Bipolar 2 From Inside and Out

Posts tagged ‘overthinking’

Mania, Overthinking, and Costa Rica

I’ve had a bad spell of overthinking lately. It’s related to a bad hypomanic episode that I had lately. I had it in my head that my husband and I needed to move to Costa Rica. Of that I was sure. (Why Costa Rica? Of that I wasn’t sure.) What I couldn’t decide was whether we needed to go to Costa Rica for a week or two to scope out arrangements before we took the proverbial plunge.

At first, I had been exploring whether there was any real estate for rent at a reasonable price in or near the town of Grecia, which I had somehow fixated on. (Why Grecia? Again, not a clue. That’s about the last thing I’d need to decide and arrange for if we were to move.) I was researching the cost of living, the health care system, and the cuisine. I was practicing in my head the Spanish that remained from my high school days, supplemented by “essential phrases” that were listed online. I looked up what papers were needed and how long you could stay on a temporary visa. I checked on whether we could bring our cat.

It kept me awake at night. After I take my nighttime meds, I usually read for about a half hour before I shut down my brain and try to sleep at night. But I had no such luck. The arrangements, the language, and the travel all occupied my thoughts. I would give up on sleeping, try reading for another half hour. Then the cycle would start all over. For the first time in a long time, I need sleeping pills—the 10 mg. ones. Even then, sleep didn’t come easy.

My husband pointed out that maybe it would be better if we went to Costa Rica for a week or two to see how we liked it before we made the move. Instantly, my mania switched in a different direction. I began working with a travel consultant on what cities or attractions (in addition to Grecia) we might like to see. Anticipating a chunk of money coming in (another manic fantasy), I researched flights, even selecting flight times and layovers as well as costs. I selected dates, then revised them based on seasonal prices. Again, I couldn’t sleep for running over the arrangements in my head.

At last the mania and the planning eased off. The fantasy funding fell through, as I should have realized it would. Along with it, my mania retreated and my overthinking stopped—at least for the time being. My overthinking backed off too, at least on the subject of Costa Rica. Now, what I have to overthink is my writing assignments, which seem to have multiplied while I wasn’t looking. I’ll make money, but not enough to get me to Costa Rica.

At any rate, I’m happy to say that I’m back to where I was before the mania and the overthinking—back to sleeping without sleeping pills, anyway. Now all I have to overthink, besides the writing, is our upcoming trip to Florida, which provides plenty of fodder. I’ve prearranged everything I can think of, but I’m sure there’s something that I’ve forgotten or that is completely out of my control. And I hate that feeling. It leads to other things that are out of control, like thinking and mania.

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Mental Health

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Overthinking Night and Day

Like many people with SMI, my superpower is overthinking. In fact, even as I write this, it’s 2:30 a.m. I can’t sleep because I have hamster brain, a phenomenon I’m sure will be familiar to most of you.

I’ve got plenty to overthink about. I’m starting a new writing assignment and am confronted with a big, messy outline that I didn’t write and have to make into a coherent book. We don’t have the money to get a plumber, only the downstairs toilet works, and there’s only a trickle in the showers. Between the two of us, over the next six weeks, we have a total of six assorted doctor appointments coming up, for everything from nail fungus to heart meds to psych meds to test results to steroid shots. There’s the trip we have booked in January to see Dan’s 96-year-old mother. There’s our senior cat whose health is holding for now, but who knows? Pick any one. Or two. Or more.

If only overthinking were productive. Wouldn’t it be great if all that thinking led to creative problem-solving? But no. The problems remain and continue rolling over and over.

Overthinking is tied to anxiety, at least in my case. I do have an anxiety disorder, so my overthinking is something prodigious. And, as exemplified by the hamster brain analogy, it’s cyclical. Anxiety causes overthinking causes anxiety and so on and on. The more out-of-control your problems are, the more out-of-control your thoughts become.

Overthinking is also a symptom of other mental disorders, such as PTSD, OCD, and depression. Another perhaps related phenomenon is intrusive thoughts, the ones that seem to appear spontaneously in your mind for no apparent reason. Perfectionism can be involved, too, if you obsess about doing everything just right. Catastrophizing and all-or-nothing thinking can also contribute to overthinking.

But those are facts. And overthinking has little to do with facts. Take that upcoming trip, for example. The flights are booked, the accommodations are arranged, the rental car is reserved. All three are already paid for. All this was taken care of months ago. But I still overthink. I check the airline reservations to make sure they haven’t changed (they did at least once, with a layover in a different city). I hope we can get an accessible condo. I worry about paying for gas and food. I feel panicky about getting to the next gate during layovers. I have done everything I can think of to make sure the trip runs smoothly, but still…

It’s exhausting, so it’s ironic that I can’t sleep.

How to stop overthinking? Mindfulness and meditation are often recommended, but those don’t work for me. I just can’t shut off the over-thoughts long enough to accomplish them. Distractions are another recommendation, and I try that, but they only provide temporary relief. Reframing negative thoughts is yet another suggestion, but I don’t know how to reframe having to go downstairs to pee in the middle of the night. Self-acceptance or self-compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude—nothing seems to work.

I do take antianxiety meds, and I do have permission to take an extra one if I have more than usual anxiety. I have a prescription for a sleeping aid, but I don’t like to take it very often. More often I just say the hell with it and get up, read or write or watch TV. My sleep-wake schedule is off for days, along with my meals, but if I can just stop the thoughts for a while, I’ll take it.

For me, overthinking happens mostly at night, but it doesn’t have to. There’s plenty of fodder for overthinking during my waking hours. Perhaps I just don’t notice it as much because during the daytime I’m usually doing something that distracts me from my thoughts. Today I was overthinking how to get an accessible room at the condo where we’re staying in January. I made phone calls and stayed on hold, but I got put off until four weeks before the trip. That started me overthinking about what to do if we can’t get an accessible room. I’d have to get one of those shower substitute wipes they use for people who are bedridden. Then I started looking those up online. Maybe I should order some, just in case. Or, I thought, I could wash up in the sink every day. Or some combination of the above. It’s ridiculous how long I spent contemplating the possibilities. All I really have to do is request an accessible unit when I show up, and they’ll tell me whether one is available that day. But do you think I’ll be able to wait until we show up? No, I’ll keep overthinking it. And get the wipes just in case.

Because that’s just what I do.

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Mental Health

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Anxious in Ireland

So not us.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve written about the anxiety I’ve been having regarding our vacation in Ireland. There’s been the overplanning, overscheduling, overspending, and the trying to make sure that everything went perfectly (like that was going to happen). I had anxiety about whether I would pack too much or too little, whether I could sleep on the plane, whether I could find things to eat comfortably (after recovering from dental surgery). Anxiety about whether I could find help with my mobility challenges in the airports and at my destinations. Anxiety about driving on the left. Et endless cetera.

As my therapist noted when I spoke to her after my return, it was good I took my anti-anxiety meds with me. (I made sure to pack them, even though I haven’t been taking them every day since consulting with my prescribing psychiatrist. I packed all my other psychotropics too, of course. I also carried my sleeping aid, which I’ve also stopped taking regularly, for the plane flights, but didn’t need it.)

Many of the anxieties I encountered in Ireland did indeed have to do with driving. I tried driving the rental car once, but I was too nervous to continue that. My husband ended up doing all the driving and I navigated. After some bad experiences with the GPS unit that the car rental company provided, we switched to using Google Maps on my phone, both of which fortunately worked in Ireland. I was in charge of transmitting the directions to Dan and trying to translate kilometers into miles for him.

One of the first difficulties we had before we defaulted to Google Maps was when we were heading to our first bed-and-breakfast reservation (the accommodations were arranged in advance by the travel company, so I didn’t have to have anxiety about where we were going to sleep each night). The GPS took us on a series of narrow, stony roads that ended up with us running off the one lane and into a ditch. After the initial shock and the realization that we couldn’t simply rock the car out of it, though, I wasn’t really all that anxious, perhaps because it was late at night and I was emotionally as well as physically exhausted.

I had a flashlight in my purse (something I almost always carry). My husband took it and set off on foot to find help, while I waited with the car. In about half an hour he returned with a local couple of lovely, helpful people, who drove us and our luggage to the b-n-b (which was actually quite nearby). They also came back in the morning to pull the car out of the ditch and pulled out a minor dent for us, and they accepted a modest amount of Euros for all their help. All things considered, it could have been much worse. I fell into bed that night and slept soundly.

During the whole trip, I never got really used to the driving situation. Dan noticed that I was making humming noises as we drove and bracing my hand on the dashboard (or the roof) at times. He called this “vibrating” and gently reminded me that I had the anti-anxiety meds with me. Eventually, I got used to taking them every morning before we began our day’s wanderings. My vibration was particularly noticeable when we passed another car or when I thought we were swerving too close to the edges of the road (the ditch situation made this seem all too plausible). Parking in cities – and indeed simply trying to navigate in them – also triggered my anxiety.

Then there were the godawful problems with our flights and our finances. Back in December, the airline had changed our flight out but never notified us about it, so we showed up at the airport four hours after our flight left. I spent several hours on the phone with the airline, our bank, and our credit card company trying to make arrangements for the first flight out the next day and the money to pay for it (since we were considered no-shows). Fortunately, I went into task-oriented mode (which I am sometimes capable of) and shuffled money and flights around before I collapsed. We did miss our scheduled first day in Ireland, though.

Getting a flight back was even worse. There was a problem with our COVID certification (we needed an antigen test, not just a triple-vax card) and later flights were booked solid. In the end, we had to spend two days in a Dublin airport hotel while trying to make arrangements with a dying phone and no charging cable. Dan came through there too when I was at the end of my proverbial rope (or in this case cable) and managed somehow to get a replacement. But by then we were out of money and I had to ask friends and family to PayPal us money for the extra nights in the hotel. It was all quite nerve-fraying and close to panic-inducing.

We’re back home now and I have settled down quite a bit, though I’m still dealing with financial repercussions, which have always been one of my major anxiety triggers. But I’m not taking the anti-anxiety pills daily anymore. And, as always, Dan is helping me.

The good news is that, throughout and despite all this, we managed to have a great time in Ireland. Sure, I had anxiety – and quite a bit of it – but I was still able to enjoy the country, the scenery, the food, the activities, and the wonderful people. We’re already talking about saving to go back.

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Mental Health

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Traveling – and Planning – While Bipolar

Traveling is often a challenge for people who have bipolar disorder. Some people can’t do it at all or can’t even leave their houses, which I certainly sympathize with. I really do. There have been times in my life when I could travel and times when I could not, because of my mental state.

Right now, I’m able to. I’m taking advantage of this to go with my husband to Ireland for ten days. We started planning this trip last fall, which has, of course, given me plenty of time to overthink everything – but not to reconsider. I think this will be one of the best things we have ever done together, apart from getting married.

If everything (and by everything I mean Facebook) works right, this post will appear while I’m overseas. I didn’t want to just skip a week in my blog, so I’m trying out the feature that lets you schedule posts ahead of time. I worry that it won’t work, which in the greater scheme of things wouldn’t really be so bad. Just more overthinking.

In addition to overthinking, I am over-scheduling and over-packing. I have been bothering our travel agent with questions about driver’s licenses and phone service. I have made reservations for eight different scenic places and interesting events. (I think they require reservations because of COVID, because they don’t want too many people to show up for tours at the same time.) I have a list of things I need to do before we leave. Every time I cross one thing off, I add another at the bottom. I used to be able to pack for a long weekend for both of us with only one tote bag, but those days are long gone. My list of what I will need to have with me threatens to spill over my luggage allowance.

In the past when I’ve traveled, I’ve had some success with giving myself permission to feel the way I feel – to take a day off from activities if I feel low, for example. This time, what with all the pre-booking, I may not be as inclined to do that. We do have days scheduled with less driving around and I have noted times when we can simply explore local pubs and restaurants. We’re even bringing along a card game in case we feel too useless to leave our bed-and-breakfast.

I have no guarantees that my mood swings will abate while I’m gone, of course. Making sure all my meds are refilled and packed is top on my to-do list. That’s much more important than packing a card game. I can see myself getting cranky about getting to the various locations in time for our reservations, but I’ve been fairly stable lately, so I hope I don’t tip over into something worse than grumpiness. At least my husband will be there to help me laugh and decompress.

I think that time to decompress is necessary while traveling. It may have been my hypomania that told me to make reservations for every occasion. And I hope the looming shadow of my bipolar disorder doesn’t sabotage the whole thing. This vacation is very important for us, which probably means I have too much invested in it, and I don’t mean just monetarily. It’s most likely the last time we’ll ever be able to travel abroad, so I want to make the most of it.

I just hope that making the most of it doesn’t send me tipping over the edge into depression or hypomania. I’m never good psychologically with financial affairs or not knowing what’s going to happen. I’ve seen those tendencies in myself increase with time. I hope that this vacation is what I need to shake me loose from some of those feelings. I hope that I will look back on it, after this bit of writing becomes public, and realize that I have proved my relative stability by being able to go through what is intended to be a magical time. But I guess expecting magic is too big an expectation to put on a vacation.

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When Your Thoughts Run Away With You

Overthinking. It’s something we all do at times – so many of us that it cannot really be said that it is automatically related to mental illness. But in some cases, it is a symptom.

Let’s start with depression, a subject about which I know a thing or two. When I was in a depressive phase of my (undiagnosed) bipolar disorder, I could, as the saying goes, overthink a ham sandwich (once I actually overthought a BLT). When I was depressed and/or anxious, it seemed as though I had a recorder in my head that would play back for me every stupid thing I had ever done – even such a small thing as handing the wrong person a glass of water. At random moments, the memory would pop up, usually with full color and sound, and I would again castigate myself for being so stupid.

I agonized over decisions. Should I call a friend to tell him or her about a phone call I received that might affect them? One time it was the right thing to do, with positive consequences. Another time it was also the right thing to do, but with negative consequences. Dilemmas like that made it even more difficult to know what to do. Indecision paralyzed me. When I couldn’t figure out the consequences ahead of time, I couldn’t know if my decision was correct. Of course, this is true of most people and many decisions, but the dilemma would derail my thoughts and leave me vacillating.

Intrusive thoughts are quite often symptoms of depression and bipolar disorder, and they can be valid or nonsensical. Are my children getting an appropriate religious education? Where is my passport (when no trip is remotely planned)? They can keep one awake at night.

Psychologically speaking, overthinking and intrusive thoughts are definitely symptoms of OCD. Did I lock the door? Better check three times. Did I leave the stove on? Better check four times. Has the milk in the refrigerator expired? Did my cat get out the door when I wasn’t looking? Better go out and look around. Will I throw up when I ask my boss for a raise? Better not try. Does my aching knee mean I’m getting arthritis? Should I call my doctor about it? Will he think I’m imagining it? My mother only loves me because she’s my mother, not because of who I am. These kinds of thoughts can be disabling, crippling, or at the very least painful. They can cause you to doubt yourself and everything you do.

In mania, overthinking comes later. While you are spending or gambling or having risky sex or driving recklessly you don’t question it. It’s only later, when the episode wears off, that you have intrusive or obsessive thoughts. Oh, my God, why did I do that? How can I ever pay for all that? Are my finances so screwed up now that I can’t pay my rent? Did I binge drink and hurt someone? I’m so ashamed. I feel so guilty.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) may be one way to confront your intrusive thoughts and push them aside in favor of more productive thinking. Talk therapy of the usual sort may help you develop coping mechanisms for when your thoughts run away with you. And psychotropic medication may lessen or eliminate the underlying problem that causes you to have intrusive or obsessive thoughts. In my case, it was the latter two. I still get stymied by some decisions, but I don’t lie awake and think about them. I discuss them with someone else (my husband, my therapist) to get feedback. Then I make a decision and stick with it, or move on to thinking about something else.

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When Overthinking Takes Over

Overthinking, or analysis paralysis, as it’s sometimes known, is the great immobilizer. Your brain goes temporarily out of control and prevents you from making choices, doing things you need to do, or even getting out of bed in the morning. There are many ways in which it can accomplish this and ways in which you can fight it.

• Night thoughts. When you’re trying to get to sleep and your thoughts keep revolving like a small rodent on an exercise wheel, that’s what my friends and I call “Hamster Brain.” Really, the only way to stifle these thoughts is to get up and do something else. Clean, read, exercise, get your tax documents in order – anything that tires your brain and/or your body. Then try sleeping again.

• Random thoughts. Sometimes the oddest thoughts occur at the oddest times. Once it occurred to me that I didn’t know whether my passport was up to date. A friend was worried about her children’s religious education. If possible, check out whatever has popped into your head. I dug out my passport and saw that it was, indeed, up to date. My friend couldn’t get an immediate answer, but later received validation that, yes, she had done all right by her boys.

• Your every mood. Depression – and particularly bipolar depression – can make you doubt your every mood. Am I just sad, or am I teetering on the edge of a major depressive episode? Do I feel good, or am I just kidding myself? Maybe I’m trying to cover my depression with a smile. You can analyze your moods until you really don’t know what you feel. Look for clues in your life. Did a beloved pet die recently? You may be experiencing reactive depression, nor clinical depression. If you feel happy, don’t analyze – just go with it!

• Your every move. Sometimes it seems that you have a little recorder in your brain that keeps a copy of every foolish thing you’ve ever done or said, and plays them back at unexpected moments. Most people I know with depression experience this and end up beating themselves up over events long-gone. It may be a comfort to know that, with time and proper treatment, that recording machine goes away, or at least plays back your words and actions less often. If you notice that happening, it is a sign of healing.

• Decisions. Making decisions, especially important ones, is a hallmark of analysis paralysis. Weighing choices can be difficult for anyone. Depression can cloud your thoughts and make it even more difficult. Should I use what energy I have to meet friends for coffee? Should I tell my employer about my depression? Should I take a full-time job?

For life-altering decisions, careful thought, not overthinking, is needed. Make a list of pros and cons. Talk to a trusted friend about the situation. If what you can’t decide is less earth-shattering, use a simpler solution. Flip a coin. Draw a number out of a hat. Anything to make the decision for you. If you do that, you’ll quickly discover if that’s the choice you really want.

• The good and the bad. Overthinking often comes down to deciding what is good for you and what is bad for you. At times like these, focus on your mental state. Will this career decision make my depression worse? Is this spending decision really my hypomania talking? The question you need to ask may be “How do I feel about this?” rather than “What do I think?”

• Going off on a tangent. Once in a while, you may be thinking about one thing, only to have your brain flit to something else and start obsessing about it. I once heard a metaphor regarding mindfulness and meditation: When you find your thoughts wandering off-track, imagine them as a puppy that wants to wander off. Gently corral it and pull it back. Then go back to what you were originally thinking about. It may be necessary to do this several times until the “puppy” gets the idea and doesn’t wander off.

I’m often subject to analysis paralysis. It’s been said that I have a third-degree blackbelt in overthinking. I like to think, though, that I get into such traps less often now, or at least get out of them more quickly. Really, overthinking adds nothing good to your life and mental well-being – indeed, it detracts from them. For many of us, overthinking is sometimes inevitable. Developing a few techniques to deal with such thoughts can be a blessing.

 

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