Exercise.... who knew?

So this anti-anxiety, anti-depression medication that I'm taking has been taking me on a minor roller-coaster (think teacups, not days of thunder) of side-effects. At first I had a lot, but only for a few days. Eventually it leveled out so I seemed to only be having trouble with some jaw tension, and vivid yet mundane dreams that sometimes tire me out (which I've had for some time, but have become more frequent since the medication). I figured I could handle that, at least for a few months, as long as I was able to be comfortable most of the time.

However, more recently, a couple of somewhat more disturbing (in both the physical and emotional sense) side-effects have cropped up -- more than usually jittery legs after having lay in the same position for a while, and a weird involuntary movement of my diaphragm that disrupts my regular breathing pattern when I'm drifting toward sleep -- both of which seriously derail my ability to get a good night's sleep. And you know how I feel about sleep. Not only that, but my strange dreams kept me popping in and out of sleep and full of exhausting worry during the sleep I did get. So unfair! This, and not headaches and jaw tension, was enough to make me think about calling my doctor for a change.

I had these side-effects when I first started taking the medication, but since I'd had them less intensely before when not on medication, and since they died off as the initial jitteriness caused by the meds calmed down, I wasn't worried about them. But when they started cropping up again, they were both disruptive and worrisome.

But another cofactor, which may have seemed fairly inconsequential but which I'm now thinking may have an important effect on regulation of the medication's ability to make me jittery, is the fact that around the time I started taking this medication, I also started going to Goodlife and taking BodyFlow or aerobic classes once a week. I noticed that even though I was very jittery at first, the night after BodyFlow or BodyJam, I slept like a baby.

Eventually, the side effects completely died down and I thought nothing more of them, until late July, when I had a few interruptions to my gym schedule, and stayed away for probably about a month. About three weeks in, my jittery legs and diaphragm were back and I was noticing headaches and jaw tension more. I wondered if there was any coincidence, since even through the screen of my habitual reluctance to drag myself out to the gym, I felt a longing to go there. A few nights, I tried doing a sun-worship yoga flow once through on each side of my body before going to bed, and things improved measurably. I was able to get through a night's sleep. Perhaps I was really on to something.

I mentioned to my therapist the theory that getting back to the gym might calm my jitters. She didn't endorse it one way or the other (although she's all for exercise as a good way to combat depression and anxiety), but she suggested that I test it by using the following week (this past one) as a trial period, to step up (reinstate, really) my exercise routine and see if it helped.

So I went and did a quickie workout (a 15 minute run, a few weight machines, a couple stretches) on Friday the 27th, and that -- probably in combination with lots of walking in shopping malls and beaches during the following weekend -- took me through to about September 1 with no sleep issues. Around the night of the 2nd, I got a few jitters and a few breathing hiccups, but nothing that kept me from sleeping the night. Yesterday I went again and went all the way through Goodlife's "FitFix" gym, and last night I slept soundly, without even any weird dreams to tire me out.

My theory is that maybe this medication really elevates whatever it is that makes me hyper and full of energy, and that I need to siphon some of that off every once in a while so that it doesn't prevent me from having downtime. So exercise is the key for me to get a good night's sleep. How's that for motivation to go to the gym?

I dreamed a dream (or: A very un-portent state)

Here's why I don't believe that dreams are portents sent from some outside entity to forewarn of present or future events.

The content, intensity and memorability of my dreams is heavily based on what I've been thinking about over the past month, whether or not I'm on medication, and what I've eaten that evening. In other words, my dreams are made up of my inner life. To me, this signals something that can have direct bearing only on that inner life, and can go further only via my choices.

Last night, I dreamed (among other dreams) that G, K and I went on a jaunt to Paris, secure in the knowledge of having rented an apartment from somebody that G knew. When we arrived, we realized none of us had thought to google the place to find out where it was. All we knew, collectively, was that it was in Paris, and that it had an address on rue Ste-Bernadette. No problem right? We'll just poke around town til we find it? D'oh.

So we started asking people -- Ou se trouve rue Ste-Bernadette? -- Euhhh... je ne connais pas rue Ste-Bernadette... So we started looking in the phone books... no such of a road. The apartment could not have existed, we had been had!

(Incidentally, I have since googled it, and found that indeed, there is no rue Ste-Bernadette in Paris, though there is a place Ste-Bernadette in a nearby suburb. So there you go.)

As I drifted toward wakefulness, I was still pondering the possibilities for moving forward -- perhaps I could get a job tutoring English to teens wanting to go abroad, or French to ex-pats and tourists, to support my sisters and I while we tried to eke out food and lodgings and entertainment during our stay...

I found the dream slightly disconcerting in its verisimilitude (colour, reality of character, intensity of real life, plausibility), but all of the elements can easily be traced back to things I know and frequently think about. I have no worry that I will soon embark on a botched overseas trip. If you know me, you know I wouldn't budge without personally knowing exactly where I was going first.

I've never believed in dreams as a hard and fast set of symbols that are universal to everyone, or even to a given cultural set, and I've never really understood the thinking that says that they are. I think the dreams of an individual have unique representations for the individual and any commonality can only be owing to the experiences and imagery that any set of people may happen to have in common. No matter what else is true, I believe that dreams are built from whatever is within the person, and if a given person does not have a deep-seated idea of, for example, a voyage as something that represents an inheritance (or, in my case, a disastrous voyage that represents incompetence and false loves), then I don't believe that such a dream can possibly represent those things for that person.

This is not to say that I don't believe dreams can have meaning, or that they can sometimes reveal shocking things to people. I think dreams can be a medium to reveal truths that may be within a person's sensory grasp but outside of their ability to effectively process. That is to say, I think dreams are exclusively a way for the self to communicate with the self, but that information gleaned from unconventional information (i.e. ESP) could find its way to a person's understanding through dreams. You might have a momentary bad feeling when all seems well, but through a dream realize that something bad is happening so far away that you could not have perceived it through the regular sensory channels.

However, I don't believe that this particular dream -- or last night's other dream where my aunts were secretly hosting a family event that would effectively sabotage another aunt's annual family gathering unbeknownst to her -- has any sort of implication beyond the idle musings and overfed turmoil of my anxious and creative brain. Though maybe I will email my aunts, just to make sure.

Wearing my worry on my sleeve

I seem to have developed a disturbingly persistent Bejeweled Blitz habit.

I'm not sure what exactly is behind it. I mean I like puzzle games, like Tetris, Puzzlequest, Bejeweled and such, stuff that requires a good eye and good processing skills but little strategy, so it's a natural enough thing for me to use as a frequent pastime. But I feel like it's gotten ridiculous! I mean... there's no thought involved, and not a whole lot in terms of progress to be made (currently I'm trying to see if I can give the coin counter a meltdown by acquiring enough coins to increase the digit count by one, but it failed to break when I hit 100,000, so I'm not betting on success).

Mostly these days, it's a tool for occupying my restless hands and numbing my restless mind. I'm bored. Bored and kind of lonely, really. It's a problem I'm not sure at this point how to solve, since despite being rather timid and reserved in strange company, I've discovered I'm almost wholly a creature of social pleasures, and my social net is kind of strained thin lately for various reasons. Still, it's good to be able to know it and say it.

I recently started taking medication to alleviate anxiety and depression, and as of now, one promising effect has been to relieve me of a lot of the spiralling-out-of-proportion thought compulsions I was used to being embroiled in much of the time. The realization that I probably should find a minute in the next week or so to cut my toenails no longer sends me into a morass of panicky thoughts about how I just will never be able to find the time to do all the things I need to do over and over again just to keep myself fit for polite society for the rest of my life!

However, on the other side of this coin, the disconcerting nakedness I feel without my constant stream of worry leaves me uneasy. Not only that, but sometimes I feel decidedly apathetic about things I'm not sure it's appropriate to feel apathetic about, especially if you're me. Which I am. I haven't had an "okay, it's time to get rid of the clutter before it topples over on you" moment in quite some time, and my clutter, as a consequence, is now threatening to topple over on me in a way it hasn't been allowed to do in quite some time. Even though I know I'm starving for connection, unsought opportunities go untaken, messages unanswered -- and I feel like it's more than my usual scatteredness. Apathy isn't like me -- at least I don't think it is.


Nonetheless, it's really, really nice to experience what it's like to float on an even keel for a while. For that, I'm definitely willing to continue giving the current chemistry a chance to work itself out.