Stress

Whether you suffer from a chronic illness or not, you know that stress can wreak havoc on your body.  Stress can cause you to lose sleep, create difficulties with family and friends, and bring on health problems.  For those of us with a chronic illness, those things can be amplified.  Stress can cause our pain to increase.  It can bring on flares for those of us with fibro.  We already have sleep disturbances as it is, and additional stress makes sleep almost impossible.  I deal with insomnia, and have since childhood.  When I am in the middle of a bout of insomnia, I crave sleep, then I worry about not sleeping, then I worry about worrying about not sleeping.  It's a viscous cycle.

I would love to say that I have some answers to the problem of stress, but unfortunately, I'm having a very difficult time dealing with the stress in my life.  As I have written about previously, I am a world class worrier.  I worry about pretty much everything.  And telling myself that worrying isn't going to solve the problem doesn't help in the least.  I have a lot of things going on in my life right now which are throwing my stress levels into overdrive.  In the last 4 or 5 days, I haven't slept more than a couple of hours at a time.  Between the stress and the lack of sleep, my pain levels are through the roof, and I can feel a fibro flare up coming on.  I am completely at a loss of how to deal with all of these issues right now.

In a perfect world, I would have a magic wand which I could wave and have all of my problems disappear.  But, as we all know, this isn't a perfect world.  I am searching for the answers to the things I am dealing with right now, and I am unable to find the solutions.  I am feeling helpless at dealing with my own life, and I hate feeling this way.  And this helpless feeling is only increasing the stress that I am dealing with.

Believe it or not, I'm not good at opening up about things.  It's very hard for me to tell people what's really going on with me.  I've talked about this before as well, but my family believed that problems within the family should stay behind closed doors.  You should always present your best face to the world and not let others know that you were falling apart on the inside.  It's hard to stop doing this, even when you know that it isn't helping the situation.  I just feel like I am about to explode on the inside.  Even as I write this, I feel as though I should delete the entire thing, but I know that if I feel this way, someone else does as well.

Trust is another thing that's very hard for me.  I used to be overly trusting.  I thought that others would hold my secrets as tightly as I held theirs.  But, I learned the hard way that this wasn't always the case.  I have been hurt one time too many, and now, I find it nearly impossible to open up completely to others.  As much as I know I need to let some of this stress out, I am terrified of being exposed.  I am afraid that if other people really knew how I felt, they would run away from me with the fear that my problems would rub off on them.

And so, here I sit in front of my computer after another sleepless night, worrying about how I am going to deal with some of the issues facing me right now.  This stress is turning into physical pain, and I am at a complete loss in knowing how to deal with it.  My head feels like it is going to simply explode, the muscles in my neck and back feel like they are being twisted by a taffy puller, and I am shaking from exhaustion.  For now, my dear readers, I am asking for your prayers and positive thoughts.  Knowing that you care is some comfort to me, and with luck, some of this stress I am under right now will disperse and I will begin to feel better.