Over several years I’ve not known what true anxiety is. According to google, “anxiety is a normal human emotion characterized by feeling of worry, nervousness, or fear in response to perceived threats or stressors”.
With the definition that google has provided it means we have all been anxious at a point in our lives even without knowing it. The thing is in an African setting we are not familiar with this kind of behavioral traits because first of all we think that it’s a sign of weakness. Yes, we are allowed to say we are tired and all that when you say you’re anxious it becomes a whole new ball game.
This also means that even at younger ages we were anxious without knowing what it meant. Each time we have to write end of semester exams we will read and read to a point were we became tired but since we didn’t want to fail we didn’t stop reading. Now, back in the day you could get repeated for now making the cut so you didn’t like to play with your exams. This days the repetition hasn’t stopped but it has decreased drastically.
You can’t really feel something until you know it exists. Imagine as kids we used to think that going out late at night will make you see spiritual beings which will harm you so we were supper scared of the night. Now that we are grown we have realized that the chances of seeing those beings are thin so one doesn’t respond to night time with as much fear as we used to.
This brings me back to anxiety. As younger folks we didn’t even know what anxiety was so our anxiety levels were low. It can also be that the factors leading to stressors were quite on the low so it wasn’t as bad as now that we are grown.
This might sound cringe but one thing that is messing with mu mental health right now is sleep. Wait, I know it might sound like am trying to be funny but it’s true.
Image made with grok
I’ve always been a nocturnal person so I love sleeping a lot during the day time. Infact i once asked why God created the night time for sleep cause I didn’t see the essence of being forced to sleep at night if one wanted to be awake at night time.
A few years down the line and sleep has become the thing to stress me to a point that I am starting to think it’ll drive me crazy lol. I sleep so much this days that it’s beginning to get me so worried. I attribute it to mu service years. During my national service i had to change my sleep pattern to sleep early at night time and wake up early in the morning and prepare for work. It’s so weird that my body has adopted to that in a space of just one year.
I sleep so much that even after waking up I become worried at how much I’ve slept. My normal sleeping hours this days are around 10 to 5 am. I generally wake up at 5 am because of prayers. After prayers I can’t do anything cause I go back to sleep and mostly wake up around 8. After a few things I can go back to sleep after 10 and wake up around. From 10 i best believe my active hours are just about 2 and a half hours and then I sleep for a while again.
During the day time I am only active for that 2 hours and then I sleep again until night time where I sleep around 10 again. Now with this type of sleeping pattern I can’t do most of my daily tasks which I pride myself doing. Previously I would have stayed the whole night and gotten over with these tasks but now that I can’t stay awake I can’t do those things.
This makes me anxious cause I can’t do what I want to do. When I can’t do what I want to do then I become worried. This is a huge factor to my work and am super stressed thinking about it. How do I tackle this?
I sincerely don’t know. I hope my body will adjust automatically back to what it was so I can do my daily routine again. For now I think I’ll be stressed for a while lol.