My Sanity Went AWOL
The body remembers what the mind denies.
It started subtly, the way a crack in the floorboards first whispers under your weight. A twitch of tension behind the eyes. A jitter in my fingers. I ignored it. I told myself it was coffee, deadlines, the city vibrating too close to my skull.
By midday, my stomach was a coil, my chest a drum. My pulse didn’t just race — it betrayed me, stuttering in signals my rational mind couldn’t parse. My limbs trembled, not with weakness but with demand: act, move, survive. The emails could wait; my body could not.
I learned to live in the blurred edges of awareness. Conversations sounded distant, though the words were clear. I’d reply, smile, nod, but a hollow hum ran beneath the facade. My hands wrote notes I couldn’t read a minute later. My mind was fragmented, like a shattered mirror reflecting a thousand tiny anxieties.
Sleep became another battlefield. I would lie awake, chest tight, stomach clenched, mind rehearsing every imagined catastrophe. Dreams were indistinguishable from premonitions; I woke exhausted, yet unable to stop the momentum of thought. Cortisol had turned the night into day, and day into a thin wire of survival.
Friends noticed irritability. I called it fatigue. Doctors called it stress. I called it life. Only alone did I feel the creeping terror — the awareness that my nervous system had gone rogue, autonomic functions fraying, HPA axis on perpetual alert, adrenaline spiking without cause.
I tracked my symptoms obsessively: heart rate, sleep cycles, digestion, tremors. Each data point confirmed the pattern — a chronic subclinical stress disorder, silently rewiring cognition and emotion. Yet numbers alone didn’t capture the fear. The dread. The sensation of watching your brain turn against you while everyone else moved in ordinary rhythm.
By week three, I caught myself speaking to the ceiling. I didn’t know why. My thoughts fractured mid-sentence; words vanished. I trembled while making tea, poured water over the counter, burnt my palms with the kettle. My body followed commands only partially; my mind lagged.
Even mundane choices felt impossible. Could I walk to the store? Sit in a meeting? Eat without trembling? The physiological storm made each decision a test of survival. Subclinical anxiety had manifested as dysautonomia, tachycardia, shallow breathing, insomnia — all quietly eroding my life before I even recognised it.
I sought refuge in rituals: timed breathing, slow walks, journaling. Still, the world spun differently. Colours seemed sharper, sounds louder, the air thinner. I was present but not entirely. Alive, but suspended. I began to understand what doctors mean when they warn that chronic stress is cumulative — it eats the synapses, the neurotransmitters, the clarity of thought itself.
Months passed in this liminal state. Improvement was not linear. Some mornings, I could think, stand, speak, and remember clearly. Others, the fog returned — insidious, relentless, reminding me that the brain I thought was mine could misfire at any moment.
And yet, I kept moving. I learned to listen to every subtle bodily cue, to meditate, hydrate, regulate sleep, schedule breaks, confront triggers. I rebuilt structure to fight invisible entropy.
I am not “cured.” I
am vigilant. Each day is a negotiation with a nervous system trained in
betrayal. But I am still here. I still work, laugh, and touch the
world. I am learning that surviving subclinical burnout isn’t about
heroic leaps or dramatic awakenings. It is about listening, respecting,
and recalibrating, one disoriented heartbeat at a time.
–––
These stories aren’t rare.
They’re just rarely told early enough.
Most decline begins in silence —
a skipped check-up, a cough you dismiss, a breath you pretend is fine.
She didn’t need saving.
Just a warning sooner.
––– Pause Here –––
If this feels familiar, you’re not alone.
Most illness doesn’t start with a bang.
It starts when silence becomes habit.
Lingzhi isn’t a miracle.
It’s a habit.
A quiet, daily way to care for the body —
before silence becomes suffering.
Lingzhi is a traditional food taken to support general well-being. It is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. For personalised advice, please consult a qualified healthcare practitioner.
#SubHealthStories #HealthIsAHabit #HappyHealthyLingzhi
Comments
Post a Comment