It’s Monday
Today is Monday and since I recently dubbed today, “Music/Movie Monday”, I had a couple of ideas to write about today related to movies. I’m not at work today and doing as my supervisor suggested, checking email a few times throughout the day, since the campus is closed because of the icy conditions. Which are mostly gone now since the temperature went up over night and the precipitation that came down was mostly rain.
This morning, I checked my email as instructed, and then opened a new post on here to write about my first movie related idea. I wasn’t feeling it though, so I put it off. Instead, I laid on the couch under a thick, red, chenille blanket that my mother-in-law had given us for Christmas several years ago. I opened the book I started reading recently and read for a while.
After a while, I sat up and checked my email again and again clicked to this page and attempted to start writing about my second movie related idea. I still wasn’t feeling it, so I laid back down and kept reading. By that point, Josh had taken a pause from the work he was doing and joined me. He was watching a movie he recently bought on Prime and as I read my book while he watched, I began to get sleepy. Rather than complain about how loud the tv was, I took the red blanket and my book to our room and nestled in on our bed.
I had one of those pillows with the arms on the side and two throw pillows to lean on and two cats to lean on me in return. There’s something irresistable about the chenille blanket. It attracts the cats instantaneously.
I read for only a few pages before my eyes got heavy. I laid my book down and let myself sleep.
I don’t usually nap anymore. I’m never tired during the day and if I do nap, I generally don’t sleep that night. To combat that today I’ll probably need to stay up a little later than usual before going to bed tonight.
But today, I let myself sleep. And while it wasn’t a deep sleep, it was comfortable. The memory foam topper on our mattress embraced my body and the chenille blanket with the throw pillows was the perfect combination. When I wasn’t actually asleep, it was blissful to just lay there with my eyes closed. Not scrolling my phone, not reading, but luxuriating in the comfort of our bed, the blanket, and even the cats crowded on me. My mother-in-law used to lay down in the middle of the day for about 20 minutes. She always said she never actually slept but closing her eyes for that short amount of time helped her to feel rested.
During the similar time I experienced today, I thought about how naps had become a sort of defense mechanism for me as anxiety became more and more prevalent in my mental health journey.
Anxiety hasn’t felt the same for me the whole time I’ve had it. In fact, I haven’t always had it. When it first showed up, it was the summer of 2001. My father had left the Christmas before. He took a substantial amount of money with him leaving my mother with no choice but to file bankruptcy, foreclose on our house, and move back to Cleveland where she would live with one of my aunts. This was the same summer that my self-injury would become increasingly frequent and bloody and I would be hospitalized a second time over the 4th of July holiday because of it.
She and I spent our days packing up the house. We did that for the morning, then in the afternoon, we’d run errands, and then in the evenings we would watch a movie on VHS–the cable had long since been cancelled–and then we’d repeat the process the next day. It was our own little routine that summer. But it wasn’t the comforting kind of routine that I depend on in my daily life now. I don’t know what it was, but something about packing up the house I had lived in throughout middle and high school and knowing just how different things were had an effect on me. I suspect that the fact that I didn’t know what the future was going to look like for us–not having my mother in the same state as me, was troubling as well.
Throughout the hours each morning of packing boxes, my anxiety would gradually grow. It manifested in my legs every time. Think of the feeling when your foot or leg has fallen asleep and it’s “waking” back up. Not the prickly feeling, but the weak, tingly feeling. That’s what my legs felt like. Increasing in intensity as the morning went on. The crescendo would feel like I almost couldn’t stand on them anymore. That was my cue to stop packing for the day and take a nap. My mother was always a daily nap taker so I believe she also napped at the same time. Or not. There was a moment one day that she took a picture of me during one of my naps.
Every day that I woke up from my nap, my legs would feel better. My anxiety was gone.
Years after that, when I had gotten control of my self-injury behavior and stopped exhibiting signs of my bipolar and borderline personality diagnoses, anxiety began to show up again. This time, it wasn’t in my legs. After that last summer with my mother, I never had the weak feeling in my legs again. When my anxiety started again, it felt more like intense butterflies in my stomach. But not the good, Christmas Eve kind of butterflies. It would always be followed by an immediate feeling of fatigue. I always thought it was my body’s way of protecting itself. A defense mechanism. I felt compelled to take a nap. And after I did, I always felt better.
Apparently sleep is a magic cure for anxiety. I’ve read a little about why that is. This is the answer Google’s AI gave me when I asked “Why does sleep make anxiety go away?”
“Sleep reduces anxiety primarily by allowing the brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex, to reset and regain control over emotional reactivity, acting as a “brake” on the amygdala’s fear response.”
There’s probably a deeper scientific explanation for how this works. I’m just glad it does. Of course, I can’t always stop what I’m doing and take a nap when I feel anxiety. Which is why the coping mechanisms I have learned in therapy are very helpful. I learned those to combat CPTSD triggers. They really help. Now though, I have an as-needed anxiety medicine, which truthfully, works the same way as taking a nap. It makes me very, very sleepy and almost lethargic. It makes it so that those feelings overwhelm the anxiety and I don’t feel it anymore.
Today, I didn’t have anxiety. That’s not why I laid down to rest. Today, it just felt good to lay there and be still. To let my mind wander and go where it wanted to when I wasn’t reading my book. I’m rested now. And while I wasn’t feeling upset prior to laying down, I actually feel pretty happy.
Anxiety is fascinating in that I’m sure my experience with it is not the same as others. The way it manifests is unique to the person. Weak legs and butterflies in my stomach and chest may not be what others feel. Or it might be the same exact thing. Why it’s different is probably something with a very complicated answer. For me though, I’m just grateful that I am more equipped now to handle my anxiety as it comes up. Having tools like medication and other coping strategies at my disposal are invaluable because while anxiety is different for everybody, I think we can all agree, it sucks. And if there are things we can do and medication we can take to make it go away, we’re all for it.
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