Spinning through life

It doesn’t matter what holiday you celebrate. This time of year can be stressful and potentially cause the mental health struggles you deal with regularly – and likely have under control – to flare up. Increases of anxiety and depression around the holidays are so common that a term has been coined and Elvis even wrote a song about it (well and missing someone!). According to Psychology Today, 38 percent of people surveyed said their stress level went up during the holiday season and listed their top stressors as lack of time, lack of money, commercialism, the pressures of gift-giving and family gatherings. Some known causes of the holiday blues include overeating, excessive drinking, not getting enough sleep and having unrealistic expectations. I have an extra special reason to catch this bug each year. My dad passed away on Thanksgiving and his birthday is at the beginning of the month of November on Veteran’s Day. So, each year just as everyone else is started to get me...

Have you ever had a conversation not go as planned, so you run through it in your head a few times over. That’s my life all of the time, except I relive conversations from last year or five years ago on repeat. If you’ve talked to me once, I’ve talked to you 50 times! This is probably the strongest of my anxiety symptoms. It starts the spiraling that leads to the others, if I’m not taking care of myself, or my stress levels aren’t under control. Most people have a triggering moment or a traumatic event that they can point to where everything went awry, and I have one of those, but this conversation spinning has been going on since my earliest memories – maybe even the playground.   Mental health difficulties have troubled my family as long as I can remember. My grandmother used to joke each morning, “I can’t make Paw Paw’s eggs without my Xanax.” I think she was serious but scared to say so. My dad struggled with anxiety, depression and what presented as PTSD, b...