YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

Mornings are the absolute worst for me. Within a few minutes of waking, my mind gets flooded with negative thoughts and memories from the previous day. I try to get out of bed and do stuff as soon as possible, because the ruminations get worse if I just lay there. By around noon or so, I have a panic attack and then the anxiety slowly recedes until about 9pm, then it usually goes away for the night and I feel close to normal. This varies from day to day, but this is the general pattern.

Morning- Oh God, what's wrong, something's wrong & I don't know what!

Noon- oh craaaappp. I've got to drive for 2.5 hours to the meeting . They think I'm stupid & unreliable b/c anxiety has kept me from doing this the past few times. I'll stall like a deer in headlights during my presentation. And yes, they will notice.

Night- when is this going to end? Why don't I feel like I have any purpose ?

Definitely night for me.

Specifically, when I shut everything down and try to go to sleep. I tend to busy myself with activities or tending to the needs of my family during the day, so my mind is busy and I don't have to think. It isn't until I try to shut off the tv and my computer (almost always running at the same time because god forbid my mind starts to wander) and I am faced with silence and solitude that all the stress and worries that I blocked all day come rushing into my empty mind.

I think I have actually developed a fear or aversion to going to sleep. I tend to run myself to exhaustion so that I have as little time as possible between the moment I turn off my distractions to the moment I slip out of consciousness.

Whoa! Pigeon get out of my head .
Everything comes flooding to me at night when I'm trying to go to sleep, which is why I'm up at 2am right now. When I was in high school I played football and no matter what time of the year it was, were always doing something related to football. I always had something to keep myself from staying in my head too much. I had to worry about practice, lifting, fighting for a starting position, school work, etc. I was always concerned about normal high school stuff, like most kids in high school.

However, when I started college and didn't have to manage an extracurricular activity, I really just had to worry about myself. I could only think of why I hadn't had sex yet, why I wasn't better at football, why did I have such a hard time making friends in high school and for some reason those thoughts would all come flooding in at night. Those negative thoughts are hard to shake when you're alone in your room with no one to talk, while you sit and judge yourself for every single decision you've ever made. Thinking about sleep makes me anxious because I know it won't come very easily.

transition between work and home (4 pm to 5 pm).

LatinPhrase, I totally understand! Are you as physically active in college as you were in high school? I used to have a very physical job, and some of my easiest times sleeping were after a physically demanding day. I would be so beat that I would fall asleep so easily! I kind of miss that.

Challenging classes (like college courses) are sometimes nice because you can focus on them (run through what you learned) instead of picking on yourself all night, but it's really easy to slide from mental reviewing, to stressing yourself out about a course. I'm still working on trying to find that balance :/ and figuring out something to focus on when I'm on break (like I am right now).

No I'm not Pigeon. Once I stopped it was really hard to get back into lifting weights, running, etc, as consistently as I was doing it when I was on a team. It's a bit of a struggle, but I know it just takes time to get that consistency back.

I completely understand what you mean about physically jobs. That's such a great feeling to come home, take a shower, and just rest. It's like your body is so tired that it refuses to let you stay up all night worrying.

I think mornings are the worst for me.

I can't pull myself to get out of bed and when I do the stress of facing the day nearly stops me. Sometimes it does stop me. Almost every weekend it stops me.

Morning means that there are at least 12 long long hours between me and bed. Bed is safe even when I can't sleep.

I hate mornings.

Evening and mornings are worst for me, I think. I find that if I go to sleep feeling lonely or insecure, I wake up several times during the night feeling horribly anxious and have trouble going back to sleep. Even if I manage to calm myself down enough to get shut-eye, I usually wake up to the day feeling anxious. I hate starting the day like this, because it just feels like from the beginning, everything is set to be more difficult. I feel irritable at work, and am in a state where other people feel vaguely threatening/feel like I simply can't deal with the basic sociability, and then I get anxious about that, about how I will alienate people or make a stupid mistake, etc...

Anyway, do any of you find that the way you feel when you fall asleep impacts how you feel when you wake up? And if so, do you have any tips for how to calm yourself at night when you can sense that this will happen so the mood doesn't have to intensify and carry over to the next night?