u/Fairwolf

I've been in EMDR for a couple of months now and it's overall been a net positive for me, although I do occasionally have very rough EMDR hangovers after sessions.

I had a particularly challenging session last Friday and I've felt like my nervous system is incredibly activated ever since. The first few days after the session I was just totally exhausted and slept most of the time, but since then the main thing I've noticed is that my usual tremors and panic attacks have reduced in severity, but it feels like my nervous system gets overwhelmed at the drop of a hat.

When I was stressed out in the past, loud noises would be enough to knock me out of my comfort zone, but it feels now that I'm constantly stuck on, and that even minor noise (car traffic etc) is enough to knock me out of my window of tolerance. Additionally, the most annoying new symptom is that I'm hyper aware of what my skin is touching. Clothes, blankets, even the wind all are super noticable and it's not like it's painful or anything, I just feel like my brain can't tune out the sensation and it's overwhelming my nervous system at times.

Has anyone else dealt with anything similar in the past?

Posted here back in January so there's a bit of backstory there regarding it

Following on from that, I've passed my probation period now, and have started therapy in early May that's done a solid amount for helping reduce my anxiety, I'm no longer suffering from constant unrelenting anxiety.

My problem however, is now the constant tired but wired feeling has reduced, I'm now just left with exhaustion. I think I left getting help with the anxiety too late and just burnt myself out. which isn't helped by the fact that the therapy I'm doing it PTSD related and is honestly pretty exhausting at times itself; the job is very much a role I wanted to get into, and I have good coworkers and a decent manager, but I've reached the point where I just struggle to drum up any motivation for my work, even the stuff that interests me takes about five times as long as it should do and I'm struggling to take the initiative on work outside of my standard duties that would help meet my goals for the year.

I think I've reached the point where I realise I need to quit and take some solid time off to recover, as much as it makes me feel like a failure. I'm just wondering if other people have had to take a similar step, moving away from a good job cause they needed to recover from stress, and how that recovery looked?

Bit of a weird experience for me here, I've been doing EMDR for about 5-6 weeks now for CPTSD and it's been absurd how big a difference it's made to my general anxiety levels, however I had my last session on Tuesday last week and didn't really feel much of anything for a couple of days, then on thursday after work I had quite a bad panic attack out of the blue, and my breathing muscles tensed up quite tight.

I've had this happen a few times after panic attacks, but it normally settles after a day or so, this time that tightness continued a whole week, and I had that kind of shortness of breath feeling the whole time. Well today it finally released and I got hit with what feels like some of the EMDR hangover episodes I've dealt with in the past, feeling tired, sore, a bit dissociated and got a bit of a pressure headache.

Wondering if anyone else has ever had something similar happen, was my body just struggling to process and took a while to let go?