The good news is all I have to do is calm down

[cimorene]

I failed the driving test in apparently one of the most common ways to do it: no major errors except that the engine died at an intersection and I got flustered and failed to restart it so many times that the test administrator had to gently coach me through even though we both knew I knew what to do. I was fully aware that I was releasing the clutch too fast, but I just could not slow down no matter how I tried. Until she gently and calmly told me when in her coaching voice, of course, and that worked right away.

We sat there three light cycles. It was like something out of a sitcom. The test administrator was very nice about it; and apart from the embarrassment, I don't feel that bad about it, and I think I'll be okay when I retake it in three weeks.

§§§

However.

It's very frustrating to be told that you just need to calm down or relax, as a person with anxiety disorders. I don't mean it's insensitive or anything, just that it's frustrating because I already knew that and have been trying very hard to, but it's not working very well, because there's nothing that does work very reliably that I can do.

I can't take a tranquilizer. I can't magically make myself extremely familiar with the entire context/place/situation/people. I can't exercise vigorously right before because it takes longer to travel to Turku than it does for endorphins to fade (and I'd have to have time to go home and shower and dress even before the hour commute). I can tell myself everything's going well and it's not an emergency and I should chill; I can tense up all my muscles and then release and do those breath patterns that help lower your heartbeat; and I can listen to music that I find comforting. That's really it. It's got limited effectiveness.

But importantly, the bus ride is already stressful enough for me to need to do those things much of the time because I have a severe perfume allergy and am hypersensitive to perfumes, and typically there is at least one (physically) irritating perfume experience in over 90% of bus rides that I take. It's not often possible to come out of one centered and relaxed and refreshed, even if I logically know that the risk of anaphylaxis was low!

Probably it would still be hard to relax without the bus trip, though.

Comments

[phosfate]

When people tell me to calm down I usually tell them, "Oh, that's adorable." Probably not the driver's test person, though.

[james]

That does suck, so much. But good for you for not beating yourself up over it!

[princessofgeeks]

ALL THE HUGS

[msilverstar]

I flunked the first time too -- clutching was really damn tricky for me. I wish you luck next time.

[wychwood]

I'm sorry, that all sounds so stressful!!

I assume a taxi to the test centre wouldn't work out? Wouldn't solve everything, as you say, but every little helps etc...

[cimorene]

If we lived closer I could consider it, but from this far out it would be more expensive than I would be willing to pay. But man, do I wish!

[cimorene]

Pretty much. She's right, that definitely is the problem, so in the circumstances I can't fault her for telling me since it's her job. Just. Unfortunately not actionable.

[cimorene]

❤️💕

[cimorene]

Yeah, I was doing really well with it the last couple hours of driving time, even did it right without thinking sometimes, but as soon as something confuses me my brain can still wipe all knowledge of it away for some reason, like when I get tongue-tied and then can't produce a coherent sentence in any language until I say Blergkllkrgf.

[cimorene]

I admit that was a surprise, too. I think that I felt comfortable and not judged at the test and that helped a lot. I was able to leave with some positive emotions. I usually struggle a lot with being self critical!

[torachan]

Aww, that sucks! But at least it was just that one thing, so hopefully all goes well next time!

[laurenthemself]

If you're able, could you go to Turku earlier so that you have some time on that end to recover from the bus trip?

[cimorene]

I think this is technically possible but it would be hard to know for sure that I could find a comfortable enough place to relax in, because there's so little public space downtown and so many people. Sometimes I get lucky and get a spot in the sun somewhere that feels tranquil when I have time to kill downtown, but sometimes it's cold or wet and everywhere indoors is busy, and I wouldn't want to add too much time and too much extra travel to the trip, say to go as far out of my way as the library. Tragically, the quiet, roomy coffee shops that I liked 15 years ago have gone out of business or redecorated and they're now dark and crowded and noisy.

[laurenthemself]

That's awful! I hope for your sake it's a sunny day, both for potential relaxation time and because driving in the wet would be fucky.

[isilya]

Congrats on passing the majority of the test! Manual transmissions terrify me and I stall about 100 times whenever I have to do something simple like move a friend's car from the driveway.

I have a bunch of physical anxiety tips if you want them--obvs you have been managing your anxiety and body for your entire life but if you want any physician advice I have it!

[cimorene]

It rained a little during the test actually, but yeah, nyt enough to get slippery yet! And the sun helps my mood a great deal as well even if I don't sit in it and bask.

[cimorene]

I would love to hear it!!

[cimorene]

Yeah, that's what I'm hoping. Fingers crossed!

[isilya]

Short-term:

1) A beta-blocker medication like propranolol/atenolol. These are non-tranquillising and non-sedating but essentially block your stress hormones receptors. Very effective for situations like public speaking/exams. Can be used long term or short term, however will lower blood pressure and potentially slow heart rate so if you've got low blood pressure/anaemia etc you will need to get that sorted out first. Speak to doctor but it may alleviate the physical effects of your MPH adhd medication.

2) For the bus trip, a decent antihistamine the night before (like fexofenadine 180mg). Consider a mask and noise-cancelling headphones. Carry additional antihistamines, Ventolin, and an epipen (if you have a history of anaphylaxis you should be carrying one whenever there's potential for exposure). Use chewing gum or mints or whatever strong flavour you can tolerate/enjoy. Histamine reactions can trigger anxiety, and anxiety can increase histamine so it's a vicious cycle best short-circuited.

3) Plan your nutrition leading up to the stressful event. Eat regularly, sufficiently, and food that's not going to cause stomach upset or sugar highs/lows. Homemade chicken soup, scrambled eggs, etc. Can't stress enough how much the body needs regular and sufficient nutrition. If your stressful event straddles meal periods, eat prior instead of skipping a meal to eat later. If you have great difficultly eating, find a protein/nutrition shake that you can tolerate and keep them stocked. Optifast, while marketed for weight loss, is excellent as a *supplemental* nutrition shake and is available globally (strawberry is the best flavour in my opinion). However, due to the rise of bro-lifting culture decent bottled nutrition/protein shakes should be available at your grocery store or by mail-order, strongly recommend experimenting to find both a bottle and powder that you can tolerate. Sometimes grabbing a bottle from the fridge is much easier than mixing up a powder.

4) Ideally book the stressful event for the week after your menstrual period. The worst time to book is the week prior to your period and potentially the week of your period. The week prior to your period, your oestrogen and progesterone levels crash and may cause significant loss of executive function, coordination, emotional regulation etc.

Long term: physical anxiety management is like weight lifting, you wouldn't expect to be able to walk into a gym and pick up the heaviest weight, but with training, you can pick up increasingly heavier weights. It's very possibly to build up so much physical strength and stamina that weights that seemed previously unliftable, or that caused a lot of discomfort, stress and strain to lift, now feel easy and comfortable.

1) Health:

a) get checked for any medical issues like iron deficiency, anaemia, thyroid issues, hormonal issues, medication review.

b) eat regular, nourishing meals on a schedule. For me it was helpful to imagine that I was my own pet--I would not starve my pet and only feed them a dinner of scavenged granola bars and cheese shreds so why would I do it to myself. Any thriving or growth must first be supported by sufficient (ideally abundant!) nutrition. The other day I noticed a real impending sense of doom and dread and it felt completely emotional until I realised it was 4pm and I hadn't eaten since early the night before--but I didn't have a single "physical" symptom of hunger. I don't experience hunger as hunger most of the time, so have to rely on the clock. Again, the nutrition/protein shakes have been very handy for me here but they cannot become meal replacements, just meal supplements. You may need to track your macros and actually aim to hit specific goals for a while until eating 100g of protein per day is routine.

c) literal physical strength and stamina building (weightlifting and cardio).

d) zero caffeine: coffee, tea, soda, dark chocolate. Even a "little" caffeine has a long half-life. Trial this for at least two months, and see if it has a measurable effect on anxiety. It may or may not, but a lot of people trial reduction for a short period of time and conclude it's unhelpful when they need a longer trial of full elimination.

e) build up gut health.

Mind-body connection:

1) Daily meditation practice: guided meditation apps are great now (Smiling Minds is free, Headspace is paid). Twice daily is great too, if you do nightly meditation before falling asleep you can very quickly train yourself into falling asleep more quickly, being able to fall back asleep after waking up. Somatic meditation, breath work, body scans, shaking, tapping, dancing, vagus nerve medication, tai chi, all are great. Meditation is a skill that needs to be practiced, and with ADHD you may find that you need to try a few different methods before one suits you.

2) Yoga/tai chi or some other physical activity where you are moving your body in unison with other human beings. Basically at the end of the day we are social pack animals and deeply soothed at a primal level by moving in unison with other bodies. Choir and exercise classes also work for this too.

3) "Sentinel" training: meditation techniques that allow you to tune out specific input and increase discomfort tolerance. E.g. after learning body scan meditation, you can then focus on your body parts that are comfortable instead of the uncomfortable one, or the senses that are soothed rather than the ones that are over-stimulated. On the bus for example this might be rubbing the edge of a fuzzy sweater and focusing on the nice fuzzy sensation under your fingertips, sucking a peppermint and focusing on the strong taste, listening to music in your noise-cancelling headphones, rather than continuously noticing the overstimulating smells around you or the itch in your nose (lowering your stress level can reduce/prevent a histamine reaction to a mild allergen). Hilariously some of the old Sentinel/Guide fanon stuff is perfect here, dialling down the unwanted input.

4) Building up discomfort tolerance (connected to building up strength/stamina). This unfortunately is exactly what it sounds like. Exercise is one of the best methods of increasing discomfort tolerance because it can be scaled up very slowly. Avoid burnout by increasing activity very slowly, nourishing yourself, and meditating. Eventual goal is to think of what kinds of activities you would like/need to be doing. Aim for a threshold of stamina/strength that is higher than those activities, then they will be *physically* easy. Basically the goal is for your stressful event to not also be a physical challenge.

E.g for people who garden, if they can weight lift (deadlift or squat) in a range that is higher than what they need to pick up and move around the garden, they will not injure themselves gardening, nor will they be exhausted and sore after gardening.

In this scenario of the driving test, if you can build up your physical tolerance of being out of the house and taking the bus to town, then it's just the test itself that is stressful rather than every part.

5) minimum daily activity level: being sedentary is a very strong independent risk factor for anxiety and depression, but on a physical level, it also means that any non-sedentary activity feels uncomfortable to distressing. A minimum level of daily heart-rate-elevating standing-up activity can be thought of as necessary as medication.

One of the big things that stuck with me from eating disorder therapy was that yeah, eating and digestion will be uncomfortable if you're used to not eating. But that it's better to eat and be uncomfortable, and even risk puking, than to not eat. Because a) you almost never actually puke and b) you can then train yourself into tolerating all the feelings of digestion and c) it doesn't have to be all or nothing, you can eat a little bit (and then a little bit more the next time, etc) and d) even if you do puke a bit, so what (this does not apply to emetophobes obviously!)

[cimorene]

Thank you!

Lol.

I will possibly come back with some questions later, but I can at least try some of this right away.

I took the test just at the end of my period this time, fortunately after the cramps and before the headaches started, though I still took 1000 paracetamol in case of headache on the day. But I see now from my app that the reschedule day is predicted to fall on the second day this time which is usually the worst day for cramps. It's very hard to schedule and I can't practice driving in the weeks between so I didn't want to move it even further away than that! But yikes. If the warning displayed on my main calendar instead of its own app I might have asked the instructor (the driving school does the scheduling bc you test in the car you've learned in) to push it back anyway.

In fact, I just had tried eliminating caffeine like uhhh 90% for a week and a half and given up and will try again immediately.

I have been much better about feeding myself in the last ten years, but I've never gone as far as tracking. And the sedentary issue has been making me very unhappy, but I struggle to get started getting out of it - all the times in the past when I was in the best shape and felt the best, I got my start of brisk walking by incorporating it in my commute. I sit around wishing I could borrow someone's dog to walk with because I feel anxious to go for walks by myself!!

Anyway. Thanks again!

[isilya]

I would not be shocked if you’re actually drastically undernourished despite feeling that you’re eating better. ADHD combined with your natural tendencies combined with the anxiety…

If leaving the house is too much of a barrier right now, do you think you could try breaking it down into smaller steps?

1) a few minutes of dancing every hour, or marching on the spot or going up and down the stairs if you have them.

2) a YouTube home exercise program—something guided to follow. This guy is great and has a few very low impact ones—-if actually doing the exercise is too much, watching the video is a start.

https://youtu.be/OKKRTOX5DsE?si=Fo0xM2yDDPQwMYtK

3) Can you ask for help? Like a sincere request of “I’m really struggling but this is important to me and I need help” to Wax? Sometimes it’s a ton easier to help someone else than it is to motivate yourself.

5) break “going for a walk” into smaller steps:

a) just putting on suitable clothes
b) just putting on shoes
c) cool music/podcast/audiobook
d) tell self you only need to walk around the block once
e) pretend you are your own pet and talk to self in third person “let’s go for a walk!” Pretend you are super excited for a walk. Tell self that the feelings of anxiety are actually feelings of excitement! This is a weirder one but surprisingly effective, and is how I rebranded myself into someone who “loves walking up hills”. Basically I spent a year telling myself and others that walking up a hill was an exciting treat! Detoured out of my way to walk up hills! Even though it was totally fake (steep hills fucking suck obviously) I now like them! I guess I played a ton of make-believe as a kid but I never thought I would be using it as an adult to like, eat tuna and walk up hills.
f) if there’s some kind of treat within walking distance, walk to the treat (muffin?) every time

Give self tiny missions:

1) Leave house ⭐️
2) Collect and dispose of 5 apples ⭐️
3) Take 4 cool pictures of trees or bugs or birds. We could have a group chat or a private group where all post the 4 cool pics we took on our walk today.

[cimorene]

Ohh. This is all a bit overwhelming because it's so many things that I want to try to fix all at once. I will have to try to write some lists tomorrow.

[cimorene]

I'm all ready to start with done stretches and go for a walk today, and I took methylphenidate to help.

But! I was woken up last night by RLS! The only time I've had this in the past was when I had covid a few years ago, during the worst of the symptoms. Last night it kept me awake and half-awake for about half the night, and I only managed to get some sleep again after I put a microwave wheat pillow heat pack on my thighs! It was scary! I tried to read online in my half-asleep state, but it seemed like possibly iron could help (that was the only thing aside from like, sleep hygiene and exercise I noticed). I was taking iron for a while, but last spring, the last time they checked my bloodwork, they said the levels were good and told me to stop. So do I have to start again? Or do I need to have a dr do bloodwork first? Wax has also just told me it's a symptom of menopause, so maybe it's just a horrible coincidence.

I'm trying to make a blood pressure diary right now, with readings on days with and without methylphenidate, so that I can see my new GP to review the meds with some data.