The Audacity of Taking a Break
A case study of anxiety wrecking my physical and mental health. A paradox of rest vs. stress.
A lot of us have heard about how mental health can influence your physical health. Everyone that has an anxiety or panic disorder knows that pit of panic that sits on your chest like the incubus in The Nightmare.
And a lot of us have received the “Don’t burn the candle at both ends” warning. The message is simple enough: Don’t push yourself too hard. Rest. Your body will thank you.
But what happens when you aren’t given the opportunity to rest? What if you have too many commitments and you can’t press pause on any of them?
People say “take a break” like it’s not a big deal. Like you can drop responsibilities at the drop of a hat. In a culture where capitalism is king and productivity is marketed as your soul purpose in life, stepping away from everything on your plate for a mere 24 hours -or even 24 minutes- isn’t always possible.
That’s what I kept telling myself over the past two months. I was balancing stress seven ways from Sunday each day. I knew I wasn’t doing that well and my best friend could tell. I would say something snarky in my usual dark and self-deprecating humor and he would ask me if I was okay. My only response would be to laugh and say, “No, but I’m still alive” — What else could I do?
Let’s break this stress down for a minute; the rocks in my proverbial backpack were and continue to be many:
- First and foremost, regardless of how everything in my immediate environment is going, there’s been a cinder-block in my stress backpack for the last three-and-a-half years. My father has early-onset dementia. (Expect a later article from me about how dementia is far from the Hallmark version of “Oh, how sad, Grandma is confused about where she is” — the disease is vulgar and violent and relentless.) As the only child of a terminally ill parent, my life’s been flipped upside down and the best I’ve been able to cope has involved severe compartmentalization, finding hobbies as distractions, and the occasional indulgence in cannabis.
- I graduated with bachelor’s degrees in French and Theatre Arts from a private liberal arts college and live by myself. Like most of my Gen-Z/Millennial compatriots, I’m fucking broke. Don’t get me wrong, I make a decent hourly wage — somewhere above minimum wage, but still less than a Trader Joe’s employee- but after bills, there’s little left to save towards my goal of returning to (and moving to) Europe. Unless you’re one of the very few that graduated with no student loans to pay or have a nice trust fund to live off of, you know this struggle well.
- Consider this a continuation of #2. My financial situation necessitated me to take all the available overtime I could at my job. Being short-staffed as we were, with the offered overtime, my 40-hour workweek often became a 47- to 50-hour workweek.
- I was cast in a show that ran 64 times in a span of 10 days: It was a ten-minute piece that would run 4 times per show as part of the Rochester Fringe Festival and we had 2 shows every night. I would leave work early and go straight to the performance venue. Loop that in with doing my best to prepare for the next day, run errands, and shop for groceries and I wasn’t going to sleep any time soon after getting home. I would sometimes feel exhaustion while performing, but I pushed myself through each performance to give as much energy to the audience as possible.
After my gig at the festival was done, life began to slow down, but not by much. I took a day off to give my body some rest, but in the scheme of things, it didn’t do much since I was running around during my day off to take care of errands and responsibilities that had fallen by the wayside.
The next week, I was off to a business trip to Canada where I got minimal sleep but still powered myself through meetings and presentations with coffee and sheer willpower.
The next week, a friend of mine asked if I would be willing to join the cast of a reading that was going up in the next two weeks. I agreed. I love new work and play development and I was still high off the boost that being in Fringe had given me. I couldn’t not take this opportunity. What if it led to others? An old professor’s mantra of “As an artist, you should always be on the lookout for the next job” repeated over again and again in my mind. My body and mind told me not to, that I needed to rest, but I pushed my fatigue aside.
I had met with the director and cast on Thursday and the following Monday, I called out of work. I told my boss that it was because I was throwing up; after all, it seems as though that’s the only “valid” sickness to warrant a same-day call. But I wasn’t throwing up. As far as physical symptoms go, I only had a slightly sore throat and ears that felt a little more watery than normal.
But I was So. Tired.
So tired that after I went back to bed at 8 a.m. and woke up at 10:30 a.m., I was still exhausted. So tired that I had to force myself to get out of bed so that I could fall asleep later that day.
Fearing that the mono virus that I had contracted in my senior year of college was rearing its ugly head, I called my doctor for an appointment and was able to get in that day. She suggested it may be stress-related, but sent me for a few blood tests.
At work the next week, I was miserable. I tried boosting my caffeine intake with a second cup of coffee in the afternoon, but it didn’t work. Some days I would be so tired, I would almost fall asleep at my desk.
One afternoon, it was so bad that I asked my supervisor if I could rescind my promise to stay late so that I could go home at my usual time. Instead of truly resting when I got home that day, I merely laid down for a few minutes before I had to head to rehearsal. We were in tech week and I couldn’t possibly call out of rehearsal now. I had committed.
The next week, I scheduled an appointment with my doctor to go over the test results with her. They weren’t great.
The test they had run to see if the dormant mono virus in my body had been reactivated had been contaminated or something of that nature and so the lab was not able to provide a definitive answer. What they did provide showed that I was “abysmally low” in vitamins D and B12, my cortisol levels were severely below average, and my thyroid was working overtime.
Cortisol is known as the stress hormone. How could that be so low? I’ve felt so stressed for so long. The physical feelings of anxiety that I had kept at bay with therapy and medication had returned. Surely my cortisol levels should appear much higher.
“Your body’s been in stress overdrive for so long.” my doctor explained. “Your system is in place to pump out adrenaline in times of stress. It goes back to when we had to run away from physical threats like lions. Our adrenal systems don’t know the difference between running from a lion and facing a deadline or dealing with schoolwork or dealing with strained familial relationships. Your body has been pumping out so much cortisol, running away from the lion, for so long that your adrenal glands can’t make the cortisol levels it needs so it’s just popping out what it can. This is what we call adrenal fatigue.”
That’s right. My body has been stressed out for so long that my stress hormones are on biological back-order. My body couldn’t and still can’t keep up with the level of stress I was dealing with.
My doctor went on, detailing what was going on with my thyroid and vitamin deficiencies. To avoid boring you with medical details, in summary, my thyroid was indicating that there was inflammation in my body; that this same (arguably stress-induced) inflammation was also keeping my B12 vitamins from getting absorbed into my system. Do you know what vitamins you need especially in times of stress? It’s vitamin B12 and all its other vitamin B friends.
To sum up, my stress levels were and currently still are affecting different aspects of my physical health. And not in the same tired ways I had been experienced and had been warned of before: nausea, irritability, the weight of panic on my chest. This stress was right down to my biochemistry; it could be tracked in my blood.
“So,” my doctor began. “What can we do about this? It won’t happen quickly, but there are some steps we can take.”
She wrote down her preferred brands of B Complex and D vitamins to buy online and recommended me a book about activating my Vagus nerve, which should help relax my adrenal system. We talked about stress management strategies — meditation with an app like Headspace, yoga, deep breathing, and humming. If I wanted to make any improvement — and not sleep all day long- I had to commit to these things daily to bring my stress levels down.
That was roughly two and a half weeks ago.
Since then, I’ve been taking vitamins for eight days now. I’ve been forcing myself to go to sleep at a decent hour. I’ve been trying to take regular walks again like I did before this stress hit my body like a ton of bricks. I’ve been meditating.
But I’ve also been getting frustrated with myself. The stories I’ve longed to write, the adventures I’ve wanted to take have had to wait. I don’t even have the energy to exercise. I’m just too exhausted.
This frustration only creates more stress; I feel as though I’m falling behind in life’s competition, that I’m not living up to my potential, that I’m a disappointment. Sure, I could try to power through and do these things anyway, but where would that leave me? Exactly where I started.
My body is screaming at me to rest, but my mind still screams at me to work. My soul is murmuring to me to have patience and find balance. I cannot work if I cannot rest; I cannot rest if I don’t slow down.
But life doesn’t wait. Stress doesn’t fall by the wayside just because I need to rest. There are bills to pay and meals to cook and errands to run and bad weather that I can’t avoid driving in. My father’s health doesn’t stay stagnant. Work only becomes busier. Life goes on, whether I need a break or not.
All I can do is attempt to manage my stress and my anxiety as they feed into one another like the ouroboros. Wish me luck.
