Mental Health Trauma Related To World Event Stress

Weird and lesser known mental health related problems that some of you may be experiencing for the first time cause of this traumatic situation and not recognizing as mental health symptoms cause normally you’re not so traumatized:

 -memory loss and memory issues, especially short term, and a distorted sense of time

 -executive dysfunction. If you don’t know the term, I like to think of it as the human version of buffering. It’s when you sit there and think “I need to get up and do the dishes” and then you sit there. And sit there. And sit there. And you think over and over “get up and do the dishes” as hard as you can, but you don’t, your body just doesn’t listen to you, like a slow computer trying over and over to load a page and failing. That’s not laziness, that’s a mental health symptom.

 -confusion and brain fog (and even slight dizziness and balance issues as well)

 -sleeping too much or too little

 -feeling nauseous all the time/not being interested in food even if you’re hungry

 -on a similar note “forgetting” to eat or shower or pee, etc. I put it in quotes because what’s really happening isn’t a memory issue: instead, you’re not getting the cues from your body asking for food or water or hygiene or the bathroom. I haven’t quite figured out whether the “I need this” signals aren’t being sent or aren’t being received, although I’d be willing to bet it’s the second, but either way it results in the slightly oversimplified “forgetting” to take care of yourself because you can’t hear your body asking for its basic needs, and you’re instinctively used to the reminders. (It’s a LITTLE like how we don’t have to think about breathing because our bodies naturally remind us every few seconds that we need more air. If somehow those “i need air” signals weren’t getting where they needed to go, we would not be used to consciously thinking about when to breathe.)

-the “bell jar” feeling, or as it’s otherwise known, dissociation, where you feel like somehow there’s glass between you and everything and everyone else in the whole world, and it takes a lot of effort to engage with anything outside yourself. It’s not a sad feeling in and of itself- it has no flavor, it’s just exhausting.

-intrusive thoughts. These are thought loops you get stuck in, usually bad ones, and they’re easy to miss the signs of in traumatic times. If you notice yourself just irresistibly cycling through a sequence of bad thoughts that you don’t want to have, that’s an intrusive thought pattern.

 -inability to make decisions, even small ones (resulting in disproportionately intense distress if you try to force yourself)

 -shortness of breath and heart palpitations. Yes, really.

 -auditory processing issues- staring at someone for a good 10 seconds after they speak just trying to make your brain decipher what they said, or missing what someone said entirely multiple times, even though you could hear them perfectly well, or being unable to separate a conversation you’re having from the background noise of a television in the other room, sometimes to the point where you can’t finish your own sentences because the combination of sounds is distracting you.

 -on that subject, also finding sounds** and sensations more annoying and intolerable than usual- forks scraping, plastic bags rustling in the breeze from a fan, birds outside, etc. The way to really recognize this one is that it’s not even just annoyance, it’s an instant knee jerk reaction of distress and rage, and your brain can’t fully function until you make the sound stop somehow. (**interestingly, this category INCLUDES silence) That goes for sensations as well- getting suddenly negatively overwhelmed by being touched, or having tags in your clothes or scratchy fabrics bother you to the point where you can’t think.

I have struggled with/currently do struggle with every single thing on this list, so if any of you are experiencing these things for the first time because your mental health is declining due to the state of the world and the necessity to sit inside with your thoughts, seek out counseling and/or help as there are tips and coping mechanisms for every single one of them. 💕

from Facebook post on 4/8/21