An extreme fatigue has been plaguing me in the past few afternoons while strolling with the baby. At first I was puzzled by the phenomenon but then realized I was just PMSing. Okay, everything is normal. Nowadays that's they only time when this fatigue hits me, but when I was in high-school it was a chronic issue. Every day after lunch (which I didn't usually eat) my energy levels dropped so low that I thought I wouldn't make it though the day. Once back home from school I'd usually need an enormous cup of coffee, some scrambled eggs and spoonful of peanut butter to pull my liveliness up back out of zombie range, followed by a few hours of no-brain work such as watching a tv-show or listening to music. Nowadays I eat better, get much more sleep at night, try to drink only one cup of coffee a day and that chronic fatigue thing is just a thing of the past, unless I'm PMSing, which is understandable; that's a hormonal and physical roller coaster that just sends everything out of whack.
Anyway, I did a little research on afternoon fatigue and found some suggestions for eating strategies and how to keep glycogen levels this and that and how to urge the body into fat-burning for fuel by doing a 6-8 hour fast between meals and so on and so forth. Then came the warnings: Do not try this if you have had (amongst other things): adrenal fatigue (check) or you experience chronic stress (check.) The latter check came with a sad acceptance of a truth that I haven't really wanted to admit to myself. Chronic stress. That sounds exactly like me. I never seem to be at ease with the world. I can't relax properly. I'm highly industrious, efficient and hardworking and it either takes two hours of intense exercise, where I blast my endorphin receptors and burn off all my energy, or a few hits of a joint to make me relax.
It's not like I don't try to calm myself down or live a more relaxed life. I do yoga, I try to meditate, diffuse calming aromatherapy oils and spray lavender on my pillow, I eat healthily and avoid all processed foods and refined carbohydrates, I exercise regularly, go to the sauna, I've cut down drastically on my caffeine intake, I sleep well (usually 8 hours a night), I take supplements and vitamins, I laugh and smile a lot, I surround myself with nature, good people, children, beautiful things, I focus on what I have and practice gratitude for all the little things, I get massages from my loving boyfriend at least twice a week… So WHY do I suffer from this chronic stress, this inability to be at peace with the world?
I ask myself if this is a nature versus nurture thing. Is this something I've inherited genetically, something passed down from my mom's side (both she and her dad have struggled with stress, burn-out, anxiety, depression)? Is this just some weird German trait thats been bred into me? Or is this a behavior that I've been trained into exhibiting? I won't say that I've always been exposed to stressed family members, but pretty much since I was 6 years old there was a permanent fight-or-flight situation in our household. Did the struggle to survive hang so prominently in the air that I learned nothing else than to constantly be stressed about life and its hardships? Or am I perhaps sick of my own accord? Likely not. I find it hard to believe that I've truly created the tendency to stress on my own, considering how much shit I've been exposed to, both as a young child and as a developing adult.
I thought that when I moved away from home that stress would dissolve, like it wasn't something that I bore naturally, but rather something that I was forced into living out because of the circumstances at home and my surroundings. But it's been nearly two years that I've lived 20,000 kilometers away from home, the supposed wellspring of stress and yet the feeling hasn't evaporated. I haven't exhaled and left it all behind. No, it's like it reached my bone marrow while living in the midst of it and now it's multiplying cancerous stress vibes into my every exertion. How can I shut this off? I don't want to be a chronically stressed person. I don't want to be my stressed mother. I don't want to have to drug myself or wear myself to the bone to relax. I don't want to have to clean the kitchen sink at night as a prerequisite for falling asleep, or to constantly makes lists in my head of things I need to do, or worry about this and that, or to move from one stressful event to the next with little room to rest. I just want to live life without having to take daily doses of herbal adaptogen supplements like rhodiola rosea and b-vitamin "stress blends" to milden my stress.
Sometimes I think that the city life, the high-tech life, the work-to-die life is what facilitates this sickness, and then I begin dreaming of a future life on a farm, with nearby woods and lakes and lots of nature, with no loud roads or light pollution or timetables or stamping in a 8am. But surely that life has its stresses too. I don't want to get into weighing the two lifestyles now, but I won't pretend that it's all smooth sailing. Crops fail, animals get sick, nature does her thing… But somehow these stresses seem more reasonable. It makes senses that nature creates and destroys, that there's life and death and a constant exchange of resources and energies between the various members of the ecosystem. That very thought is relaxing and feels comfortable… A place where sunday and monday are exactly the same except that monday is 4 minutes closer to the equinox or solstice, and that the weather is possibly different and day's events play out differently, but burn your calendar or break your clock and there's no difference. There's no stamping in or out, no being on time or late, no dress code, no artificial niceties or social lubricants to make the sickening machine of work and money run smoothly. Of course you have to be timely with sowing, weeding, harvesting and maintenance, and the economy of the farm must check out, but just from personal experience, the stress on farms is a lot less than the stress in cities, or at least it differs in a way that makes it easier for the human system to digest. Its like we (I'm sure it's not just I who experiences it like this) haven't yet caught up genetically with our industrial lifestyles, and even though agriculture is still quite a novice step in the evolution of the human, it's been around for a lot longer than cities and industry, so perhaps we've adapted more to that lifestyle than the one we lead now.
I don't think that there's a sufficient conclusion for this train of thought, as my thoughts haven't really led to any concrete conclusion. I believe I struggle with chronic stress, I'm not entirely sure why, but I'd like to find out the cause and find a way to eliminate it, because this really doesn't feel good.
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