I could feel my anxiety ratcheting up today, a warning light that flickered at first, then held steady, until finally, having not done anything about it, all systems began flashing “eject, eject, eject.” After a lifetime of this, you’d think I’d be familiar enough with it to take evasive action sooner.
Usually I keep my anxiety and depression in check through a combination of a heroic dose of medication and consistent exercise, but since I got Covid a week ago, I haven’t been able to go to the gym. Today I was looking forward to getting back to it, knowing it would be a good “reset” for me after a week of missing out on a long-planned trip with friends and sitting around the house doing nothing.
But before I left for the gym, I did the responsible thing and tested for Covid, and although I’ve been feeling fine for a couple days, I still tested positive. That was when my anxiety really cranked up because I was counting on that exercise to ground me. Within about an hour, I think I was starting to vibrate a little and was probably giving off a high-pitched sound only dogs can hear that roughly translates to “being human suuuuuuuuuuuuucks.”
I was essentially panicking because anxiety usually leads to negative thoughts which leads to depression, and the negative thoughts were starting (so I was anxious about being anxious and getting more anxious), so without exercising I didn’t see a way to dodge my inevitable slide into the abyss. Then I got the bright idea to just exercise in my house. I have a yoga mat, so I changed up my routine and just did a bunch of stretching, planks, and an excessive amount of push-ups, and then I went on a 3-mile walk.
It was interesting, but for the first mile of the walk or so I don’t think I was really awake. I was walking fast, pumping along worrying about: work, money, my upcoming birthday and subsequent inevitable death, family, still being single at nearly 46, and a dozen other things when suddenly I noticed a bright purple flower leaning into my path about to brush against me and kind of came out of my funk. I’ve lost my sense of taste and smell, but I can still see, so I dodged that flower and then realized I hadn’t been noticing anything but what was going on inside my own head. I was just acting like an anxiety carrying vessel, moving my worries around from one place to the next, while all my senses were on automatic.
So then I started to relax a little and pay attention to the trees and flowers and a nearby lake and the sounds of people and animals, and everything kind of began to settle. But I was still pretty amped up and so I began to run, but I only made it about a quarter of a mile or maybe even less because I’m not in very good shape cardio-wise. Plus there was a really in-shape guy coming up fast behind me and I didn’t want him to think that my pace was my actual running pace, but instead that I was just trying to get somewhere a little faster and since I had arrived at a corner I could stop and he would think that the corner was where I was trying to get and that I’d made it.
Anyway, it all added up to enough to do the trick, and now I feel mostly fine again. Tomorrow I’ll probably still skip the gym, but I’m going to make sure to go on a walk and do a bunch of air squats because it is supposed to be leg day.
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