Last fall, I went to the doctor for what I thought was night-time asthma and got a diagnosis I didn’t expect. Apparently, I’m simply riddled with sleep apnea. At 31. Who knew? I’m underweight, female, and don’t even snore. Tell me that’s fair.
A few weeks later, I returned from the medical supply office with Luna. Luna is my CPAP machine. I named her. Very Hazel Lancaster of me, I know, but I can’t have a plastic device hugging my face during my most relaxed and vulnerable moments without personifying it. Luna and I had a rocky start. She smelled like industrial plastic, for one. The mask was uncomfortable. Luna’s air pressure was set too low for breathing comfort. Plus, I mean. Adjust to a medical device on your face while trying to sleep, why don’t you.
And there were psychological adjustments. I had to cart her around any time I slept away from home, had to say, “No, I can’t just crash on your couch tonight, because I didn’t bring Luna.” The worst part was working on these medical and mental adjustments at bedtime. Bedtime had always been my recharging time. The hubs and I would watch Youtube for awhile, turn out the lights and roll over, and I’d spend the next 30-60 minutes letting my mind wander to—well, whatever I wanted to think on but didn’t have time for during the day. Bedtime was my brain’s free time, and now it was associated with stress.
I worried what this would do to my already overactive anxiety, and if the unremitting stress would make me depressed. Luckily, I happened to be reading a lot about depressed moods around that time. I came across a perspective I hadn’t considered before; the idea of accepting lowered mood as a physiological reaction to your environment, rather than panicking about something “being wrong” with you. (Disclaimer: this was not advice about clinical depression, but advice for temporary low moods caused by a variety of physical and environmental factors). The basic premise: the human body is designed to lower its mood in times of stress to facilitate pulling back, resting, assessing your situation—in other words, your body wants you to recoil and ask questions about what’s going on, rather than plunging blindly ahead in the face of new stressors.
Several days into my struggle to adjust, I felt my mind crying out for that act of stepping back and regrouping. I drifted out of concentration easily. I wanted to stay on the couch. I wanted to watch TV. I wanted responsibilities to go away. I wasn’t yet at a point of desperation, paralysis, or intense sadness, but my mind was warning me to shut down and give it space to acclimate. NOW.
So I did. I gave myself a vacation of two or three days in which I was allowed to settle into a low mood. I cozied up in PJ pants and mostly stayed under blankets on the couch. I surfed the internet without worrying about what I “should” be doing. I chose things on Netflix I wouldn’t normally “waste” time on. I made tea. I ate my favorite guilty pleasures at McDonald’s and read what I wanted to read. When I felt especially low and heavy, I let myself sink into pillows and stared calmly at the ceiling. I told my husband what was going on, that I was in a down mood, and to just let me snooze in that mud pit for awhile.
Because I accepted this low mood as part of the process and didn’t panic about it, it wasn’t even an emotionally distressing time. That may sound crazy, but it’s true. I was accustomed to stress piling up until it became an emergency, until I broke down. The act of admitting to the problem and letting myself feel it prevented the misery rather than bringing it on.
The other thing I tried to avoid was being too dramatic about what had happened to me.
Our culture loves hyperbole, and one of the things we love to hyperbolize is how horrible our struggles are. Inconvenient or awkward happenings become The Battle of Helm’s Deep when retold on social media. Frustrations become apocalypses. And that means medium-sized or major life changes become epic, paradigm-shattering opuses of interstellar significance, after which life as you know it, and yourself, and your relationships, will never be the same.
I’m told that normal humans find hyperbolizing their problems to be cathartic, and I do, too, for small things. But someone with anxiety experiences struggle so intensely that there’s a very real danger of hyperbole building up the problem in your mind to unbearable proportions. For anxious people (at least, anxious and observational gingers), the line between venting with hyperbole and actually beginning to believe the hyperbole you’re venting is very, very thin.
I read an article on adjusting to CPAP therapy, not long after starting Luna, that committed this very sin. I’m sure it was helpful to many new CPAP users. To me, though, it felt like a prophecy of doom. It spoke of the emotional turmoil CPAP users feel, the marked divide in one’s life between pre-CPAP and post-CPAP, as if we were talking about dinosaur extinction and the rise of mammals rather than the addition of a plastic box on your nightstand. It talked about the fight to overcome change and grief, and how the grief could rise unbidden at the mere sight of a family member sleeping peacefully. I do believe it even likened the CPAP adjustment phase to the “Stages of Grief.”
And I thought, Holy cow. We’re talking about learning to use a CPAP machine. Not losing a spouse. Not burying a firstborn child, or starting on chemo for an aggressive cancer with a 20% survival rate. What am I even reading? Why am I filling my head with expectations of grief and lingering sadness?
So you know what I did? I admitted when parts of CPAP therapy were challenging, and then reminded myself to keep perspective and feel okay with the rest of life.
This is not a particularly popular view to hold nowadays, when every struggle is supposed to be “real” and our willingness to engage deeply with pain is seen as proof of our honesty (so long as it happens in front of people on social media). The idea that someone in distress might find relief by examining the parts that are hard, and then not panicking and keeping the rest in perspective, is just so…boring. It doesn’t make for good click-bait.
I mean, I didn’t even cry about it. And once I found the right mask and pressure setting, I slipped quietly into a new bedtime routine with Luna. Of course there’s still a level of figuring things out, and still moments when I wish I didn’t have to worry about it. But life has, by and large, gone back to normal. And not that irritating “new normal” everyone preaches smugly about, but actually pretty normal. I still watch Youtube with my husband as we’re falling asleep, making sarcastic comments all the way (bonus: now I sound like Bane when I do it). When I sometimes wake in the middle of the night, I drift into that happy place of free thinking time. My daytime still progresses as usual, with one marked change—I’m not falling dead asleep on the couch at 7 p.m. in the evenings from sleep deprivation. Drifting off at night is less frustrating, too, because I don’t suddenly not-breathe every few minutes. So if there’s anything to this “new normal” nonsense, it’s this: I kept the parts of normal that were important to keep, gained some annoying parts, and also gained improvements.
All in all, I can’t say I endorse a hyperbolic approach to problems. Sure, some things are so shaking that they deserve to be seen as such, like becoming disabled in an accident, or losing a loved one. And some pain, such as clinical depression, is much more constant and should be taken seriously.
But do we really need to react that way to every life change? If we see every single challenge as the emotional equivalent of trekking through Mordor, aren’t we more likely to increase our suffering rather than alleviate it?
This was very good thank you.