the infection cleared up and I was released, but I had to reintroduce foods timidly, finding that things that had never upset my stomach before suddenly did. When I talked with my doctor later, she said that colitis was most commonly caused by stress, and that while the infection may have been the instigating event, colitis could become a chronic, incredibly painful and frustrating condition. At the time I was in a really ugly, intensely stressful relationship, so her orders to relax and remove stress from my life weren't met until two years later, during which time I had all kinds of discomforts ranging from bloating or gas to full on can't-leave-the-house illness.
I also saw an alarming uptick in the frequency and duration of colds that I got during this time, which was also explained by my doctor as related to the situation with my digestive system. As I reckon everyone has learned from the marketing of probiotic yogurts and diet supplements, a significant amount of the immune system is housed in the intestines and includes the natural flora and fauna. My time in the hospital and the IV antibiotics flushed out everything good in my system, and subsequent episodes of umm, extensive involuntary purging, further assaulted the slowly remerging balance of bacteria and such.
As with many people who experience colitis or colitis-like conditions, I found that digestive sensitivity increased in direct correlation with stress levels, and I could more or less count on my system falling to pieces when I most needed to be at my best. My digestive health in shambles, it's a matter of days before I get some infectious disease that renders me incapable of functioning at all, and I retreat to the health center for orders of fluids, bed rest, and powerful antibiotics... which... you guessed it, further wreck my digestive tract.
Seeing this as a cyclical problem and knowing that the general public isn't going to stop coughing or sneezing on me no matter how much I sanitize my hands or hold my breath, I need to find a way to fix my gastrointestinal situation before it a) becomes truly chronic and b) leaves me with essentially no immune system or ability to fight disease.
I started by taking bacteria supplements about a year ago, which sounds disgusting, but actually makes a good deal of sense when you consider that the problem is all the good bacteria getting killed by antibiotics or flushed out: take a pill full of good bacteria and uhh, repopulate one's intestines, right? I also tried to eat yogurt and lots of fruits and vegetables, and for a few months, things were looking alright. Then I had a devastating romantic situation fall to pieces, fell into a lengthy, terrible depression, and predictably my digestive system fell apart again. I didn't really recover by the time I started school in the fall, and moving to a city full of sick people has made everything much worse.
Now that I am once again on a course of antibiotics (two weeks of Biaxin, ugh), my system has responded by bailing on everything, and I mean everything, to the point where I lost three pounds in one morning. I am slowly getting over the sinus infection and bronchitis, but I know that the antibiotics will leave me defenseless and sensitive. So this time I am eating probiotic yogurt and cottage cheese, and once I am off the antibiotics, I'm going to start the bacteria supplements again (that still sounds so gross). I'm going to eat tons of vegetables, drink the proper amount of water, and focus on colon health as a means to prevent sickness.
My goal is that by this time next year, I have little to no symptoms of colitis and I can regain normal digestive functioning. I have no idea if this is a reasonable goal or not because my insurance changed, I had to switch doctors, and the new one won't even talk to me about what I can do until I get a colonoscopy and see a GI specialist (which the insurance doesn't cover). I do intend to get the stupid colonoscopy to rule out cancer or any other conditions, and I will have to see a GI specialist to do so, but I want to try to get the symptoms under control on my own first. Essential to success in this is, of course, managing my stress, since, as we initially established, colitis is a stress-related condition.
And to come completely full circle, to stop stressing my body, I have to stop stressing my mind.
Natural anti-depressants
This past year has taught me two important lessons:
1) that I am emotionally still very immature, with poor coping mechanisms.
2) I really do not have my depression or mood cycling under control at all.
If you asked my mother, she would say that the second is a direct result of the first, which may be true, but I sincerely believe there is an organic component to what's going on in my brain that goes well beyond my rational control. My mom has not dealt with any type of mental illness, so she perceives depressive people as wallowing and those with mood disorders as having no impulse control. I've tried to explain to her that it's not just a decision you make one morning, that you're going to feel sorry for yourself for a while and that whenever you want, you can "snap out of it," as she believes. It feels much more like coming down with the flu, where your brain becomes a foggy and unrecognizably grim version of itself, your body becomes hopelessly exhausted and achey, the things that gave you incredible joy just days before don't even register, and you can't control your thoughts, which become increasingly morbid, angry, distraught, overwhelmed, and in the milder times listless.
I hate myself when I'm depressed, and I can never determine whether depression sets in because something bad or stressful happens in my life, or if I experience life events as terrible because my brain is cycling into depression. When I think about what I would have considered "triggering episodes" in the past, many of them seem utterly inconsequential, but it was the most important thing in the world at the moment. My brain spiraled around itself in endless rumination, and I was mentally shouting at myself to just shut up, quit obsessing, and be happy again. It feels like a fist in my chest, this tight inability to breathe or relax, and as unexpectedly as it comes on, it dissipates, usually a few weeks later. My mood comes around, I smile at something small or notice some bit of beauty, and I start to feel okay about things again. I wouldn't say the thing I smiled about got me out of the depression, so it doesn't entirely make sense to say the first thing that got me down was what caused it either.
What I do know is that while my moods will fluctuate, maybe more rapidly and inexplicably than others', I need them to not get so extreme for such long periods. Being full-on clinically depressed for two months straight is just not okay, and I need some way to pull myself out of it before it effects my health, academics, social life, and so on more than it already has.
My insurance only covers five therapy sessions per year, and I haven't found therapy helpful for treating depression in the past anyway. When I was on Zoloft, my therapy sessions became terse discussions of my sleep/wake cycle, making sure I wasn't suicidal (I would never do that), and then nagging me to talk to the receptionist about my insurance again (she was a terrible psychiatrist, I see in hindsight). I kept trying to talk to her about changes I could make to my diet to stave off the sudden weight gain (10 pounds a month for 6 months) or if maybe melatonin would be better for insomnia than the crazy coma-inducing pills she prescribed, but yeah, nothing doing. I stopped taking Zoloft without weaning myself off properly, and I've been really leery to go for any pharmaceuticals since.
I've tried a combination of St John's wort, gingko, and ginseng in the past, but I've never stuck with it enough to have a lasting long-term effect. I'm not sure if it's because I was taking too many pills at a time or if it just wasn't working, but I want to try an herbal approach again when I am done with this round of antibiotics.
The biggest and most important anti-depressant I need to implement is exercise. I know, and have always known, that exercise plays a powerful role in regulating moods, promoting healthy sleep and digestive functioning, and contributing to overall health and well-being, but in spite of all this, I avoid it like the plague. I am at something of a crossroads where I have to decide if I hate running more than I hate being depressed and having colitis all my life, and I think it's pretty easy to say no, nothing is worse than that fate, even if it's hot and I hate it and I want to cry through it.
One form of exercise that I may not find as odious as I found jogging in the winter is walking on the beach. As it is, I walk around 4-5 miles 4 times a week for my commute to school, but that's evidently not sufficient for either stress reduction or weight loss. I recently discovered that I live pretty close to a huge beach, and though I am going to be very busy taking intensive classes this summer, I want to make time to walk on the beach, preferably at a brisk pace, so I get some sunshine and exercise.
I've also found that I quite enjoy hiking, and I want to start working my way up through day hikes. Tentatively, I can make Sunday my hiking day, which means I must manage my schoolwork and personal life to keep this day available. It's a sticky wicket, but I think it will be a good reward for living my life in balance (that accomplishment alone will have to help all other matters).
Coming soon: Austerity Measures
I've started to chart out what I'm calling my Austerity Measures for the rest of the summer. Motivated equally by the desire to eat healthier and stop pissing money away on garbage food I can't afford, I'm making myself something of an un-diet plan, where I decide on certain foods that I'll eat for regular meals and sort out how to prepare them efficiently and economically.
I will confess that while getting textbooks on Amazon, I also bought a new diet book, but for the first time in my life, I'm going to read the book and think about it before half-assedly launching into the diet. The appeal of this particular diet is that people seem to lose weight on it very quickly, but it avoids the pitfalls of similar diets, particularly in regards to gastrointestinal health. I will give it a thorough read and make a decision if that's what I'm going to do, but in the meantime, I'll be charting out my Austerity Measures.
I'm going to use the end of my antibiotics course as the day when I start my un-diet in earnest. That is to say, I'm not going to buy cookies or cupcakes or junk anymore, and I will not order takeout or pizza no matter what. I'm starting to segue into it, with meals at regular times and lots of water, and over the next 10 days or so (I've lost count) I'd like to ramp up to the full plan.
I know that realistic and thorough planning will be essential to success, and I have to keep going about this with the right attitude: I am not punishing or depriving myself - I am being kind to myself and doing right by my body. I am not beating myself up to try to lose weight - I am eating right and exercising to improve my health and well-being.
I think really good things are about to come.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
