I am absolutely exhausted. On Thursday and Friday last week work was hectic and stressful. The team I support were producing a lot of work and since one of my colleagues was on holiday I was also supporting her team who were also very busy. My OCD is usually worse at work. In stressful periods, of course, it becomes much worse. This was one of those occasions. Because of the anxiety I feel very worried about making mistakes and because of the OCD I feel the need to check my work many times. By the time I got home on Thursday evening I was really feeling it and woke in the night at about 3am unable to get back to sleep. You can imagine how I felt on Friday which was much the same as Thursday workload wise. I got home on Friday looking forward to the long bank holiday weekend. But when I arrived at my karate lesson on Saturday lunchtime I felt half asleep and struggled through my lesson. I went home feeling mentally and physically exhausted. The physical exhaustion was not down to karate but because of the impact stress has on my body. I have experienced this before. I decided to give the afternoon lesson a miss - not so much a choice as necessary. Today I didn't go either. I feel an aching, crushing kind of tiredness. At first I did not believe how two stressful days could make me feel this bad but then I thought about how I have felt for the last several weeks.
It seems every day when I wake in the morning my first thought is of my issues and it continues like that for the rest of the day. Thinking about my OCD, anxiety, depression, lack of self-esteem. Not always actually worrying as such but at least being aware of it - having it in my consciousness the whole time so it overshadows everything. This feels like a great burden - a heavy weight on my shoulders. I need to stop this. I don't always use the worry time as I should. I have tried to reintroduce this in the last couple of days. Worry time can be a great help. Another thing I have realised is that I am often in the frame of mind that I am and my life is my issues. Because I think of them constantly they have become more prominent than anything else in my life and have event become me or at least that is how if feels. I need to adapt my perception of myself and my life to being the me without the problems and the anxiety, OCD and depression just a part of it. Does this make sense? I think the above has worn me down over time. I was down, negative and tired so then when things got stressful at work I just could not withstand the pressure. I also seem to have a constant cold. I expect that is a sign I am feeling the strain. I need to learn to cope better. I am fairly ok at handling the problems individually. I know how to deal with them. But the constant thinking about it all needs to stop.
This is hard. I really want to be able to use the worry time to stop the constant thoughts and awareness of these problems and to think of myself as the person I am aside from these things - the real me if you like. Then I think my life can be brighter.
