It's not worth losing sleep over!

I stress a lot. It’s part of the triple-whammy of having PTSD, depression, and anxiety. The three tend to cross over a fair bit and blur the lines of what most would consider rational behavior regularly.

If I have a disagreement at work or if I know I must have a difficult conversation coming up I will spend the time that I could be sleeping going over the scenario in my head. I will toss and turn and get an atrocious night’s sleep.

Sometimes I will run the scenario enough times that I come up with a script of what I will say, how I will say it and I will get a positive outcome. Other times I will just continue to spiral and catastrophize a situation to the point that I will end up facing the situation and it is nowhere near as bad as I had feared.

Most of the bosses I have trusted, I will confide in and tell them that I do this. They will invariably give me the advice “Look, don’t spend all night stressing about this”. I mean they must realize that if it was that simple, I would have just done that already?

The most helpful advice I received years ago was that instead of lying there stressing, get up, get a pen and piece of paper, and write down everything you are worried about. Once we see the words written down, we realize that they are all manageable or even not worth worrying about.

The last six months have been exceptionally stressful; my dad died, I started a new high-pressure job, COVID-19 is still around, I crashed my truck and I’m trying to be a good Dad. I know that my stress levels have been higher, and I know that I’ve been worrying a lot.

I like to try to make light of my mental health sometimes. I still take it seriously, but I try to be open and talk about it, especially if I can say that it’s not all doom and gloom. In that vein, here are the two dumbest things I have stressed about late at night.

Packing the car

We are going up to see my mom in a month’s time. I woke at about 3am the other day concerned because we will have four suitcases and Mom doesn’t have a big car. I spent an hour hypothesizing different ways that I could pack the trunk of her car to get all bags to fit.

The game of mental Tetris was quite entertaining, or at least it must have been because, by the time I figured out how we would do it, an hour and a half had elapsed. In conversations with Mom a few days later she told me that she’d be sending my cousin with a pickup truck to collect us from the airport, so I needn’t have stressed.

How many eggs?

Most days I will make scrambled eggs for breakfast. It’s a fairly simple meal, I get up early so I’ll cook them up and that’s a big protein hit for the day. The other week I could not remember how many eggs I had and went through the mental hoops of trying to remember what eggs I had bought the last time I was at the shops. I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough for breakfast the next day.

I then explored the mental depths of what I would eat for breakfast if there weren’t enough eggs. That took me to a debate on whether to have oats or toast or nothing. I spent some time weighing those options up until finally I got up and went to check the fridge. There were enough eggs.

The mind is a wonderful thing if you can silence it every now and then.

If you find yourself excessively stressing about things and not getting regular sleep this is unhealthy. Seek advice from your GP or other health professional.