Day 30/31

Day 31 - 1 Month Sober…

Should today have been bursting with pride and good energy? Where's the sunshine and rainbows of sobriety? 🙄

I'm one month sober and I’m feeling flat as fuck. It was the longest day, with stretches of stress and boredom. That’s the thing about my job, it’s one extreme or the other, there’s rarely a healthy balance to reflect on as I’m stirring the pot over the cooker in the evening.

When I have a shitty day with a lot of thoughts running around my head, I spend my free time trying to organise and process them. There’s a lot of good in that, it’s essential to real healing. But it occurred to me that I don’t really give myself a break. Could I just pause my expectations, sit with the flatness, and let it pass?

I usually post ‘some things I’ve learned’ on a milestone day. Tonight, I’m taking some time to myself to process exactly what they might be. I thought they might have come naturally over the course of my day, but alas I am curled up on my sofa with a Chinese takeaway enroute and the only thing that’s materialised is how fucking thrilled I am that #Starstruck series 2 has debuted on iPlayer.

That’s my night sorted.

Congratulations to my fellow sober soldiers who’ve touched that 1 month milestone today. Be proud of you, I am.

Time to switch off. Goodnight x

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Day 32 - Horrible Helpful Feelings (making sense of anxiety with a lot of help from @danielhowell)

“What fire is in mine ears?” asked William Shakespeare in Much Ado About Nothing. It’s a regular thing that one or both of my ears are burning. I hate it. A little because it’s a deeply unpleasant – however temporary – physical feeling, but mostly because my overworked/overthinking brain harps on the ancient Roman idiom: “left for love, right for spite.”

I don’t consider myself to be a superstitious person. Yet, lying awake at night, my mind returns to the notion that someone’s talking shit about me because my right ear is searing hot. Curious about the symptom itself - and to chill the fuck out - I turned to Google…

Cutaneous flushing - a normal reaction to strong emotions. Flushing can affect the ears; they may get red/hot to the touch. They may also feel a burning sensation.

Phew.

Naturally, it got me thinking of other experiences we can easily misconstrue as a malevolent entity rising from the dark cellars and creepy attics of our memory palaces. Thankfully, I had to hand Daniel Howell’s “You Will Get Through This Night” which contains a dedicated section/delicious table of deceptively simple explanations of some anxious emotional states…

Anxiety is what we experience when we perceive threat. It’s a normal and necessary emotion. It’s a little worry all the way to an all-encompassing fear of future danger. It can go from an ominous presence to an overwhelming feeling of doom. If we understand this natural reaction to stress and threat, can we be less scared of it?

Howell says Yes: ‘the key thing to remember is that these bad feelings themselves are not dangerous. Although it feels horrible, anxiety can’t actually harm you. We don’t want to rid ourselves of the acute ways our brain keeps us out of danger and motivates us to do things, but we can understand it better and learn to tame it.’ (Howell, 2021: p41-42)

Below is a copy of the table featured in “You Will Get Through This Night” by Daniel Howell. It explains the "Symptoms" (far right column), what it "Feels Like" (middle column) and the "Biological Explanation" (far left column):