(((Maven)))) That sounds awful. I'm glad you're better than you used to be, though. It must be exhausting to feel that way all the time.

I just remembered something else I used to do when I was a child. The church I went to preached that you shouldn't recite prayers. You should pray directly to God, from your heart and not just recite the same words all the time. I HAD to cover everything in my prayers, though -- and they were the same things. I had to make sure I got EVERYTHING into my prayers because if I missed something horrible, God would notice and then he would let that thing happen... because I had been so careless and forgotten to ask him NOT to let it happen. So, I had every horrible contingency planned out in my mind. How to avoid the recitation, though? What I did was organize everything I needed to pray about into little categories. In my mind, they were in little boxes -- arranged in a spiral. I had to make sure that each night, I switched all the boxes around in a different order. I did a clockwise rotation -- one step. The one in the centre of the spiral would move to the first step on the outside of the spiral. The categories inside the boxes were vertical and they had to be switched one step down too each time... the bottom would move to the top. That way, I wasn't reciting the same prayer, but I was getting in everything that needed to be covered. Sometimes, I would finish my prayer, and then immediately start to worry that I had missed something. So, I would turn all the boxes clockwise one step again, shift the order within the boxes and start my prayers again. I sometimes did that many, many times before I was convinced I had done it right and only then could I go to sleep.