Anxiety Minutes

Living with anxiety minute by minute and day by day

[alt-text: partial, up close view of a clock]

My smart watch buzzes my wrist again. It wants me to know that I am only a few minutes away from reaching my active minutes for the week. Those 150 minutes of exercise that it expects me to get in every week. Thirty minutes a day, five days a week. The watch tracks my exercise by monitoring whether my heart rate is accelerated or not to tell if I am active.

I look down at my watch and grimace. My heart rate is up, but it isn’t because I’ve been exercising.

Over a year ago, probably closer to two years ago, I noticed that my watch kept buzz buzz buzzing my wrist. It was excitedly telling me that I was almost reaching and then reaching my active minutes for the week. Go you, the little buzz buzz seemed to say, you did it! You were active, and you should be proud! Sometimes, I would reach my active minutes in the span of a week. Buzz buzz, good job. But sometimes, I would reach it in a couple of days or even one day.

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what was going on. I wasn’t really exercising. I was pretty sure that I didn’t deserve any kudos.

So, I started paying attention. I started tuning in to how my body felt when the my watch buzz buzzed. And I didn’t feel good. I felt shaky or unsettled or jumpy. My heart was beating fast. And from time to time, my breathing was erratic or I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. Sure enough, I would glance down at my watch and see my heart rate climb. It would tick up higher and higher. And soon, I would feel the familiar buzz buzz on my wrist. My watch telling me that I was doing a good job on my active minutes. But I wasn’t doing a good job. I was just anxious AF.

They were active anxiety minutes—not simply active ones. And I shouldn’t have been surprised.

After all, I have generalized anxiety disorder. I had a sense for years that maybe I was more prone to anxiety than the average person. A friend of mine—after I told a story about how I tried to refuse to learn how to drive and sobbed my way through quite a few driving lessons because I was terrified of reversing—stopped me and said, “How did you not know you had anxiety?” I did, and I didn’t. But that’s another story. I wasn’t diagnosed officially until my late 30s.

Now, I’m 42, and I go to therapy every two weeks and take a particular anxiety medication four times a day. My watch buzz buzzes with a reminder at strict intervals to remind me to take an oblong white pill from a rainbow-colored pill case. I mostly remember to take them because I also have reminders set up on my phone. (I regret my life choices when I miss them.) I also have a “break in case of emergency” anxiety medication to help stave off the panic attacks that I—sometimes—have. A little yellow pill that I break in half if I catch the cascade of panic early or that I gulp whole when I don’t. It works, or it doesn’t.

When I first started therapy and meds, I assumed that I could rid myself of anxiety and depression and a whole host of other things. I could be cured or fixed even. I could be a different person than the anxious mess sitting on a cozy loveseat spilling my guts to my delightful yet no-nonsense therapist. It took me a startlingly long time to realize that I couldn’t be a different person than who I am, fixing wasn’t the point, but I could learn to manage my disorders and struggle less than I was.

I could manage my anxiety, but I could never be rid of it.

And yet, and yet, I am still somewhat surprised when I feel the buzz buzz on my wrist, and my watch chirps about how close I am to my active minutes for the week. I am still somewhat surprised that even with therapy and meds, I can have a week like this week in which my anxiety is off the charts. In which I can see that today I already have 53 active anxiety minutes. In which my heart rate is at 105. In which I feel jumpy like one well-timed loud noise will make me promptly attach myself to the ceiling.

But I can, and I do.

My anxiety is managed and still manageable.

And yet, and yet, I still have not-so-great anxiety weeks that are not simply contained by the anxiety minutes that my watch tracks. They are hours of worry, intrusive thoughts, and bad dreams and days of self-doubt and exhaustion. General unease stalks my weeks.

If only my anxiety could be measured by minutes…rather than hours, weeks, days, months, years…and a whole life. Anxiety exists in minutes and in eternities. In both. And I’ve had to learn to live with that and live with it as best as I can.

That buzz buzz on my wrist, however, isn’t always a bad thing. It’s often the canary in the coal mine. A signal for me to pay attention to my body. An alert to look closer at the state of my mind. It’s the early warning system that I am about to be hella anxious or already am, so I need to be easier on myself and take care. It lets me know that I have to use all those coping mechanisms I learned in therapy to work, and that I better be paying attention to the buzz buzz of those medicine reminders from my watch. It tells me to take a half or one of those little yellow pills rather than putting them off because I think I might not need them.

The buzz buzz isn’t telling me I’m doing a good job, but it is a reminder that I can do a good job taking care of my anxious brain and my anxious self.

If only I pay attention to it, and I mostly do.