Breakfast: Nothing.
Mid-Morning: Nothing.
Lunch: 2pm
1 Double Butterfinger Visalus Shake
17oz. Kiwi-Strawberry Sparkling ICE Flavored Mountain-Water
Mid-Afternoon: 6pm
1 Golden Delicious Apple
46oz. Water
Evening: 9pm
1 Chocolate & Peanut Butter Banana Visalus Shake
17oz. Kiwi-Strawberry Sparkling ICE Flavored Mountain-Water
State of Being:
I want to show you something. I think you'll find it very useful. It may even make the difference between you failing in your transformation efforts, or succeeding. Stay with me for the duration of this post and pay close attention.
So, in yesterday’s post I talked a lot about withdrawal, and how it surges back to life periodically over the course of a transformation journey.
It’s 9:41pm, Friday the 28th, and I can tell you that I’m suffering through those withdrawal symptoms, even as I type this.
I really want something I shouldn’t have, and it’s more than just force of habit. My body is crying and moaning to my mind and my mind is translating it into logical motivations.
I feel clear. I feel focused. I feel strong and even though today’s been a long and active day, I still feel fairly energetic. Aside from needing a shower, I feel great.
So, what am I talking about? What’s the problem?
A roller coaster is a lot of fun. It’s thrilling and fast and thunderous and it’s certainly out of the ordinary. Lots of fun. You probably enjoy them. (If not, just picture something that you do enjoy that’s a step out of your ordinary day.) Ok?
How would you feel if you’d been on that roller coaster for six months?
The analogy starts to break down there, but I think you probably get what I’m saying. The way I feel right now, is awesome! It’s normal. It’s healthy. But, I’m not used to awesome, normal OR healthy. I mean, I’ve had those feelings before, but they always get truncated by a return to sluggish, unfocused and constantly-tired. So now, several months in, my subconscious is saying… “Ok,… where’s the return to unhealthy? This isn’t right. We should be feeling like crap again, by now.”
I know that seems weird and I’m being very careful here, because it could be very easy for me to sound like I’m complaining about being healthier. I’m not. This is a warning.
When I first got started on this journey, I remember wondering about what might be laying in wait for me over the horizon of “how far I’d ever gotten before,” (which wasn’t very far.) Well, now I’m learning some of those things and I’m doing my best to map and catalog what I find in these new, and (for me, at least) uncharted waters.
I’m winning. I’m beating it. But, it’s anything but easy.
The human being is a unique creature. We are, without doubt the weakest, least survivable creature on the planet. From the moment we are born, we need constant care or we’ll die. We have no natural protection from the elements. We have to learn, over a period of months, how to even stay on our feet, given how poorly our bodies are designed for ambulation and balance. Archimedes called the human walk “a series of controlled falls,” and this is an accurate appraisal.
Most creatures on earth survive by changing or adapting to fit their environment. Humans survive by changing our environment to suit us. Humans can only survive by a process of reasoning, a process of observing and thinking. Through this process, we turn our meager physical means to the task of shaping matter to suit our needs.
Confronted with a river, we build boats, or bridges, or learn to swim as a water-born creature would. Confronted with the cold, we make clothing, we build housing, we harness and command fire. Hound us with massive creatures armed with fangs and claws, and we build spears, then bows and arrows, then firearms.
You have to appreciate how our one-and-only unique ability; to observe and think through a process of reasoning, has taken the weakest, arguably most physically unimpressive species on Earth all the way up the ladder to become the unquestioned dominant lifeform,… out of a pool of billions of others.
My point is that these new, resurgent withdrawal symptoms are just another obstacle. They are one more stone that I must find a way to either surpass or supplant. This, like everything else worth accomplishing, should be done with reasoning. The obstacle here, is really just chemical urges. The thoughts they inspire aren’t accurate, nor are they useful.
Before I was diagnosed with Panic Disorder, whenever I would experience a panic attack, my honest feeling was that I was having a heart attack. I felt a numbness in my jaw, shooting pains in my left arm, shortness of breath and a cold, jabbing pain in my chest. These sensations would come out of nowhere. They would happen while I was just sitting at the computer or laying in bed.
What was actually happening was that my serotonin levels were dropping, due to the glands’ propensity to re-uptake their secretions too often. In other words, my serotonin-producing glands were sucking the serotonin back up into themselves and away from the receptor sites too frequently and too quickly. Serotonin produces a calmness, a happiness. It makes you feel at peace. Normal. When it is suddenly taken away, you feel ill-at-ease and abnormal. You simply feel as if something’s wrong.
So, all of those very specific feelings, I listed above; the shortness of breath, the pains in my chest, the shooting pains in my arm, the numbness in my jaw,… were not real. They were inventions of my mind as it failed to find reasons for the ill-at-ease feelings and so, in the absence of real causes, it created a host of imaginary scapegoats.
You see, the human mind,… that tool that gives such a weak and fragile species the ability to rule a planet of billions of species, most of which are more physically impressive than itself… is also capable of some pretty scary stuff when it applies itself in error.
So, these withdrawal symptoms… I honestly see them as being fundamentally no different than the physical symptoms I would experience during a panic attack. No matter how real the monster on the movie screen looks,… he can’t actually hurt you, kids.
Remember that it’s your MIND that’s doing this and it’s not doing it to hurt you. Crazy as it sounds, it’s actually trying to help. It’s processing something completely unfamiliar and it’s trying to goad you back toward the familiar. Just like, if you suddenly found yourself in a part of the forest you’d never seen before, every strange little noise you heard would become an inspiration for going back the way you’d come, as fast as possible.
Even though the *unfamiliar* in this case is something GOOD, the natural instinct is to run back the way I’ve come… simply because it’s *unfamiliar.*
My method for dealing with this is to occupy my mind with something else. Give your mind something to do, OTHER than interpret your new, unfamiliar, good feelings as something inherently bad. Watch a movie, clean your living room, go for a walk… and before you do, put something healthy in your stomach, so that your brain can’t use an empty stomach as more evidence for it’s paranoid desire to eat something bad.
It’s what I’ve been doing, and (a few faltering failures aside) it’s still working.
Ok, remember how I said at the beginning of this entry, that I wanted to show you something?
Here it is.
It's now 10:10pm. I've been sitting here and writing for 36 minutes. Writing. I've been employing my reasoning toward writing, not toward my withdrawal symptoms.
And they're gone. Being unreal, imaginary things, they faded away once I'd managed to hold my attention away from them long enough to give my mind something else to chew on.
It works. Try it.
See you tomorrow.
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