Thought - December 31, 2014

Try to imagine (or remember) what it is like to be anxious all day long. First your body is being put through a high amount of physical stress and secondly, your mind is overworking itself-a true understatement. Depending on sleep schedules or when anxiety kicks in your body will eventually yell STOP and slow down its processes, which biologically will affect your thinking relatively soon after. 

Let's say you are anxious from the moment you wake up. Most likely your body will give in to the stress around the evening. The sudden decrease in stress on your body and mind will make you feel more physiologically depressed than you would if you were decompressing from a "normal day" (a day with little to no anxiety).

The feeling of your body shutting down could make you lose appetite and cause you to lose interest in things, symptoms often associated with depression.

If you are a normally anxious person, or your thinking tends to speed up faster than it should at this time. If that starts to happen you may have more depressive thoughts (or thoughts you would normally not have) because your brain may recognize your body's depressive state from a previous time of depression.

Now that your mind is in overdrive, you could end up staying awake for an extended period of time (and therefore also thinking depressive thoughts longer) if you have an anxious mind.

If anything along this list of event happens it is already unhealthy on its own, but now consider if you eventually fell asleep at an unnatural time for your body. You would have unbalanced hormones when you wake up and you wouldn't be fully charged. So your chances of having anxiety that day are much higher than they would've been if it weren't for the previous night.

Then the cycle could continue on and on for quite a while until either you consciously reduce the anxiety, or your body forces a restart and eventually properly compensates for the lack of rest.

The unfortunate part is the first option is pretty hard to do if you are already anxious and the second one doesn't prevent the problem from happening again, it just gives your body a relatively fresh start.

This cycle could end up making you feel more depressed or lead to depression, and increase anxiety over time.

Possible things to take away:
1. Try to reduce anxiety when your body isn't as stressed
2. Getting proper sleep, even if it is extremely difficult, can help give your body a fighting chance to be less stressed.

Remember, everyone is different, so some of the things in this post won't directly line up with what you may or may not feel.