Saturday, March 22, 2014

suffering from morning anxiety but you don’t know why?

Saturday, March 22, 2014



did you wake up bursting with positive energy today? if not, it’s okay. we all have days when we wake up to that familiar feeling of sadness or panic or anxiety. oftentimes you can’t put a finger on it — it just feels like this thick shadow draping over you, blocking the bright rays of the sun. 

for some it’s temporary, yet for some it’s a lifelong affair with anxiety.

i have struggled with morning anxiety for years. i knew what anxiety was, i just did not understand why it would particularly happen to me in the mornings. conquering morning anxiety was a personal project of mine for years to no end. when you look around there is a myriad of articles on anxiety. my reason for writing this is not to offer an expert opinion, which i don’t claim to have, but to take you on a short walk with me, lest you’ve been experiencing it, too. 

it took years before i finally decided to do serous research on this persistent foe. i was surprised with my discovery that there indeed is such a thing as “morning anxiety” and that millions of people suffer from it (i honestly thought i gave this kind of anxiety a name, silly me.) 

general anxiety causes lack of sleep, restlessness, loss of appetite and the lack of motivation. the sum of all these would end up in overall fatigue. if you’ve been worried about your job, money or relationship and you feel like you’ve downed eight straight shots of espresso and can’t control the jitters, you will surely be struggling under an invisible anvil the day after. the body can only take so much.

what is morning anxiety like? here’s an excerpt from a story where the central character, belinda, describes what she feels so we can somehow put a face to this bothersome feeling.


as soon as i opened my eyes i noticed the thin long cracks on my ceiling. they weren’t there yesterday. or maybe i just didn’t see them. 

is today a monday? a thursday? days are strangers to me now. why is my heart thumping...it’s thumping and i’m so scared. how am i going to survive the next few days? questions, questions. my head is full of them now. do i have enough money? no, no, no. i never have enough. payday’s two weeks from now. the thought makes me want to jump out of bed and start working. maybe i’ll earn more money and i’ll never have to worry about it.”

i want to get up and do something but my body feels very heavy. I am very worried and i don’t know if anything will ever make things better. am i the only one feeling this way?”

sometimes, morning anxiety borders on the feeling of a panic attack and paranoia. you feel fearful and jittery. it is, however, a complex emotion to describe especially when you feel like you’re going through a tunnel where, sadly, the light on the other end scares you.



 here are some symptoms of morning anxiety. the moment you wake up you...
  •  feel nervous, terrified even if you do not know the specific reason
  • feel weak, tired, dizzy
  • feel out of control
  • have pains in your chest 
  •  are confused
  •  have stomach upset — this used to hit me the most
  •  have muscle tension
overcoming morning anxiety is a process, and hopefully not a long one for you. besides life events that worry you, there may be things that you do everyday that add up to your anxiety. i didn’t know they mattered, that’s why i want to share them with you because in the world of anxiety, these are juggernauts:

 
  •  sleeping on a bed that’s not comfortable will not give you a complete rest. the overall mood and feel of your room have a lot to do with your first emotions when you wake up. after all, it’s the first thing that you see in the morning. studies have also shown that when you wake up to an alarm, you subject yourself to a “surprise”  or scare and that’s not the best way to start your day.
  •  low blood sugar triggers the fight or flight response, according to deanne repich, the founder of the national institute of anxiety and stress, inc. maintaining the right level of sugar will help your body to stay calm as the brain feeds on it. the right level of sugar will also prevent cortisol from waking up and reproducing itself
  • speaking of cortisol, it is a stress hormone. it is naturally highest in the morning and at night. if you go to bed stressed out you will be producing more of it and panic is sure to hit you first thing when you wake up
  • minor unresolved problems. hey, never underestimate the power of “small”. resolve problems before you hit the sack tonight
  • consumption of alcohol -- you might want to go easy on this because the feeling of relaxation it gives you will completely reverse a few hours later or, for sure, the morning after
my next post will be on ways to deal with morning anxiety. i will also share how i personally conquered it in the simplest, most doable ways possible. no drugs and money involved, i promise.

keep reading and don’t forget to share!

stress anxiety panic attack fatigue stress at work fear paranoia paranoid low self-esteem depression sadness psycho therapy

 

 

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

missing malaysian airplane and the odyssey of flight 33

Wednesday, March 19, 2014



when so-called images of the missing malaysian airplane began showing up on the internet, i couldn’t help but dismiss it as nothing more than another failed attempt to solve what now has become one of the biggest mysteries of our time.

a lot has happened since march 8 – the day when the malaysian airplane went missing. a lot has been said, but there’s still no plane in sight.

it was later found that two of the passengers had fake passports, and as expected, all sorts of theorists came out of their holes to put their best terrorist angles and plots out there. 

politics of course, will also ever be in the limelight. the families of the passengers threatened to go on a hunger strike until opposition leader anwar ibrahim admitted that he was related to the pilot of malaysia airlines mh370, captain zaharie ahmad shah. 

“he’s related to my son-in-law,” ibrahim finally admitted. but even the admission of a likely antagonist in an aerial drama has not helped in pointing to the direction of the missing plane. 

explosions in different areas were also “suspected to be a result of the malaysian aircraft crashing there”.

the plane is still missing.

don’t you find it infuriating that when something of global importance happens and theorists of all kinds suddenly crawl out from many different places? when the search for answers (or in this case the search for an airplane, a big, big one with 239 people in it) is in progress, speculations, assumptions, half-baked conclusions, theories and whatnot swell worse than the amazon river. 

i cannot imagine what it would be like as a family member or a friend waiting for an answer and you don’t get any even after a 12-nation hunt has been launched. never mind, i don’t want to know. 

and so... just a matter of curiosity, with all the likely suspects on board the missing aircraft, they just could not steer an aircraft to a direction where no one would notice, could they? if they say the plane changed direction, then all these technology that we have now has done nothing to detect a lost plane.

we are intelligent earthlings that go to places like space, and to lose a plane like that is simply unintelligible (i hope you did not miss “live from space” last weekend. i spent two hours envying koichi’s tiny waistline as he floated in space.)

a bizarre story i've always loved
a missing aircraft – with no possible traces of it – is one of the most bone-chilling news i’ve ever heard. “the odyssey of flight 33” has not escaped my mind for days since it happened.   

“the odyssey of flight 33” was one of my favorite twilight zone episodes first aired in the 1960’s. when i heard about the missing malaysian plane, it just hit home. 

barely an hour away from their destination at the idlewild airport, the (fictional) global airlines flight 33 begins to uncontrollably increase speed. captain farver and his crew noticed that they were crossing some kind of unexplainable barrier. radio communications begin to fail and all equipment malfunction. 

when the turbulence stops, they come to terms with something that’s beyond belief. they realize they are in an uninhabited place, and when the captain looks over from his window, he sees a dinosaur. 

flight 33 stays in the twilight zone. how it ends is bizarre and a nonpareil treat to believers of the unknown. 


“...you and i know what has happened. so if some moment, any moment, you hear the sound of jet engines flying atop the overcast, engines that sound searching and lost, engines that sound desperate... shoot up a flare or do something. that would be global 33 trying to get home – from the twilight zone.”

--rod serling





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