Dysfunctional Due To Stress
It’s our response that counts
You might look at my situation and think that I didn’t have it so bad. Some of my friends did. I know that there are much worse things that people have to deal with. But as I have said before, I have come to believe that stress is not what happens to us, it’s how we respond to what happens.
What looks like a trivial situation to you can seem massive to somebody else, and the feelings it generates are very real. And when you are down there, it can be a dark and lonely place that doesn’t seem to have a way out. I finally went to see my doctor and was initially signed off work for 4 weeks. I declined the drug option and went off to deal with it.
Plugging or baling
Bill Harris, (who I will talk more of later), compares the situation of having more coming at you than you can handle, with being in a boat that has a leak.
- You could just jump overboard and abandon it. This would be like ending it all
- You could try to plug the leak and stop the water coming in. This would be like depression, where you cut yourself off, don’t want to be in the light, breathe more shallowly and generally try to reduce input from the world
- You could try to bale out faster than the water is coming in. This is like displacement activity. Carrying out any normal activity to excess. It could be drinking, sex, exercise or anything that you would normally do, done just to dissipate energy.
It turns out that it is quite normal to switch between plugging and baling. This made sense to me when I heard about it later.
A month of walking
Although I had been diagnosed as depressed, my response wasn’t as I would have expected. It was now July and the weather was gorgeous. There was brilliant sunshine everyday. I know because I went out and walked everyday. My wife would leave for work at about 8:30am and I would go out soon after and just walk. Some days I would not get back until around 4pm.
I was feeling agitated. I was tingling with the need to do something but totally unable to focus on the jobs that needed to be done. So I just walked, every day for that entire month. Normally, I would have enjoyed that but although I was out in the world, I felt strangely detached from it. Sometimes I went to a local park to walk among the trees but I didn’t really notice them. I was numb and not able to take pleasure in anything.
Worse than I thought
When I was first given 4 weeks off, I thought it was excessive and that I could just snap out of it. But as August arrived, it started to rain. I didn’t go out one day and I just seemed to crash. I lost the will to even walk and just stayed at home staring at the walls. I went back to the doctor feeling worse than I had before. I still didn’t want to take drugs but I didn’t have the will to try anything else yet.
That is a time when it is very hard to remember the sequence of events. It all becomes just a blur.
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