Have you ever started recovering from an illness, like a cold or flu, and then once you started feeling better, you suddenly returned to feeling sick? Like the light at the end of the tunnel suddenly went black.
A few weeks ago my psychiatrist started tapering me off an antipsychotic. The first two weeks seemed to be going okay. I felt a little strange and had some minor symptoms of withdrawal, but was overall okay. Then week three hit and I realized, after my sinus surgery cured my 20-something year stint in fight or flight (FOF) mode, I was right back in it because of the withdrawal.
I was not pleased.
But I was armed with the knowledge that I knew exactly what I was dealing with this time around. When I previously had FOF I didn’t know until a week or two before surgery that I had been in this primal survival mode for literally decades. Which was helpful to know, but also really frustrating because knowing you are in FOF doesn’t make the symptoms better.
According to my best internet research, I have about 2-3 more weeks of this to go. Because the antipsychotic rewired my brain while I took the medication for 18 months, my brain has to go through the entire process of adjusting to a normal baseline without it. Needless to say, my brain doesn’t seem thrilled with this.
The only thing I have found that has helped alleviate symptoms, even if just for a short time, has been other tricks of evolutionary biology. Namely the Mammalian Dive Reflex and exercise.
The dive reflex tricks your brain into thinking you have just hurled yourself head first into icy water and it starts redistributing its time and attention to bodily functions in order to survive this experience. Exercise fools your brain into believing you have either fled or fought whatever threat had activated the FOF and allows your body to calm down.
I have spent a great deal of my life telling myself, I just need to get through today because tomorrow will be better. Even when I had absolutely no guarantee that it would be. Having to tell myself this again after all these years seemed like a defeat. After having an absolutely awful day yesterday of not being able to rest because my heart was beating too loudly, I woke up today actually feeling alright.
The FOF isn’t gone completely. It just seems more manageable. More background instead of foreground. I read the withdrawal will slowly fade out, each day slightly better than the previous one. I would have prefered a switch flip to a slow fade. But at least the situation is improving. My brain is healing from the medication I never needed to be on in in the first place.
Oh, and I still have 16 more days until my psych test results.