Great, now I'm stressed.

So last night I was like “I’m having anxiety about working for the next 12 days straight and so let’s not watch ‘Homeland’ and, instead, just go read and relax so I can bank some sleep/relaxing time before the next two weeks. Hurry! Let’s go relax!” And CB was like “I live with a crazy person.”

Which is fair because I do also open the windows in the winter and then turn the heat on. But that’s more just being a poor conservationist and really has nothing to do with being crazy.

Underneath this cool exterior is
just a growing anxiety that my glasses are
too big for my face.

However, when I settled in to do my reading so I could sleep for 10 hours, I started realizing that I pre-panic about events that haven’t happened yet so that my hyper-vigilance can stop any potential drowsiness or un-planned anxiety. Basically, I panic so I don’t have to panic later. Which just leads to panicking later about whatever upcoming events I’d like to pre-panic about.

And then I realized that I basically live my life in a perpetual state of low-to-mid-level anxiety about big and small things, which is oddly comforting because I’m all about consistency.  

For example, and in no particular order, I will feel anxious about any of the following things on a given day:

The bed getting made

We’ve gone over this before, you guys. If I die, I don’t want people to think I wasn’t a good housekeeper and/or was too lazy to make my own bed. So basically, we never leave the house without first making the bed because now CB just wants the bed made so that when he kills me for being crazy, people won’t judge him for also living with a slob. Obviously.

Sleeping

I sometimes (always) feel anxious about sleeping too late. Which is why my body wakes me up every day, weekend or not, at 6:50 every morning. I then lay there on said weekends and think “I’m going to be breezy and just roll over to sleep some more.” And so I roll over and immediately start thinking of all of the relaxing I could be doing on the couch, catching up on the DVR’d shows CB doesn’t like to watch, and drinking my coffee in my cozy pj’s. I basically spend ten minutes envisioning a Folgers commercial so awesome that I contemplate filming myself being so laid back and cozy.

And so then I get up and make breakfast and drink my coffee and watch half a show before I realize that I should probably just be cleaning the apartment and/or grocery shopping and/or working out so I can get it all done before noon so I can relax. Which almost never happens because, by noon, I’ve thought of 12 more things that probably should just go ahead and get done while I have all of this relaxing free time on my hands.

Not sleeping

This gets me pretty much every day, which is why I usually am in bed by 9pm every night so I can stave off the anxiety I will inevitably feel if I stay up past 10:30 and only get 8.5 hours of sleep. Because then I’ll be tired tomorrow and nobody wants to be around me when I’m tired – and not being liked causes me stress - and so I should probably just get to bed by 7:30 to be on the safe side.

Travel

I travel, on average, every other month for my job. Which would lead one to think that maybe I’d get used to it being a part of my life, but literally every single time, in anticipation of such travel, I become the Stress Police, making sure I’m as vigilant as possible about the upcoming travel – flight information, what I’ll be doing on the trip, and how much rest I will or will not be getting. And then I start projecting upon myself the potential lack of rest/normal routine approximately two weeks before the trip, which leads CB to not ever reconsider spending the rest of his life with me and also never look up the phone number to the local high-security psych ward.

Anxiety about anxiety

I definitely stress over stressing too much. I think about how I could “just relax, already” and really enjoy whatever activity I may be doing at any given time. But then if I do that, I’ll likely forget all of the other things I need to get done during this time of fun or relaxation and that will cause added anxiety in the coming days when I’m playing catch up. And so I need to keep a low-level stress machine attached to my brain at every waking moment just so I don’t cause extra stress by not stressing enough in the now.

Which obviously makes sense.

Right?

Oh great, now I’m stressed out that this is weird. Am I alone here, people?

Happy Monday!