In 2005, I got crushing chest pain and had someone drive me to the emergency room. Nothing was found wrong. It wet away as I was being driven to the hospital. I pretty quickly decided that this had been an anxiety attack. Since then, I've continued to get attacks like that from time to time, though not real often - maybe a half a dozen times per year and even less, or more during times of stress. Because I was absolutely convinced it had nothing to do with my heart and that it was a purely mental phenomenon, I totally believed I could just talk myself out of an attack. So that's what I do, and my way of handling it works just fine. It can be very painful and hurts when I draw in a breath. It can last 25 minutes, but never has for more than that. The main thing is to lie on my back and just concentrate on the idea that it's going to go away. I can almost always trace it to something having been worrying me. I'm convinced it's a delayed response to anxiety. The anxiety is usually something very specific that I can identify. A pain pill doesn't work on it. What works is concentrating on my expectation that it will go away, if I just relax my mind.

I'm applying the same thinking to this. In a way, I think this "thing" that is happening to me now has something to do with anxiety, even though it feels like depression. I've noticed that depression and anxiety tend to be intertwined and tangled up, in a way that can feel confusing. (Depression, I suspect, is a way to try and reduce anxiety. Anxiety seems to be - for me - a state of mind where I'm trying frantically to think, but not coming up with any useful line of thought. Depression seems like giving up trying to think of what to do because I feel it won't matter what I do.) So I'm hoping that I can treat this awful state I've been in like the chest pain attacks I occasionally get and that the same approach could work and let me get rid of this too.

The hydrocodone is kicking in, and this plan I just came up with has given me some hope. The main thing is to mentally slow down. I was in a panic, and that has lessened.

I think that, when you intensely fear something getting worse, what you fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. In that way, the problem snowballs.

I have been fearing that I can't get rested enough to have the energy to do anything. That's why I was mainly talking about sleep to the psychiatrists last night. That didn't seem like any emergency to them, especially when I told them sleep has been a problem for me all my life. The real issue last night was the anxiety I was having about my sleep situation. When you have escalating anxiety about a problem, that anxiety, itself, can become the bigger problem.

Now I feel like falling asleep again.

Sooner or later, any crisis dissipates.