u/SoupDumplingOfPain

No matter what I do, it just feels wrong and bad. Trying to help around the house is physically painful, heat makes me feel like I'm actually dying, my lungs just refuse to work properly, I always feel 500 pounds heavier than I actually am, and worst of all it feels like I'm just on a completely different time measurement scale.

I *need* to sleep for at least 9 hours to feel anywhere near functional, but I stay awake for at least 20 hours cuz damn insomnia refuses to let me rest, so my sleep schedule just keeps on moving forward no matter what I do.

It's impossible to keep a proper schedule. I hate it.

It's like I'm an alien or something and being on Earth is just actual torture.

I just think it's funny, stubbing your toe is already horrible, but with this dysfunctional ass nervous system it's like every alarm was set off at once. If my brain had like a car dashboard it would be lit up like a Christmas tree.

I don't understand how I'm supposed to do anything with this damn wombo-combo of big ol middle fingers life gave to me. Chronic chest pain that seems to be caused by absolutely nothing, anxiety making me feel like I'm going to die at any moment and taking away my entire life outside this house, and ADHD making it nigh impossible to draw my focus away from it.

Every damn time I try to do anything nice, or fun, or good, one of the three pops up and ruins everything, and the other two come running. I feel like I'm actually on the verge of death at every moment.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not just sitting here accepting that I have to live like this. I'm using practically every tool in the books short of just plain medication, and absolutely nothing is working. ADHD always pulls the focus back to the horrible, Chronic pain always spikes the anxiety, and anxiety just reappears out of nowhere, for no reason.

I do stretches to ease the pain and they don't work, I do meditation to help my brain and it doesn't work, I keep an eye on my hydration and my diet and it doesn't work, I get exercise and it makes things WORSE. I try to reframe my thinking and my brain makes excuses around it. I replenish my electrolytes and my body throws a massive hissy fit

I try to do anything in spite of it and my body and mind just show me how stupid I am for thinking anything could be better.

I want to live life, not just survive. I know life isn't fair, but this is ridiculous, I just want to live.

I feel... like I'm in danger already. They just left and I already feel like something is gonna happen without them here. I've been alone before but not for this long. Why do I feel like something horrible is gonna happen to me basically every day. I'm pretty healthy for someone with a chronic pain condition, it's not like I would just suddenly fall over and that's it. So why do I have to feel like when I'm without my mother I'll just die

Health Anxiety, GAD, Agoraphobia, PTSD, I feel like so much would be better if there were a way to just ... delete information from the brain. Like deleting a file. I know for a fact if I didn't know as much medical stuff as I do, my health anxiety would be so much lower. I know so many things that could go wrong with the body but instead of forgetting them because they don't apply to me, I thought it was a wonderful idea to memorize every single individual detail of everything, so anything that even partially matches a symptom is another thing to freak out over.

I don't even google symptoms as much anymore, because it's all catalogued in my brain.

not like... looking for a diagnosis or anything, just annoyed. I keep getting hit with random moments where even after taking a full breath, my body acts like I haven't inhaled in 12 years.

(imaging and such shows my lungs are fine for the most part, despite some obvious scarring on the lower left lobe. Eh, doc says it's fine.)

I feel so crappy after virtually every meal and it's always either because I made it myself and I'm ridiculously exhausted and in pain after, or because I opted for an easier meal and it has RIDICULOUS AMOUNTS OF SUGAR IN IT!!

I've had a few incidents recently where after getting less than a full 8 hours of sleep, I woke up feeling perfectly fine. My body pain was minimal, my mood was uplifted, my headaches were gone, my chest was only a little achy. Now you may be wondering, how is this an incident, it sounds like a wonderful low-pain day. Well, after a couple hours of enjoying myself and getting things done, it hit like a freight train: fatigue and weakness. I felt like I was dying, like my heart was giving out on me. My anxiety skyrocketed, everything felt horrible.

This has happened multiple times. My doctor doesn't give a crap. Every time I wake up just a little bit less than 8 hours I instantly get that anxious chest pain that my brain then takes as a sign to freak out more. It's a cyclical hell.

Hi, everything hurts and sucks bad :)

I've had chronic pain for about 3 years now and it's continuing to get worse and worse over time. My mental state is also in a perpetual state of decline. I've seen several doctors and specialists and even ended up in the ER once, and every single one of them just shrugged at me and charged me thousands of dollars for DARING to ask for help.

It didn't click until recently that my home office is in a less than properly ventilated basement, and I have been working down here essentially every day for the past 6 years. There's far too much stuff to move around in order to look for physical mold - especially in my condition. So, I've been looking for at home mold tests, maybe one that I could send in to a mycologist or something.

Just wondering if there's any recommendations I should know about.

As an example, let's say that it's been about 5 hours of laying in bed, following all the sleep doctor advice. No screens, no staring at clocks, staying well hydrated, getting up every so often to do a nice little relaxation task, switching positions, switching locations (i.e. a couch) and STILL there has not been even an inkling of rest to be had.

And yet, because you were involuntarily assigned to be an adult human being, you have things that need to be done. Getting any rest is no longer an option.

What are you supposed to do? Just shrug and deal with being massively cognitively impaired for a day? Cancel every obligation and mess up your circadian rhythm (if it even exists anymore)?

I'm sure you understand what I mean when I say that sleep did not and will not happen.

Insomnia apparently runs in the family but the PAINsomnia is gonna drive me bonkers. It's like melatonin just doesn't exist in my brain, there is absolutely nothing to tell my brain and body "it's time to slow down and rest now"

I just get increasingly sore and weak, and my eyes get all crusty, and it just continues until I pass out

And even then, it takes like at least an hour of laying down doing nothing to get my brain to let me sleep

this is agonizing, it's 10am and I haven't had a wink of rest

I used to be able to hop in the shower and just finally relax, enjoy the water, get clean, and feel relaxed.

Now every time I get in the shower it's just one symptom after another. Pain comes up, weakness, anxiety hits like a truck, fatigue hits like a hammer, and then to top it all off: every single time I shower, it feels like someone reaches into my chest and squeezes one of my lungs for barely a second, and it fucks up my breathing for the rest of the day. My doctor quite literally just shrugged when I asked about it.

I was having a spectacular day, I actually had some semblance of serotonin running through me, and then the shower attacked me and now I'm back to normal. Anxious and depressed, overthinking an issue that lasted barely a second.

I have absolutely no idea what's different, but today I woke up and smiled for some reason. Nothing about my day has changed; I'm still in pain, I'm still anxious, I'm still disabled. But it's like a switch was suddenly flipped, and serotonin actually exists in my brain again.

If anything, I wanna take this to mean that anhedonia doesn't have to be forever. I wanna believe that it can just go away at any point. That serotonin is actually real.

I was hit with a massive wave of fatigue yesterday, and it made me feel so weak and frail. It kinda stuck with me, and I've been anxious about feeling weak since then. I am always deeply terrified about my heart health, and this weakness and overwhelming fatigue really genuinely does not help at all.

Thing is, I have had tests done to check my heart health, and it's completely fine. But still, I'm in pain, I'm weak, and I'm fatigued. So I still panic about my heart.

Why does it have to be so complicated?

Fatigue has got me anxious today, so I feel like it's a good time to just let out the anxieties. Today, I'm anxious because of a wave of fatigue that made it impossible to work and felt like my heart was beating too slow. We love health anxiety, don't we?

I get that being in pain and all the fun stuff that comes with it can really mess up your brain, but I'm noticing over time it's getting more and more difficult to actually follow along and read things. Even word by word. Every book kinda feels like House of Leaves at this point. I'm only 23, I don't have any kind of other issue that would lead to this kind of thing.

I've improved my diet quite a bit, and now I take probiotics and prebiotics like every day. There is absolutely zero difference between *before* and *after* I started taking them. And yet, my family and my doctor still say my diet is trash and I need more probiotics.

I don't think my issue is my gut flora.

I'll preface this with the fact that I'm trying to get into therapy, I'm just waiting to be paired with a therapist. I am not at risk of harming myself or others.

I have been dealing with chronic pain for about 4 years, and anxiety/ADHD for my entire life. I feel like since the pain started I've been stuck in this loop of each problem getting worse and worse. I've developed depression, and agoraphobia due to it.

I've kinda just resigned myself to the fact that I'll never be without pain, but my anxious mind keeps trying to convince me that I'm going to die. Most of my discomfort is chest related, but I've been through pretty much every test and my heart looks completely fine. However, this hasn't helped my anxiety in the slightest. I've been so scared every day because the thoughts in my mind from the moment I wake up til the moment I sleep are "You're going to die. Your heart will stop working. You'll fall over and die. Nobody can help you." It's to the point where every waking moment is hell, and I just don't want to wake up.

Nothing works in terms of distractions, and I've spoken to family members and friends about it. Nobody knows what to do. I am... deeply, deeply terrified of death, especially a painful death. I just want these thoughts to stop.