A little advice needed. No Spam.

[Tricky]

The self-help threads are doing well in SYM, so I'm going to give this a try.

I get into moods that are difficult for me to see coming. When I notice irrelevant things tick me off, it's usually already too late. I'm not really a moody person at all, even if I'm a bit freaked out it's not something I'll express easily. The thoughts in my mind will usually be a lot more intense than the expression I'll wear on my face. Courtesy of my upbringing, maybe.

Sounds in particular strain me when it happens. Repetitive sounds, stutters in mp3's, regular talking but also music from a source beyond my control, all feel more like an attack to my mind rather than random things one can normally choose to ignore. Earplugs are welcome (when I'm on my own) and I have dimmed the light too in the past.. the latter to lesser effect than the former.

'Mild irritation' doesn't quite cover it. I helplessly stumble into pointless arguments where I try to defend myself, but I'm never actually being 'attacked'. I lose interest in things that usually captivate me. I will trash things I've written or build on, thinking I might as well start over. I'll spend a lot of time thinking what event brought me to such state, but I rarely come to a conclusive thought. At such times I seem to think that being able to pin it on something will make me feel better.

I'm not sure what to think of all this. My girlfriend bears with me, helps me and frankly made my life worth living again, but I have before driven her a bit nuts when I once more fell into the familiar patterns again. I always apologize, and the more I do it, the hollower it sounds and feels like I have a problem.

Important note: online things and real life things have always (deeply) been able to affect how I feel. However, only on the Internet do things like this seem to be triggered often. My girlfriend agrees with me that I'm much easier to bear, hardly difficult at all in person. Chatting can be a bit problematic, I feel I miss the visual cues.

What's in your greymatters about this here text? Sorry, it's a bit of an unorganized braindump, this post.

[C Elegans]

Tricky, you should start by trying to identify what may trigger these "sensitivity" periods. You need to start writing down what happens in your life, how much you sleep, eat and exercise and when, how you feel, how tired you are, how stressed you are etc. After a while it should be possible to distinguish a pattern.

What you describe sounds similar to what some people experience when they are sleep deprived and/or stressed. It also sounds similar to what many people with attention deficit disorders, autism spectrum disorders, epilepsia and migrain experience quite often. How often does it happen to you and how long does it last? Do you know what makes it go away?

[Tricky]

I have painless occular migrains sometimes. They have chemical triggers and I can avoid them. I am troubled by normal headaches more often than most people, but not problematically so. I just always seem to have more paracetamol laying around than the average person (that I know). I have reasons to suspect ona specific autism spectrum disorder runs through the family, but *if* it has affected me, it could have only done so when I was still a child. I'm just going to leave that out of the equation. I am not sleep deprived.. in fact I moved back from Utrecht to my parents (so I can move to Oslo by the end of the year), and they have darker bedrooms here. I can easily sleep 9 to 10 hours here on a weekday.

Stress is difficult to figure out. I've left university aside since the beginning of the academic year. I'm mostly worried about future work, communication between certain Dutch and Norwegian university institutions, keeping my girlfriend happy while not seeing her.. etc. Yeah, I guess I am a bit worried.

On top of that the past month my wings have been clipped. I got a bad flue strain and I broke a rib from the coughing. I've been taking regular painkillers (600 mg Ubiprofen) for about two weeks consistently to deal with the pain. It was so bad, I couldn't breathe and my lungs filled up with slime. That's going better now though.

Anyway, that broken rib business is nasty, but it is all too recent. This *thing*, this problem of mine has been a problem for a long while now. I've been getting these moods for four years maybe, hard to say. Before that my life was kinda different and spend on another woman. After that there was a big switch in my life, I got used to dealing with things on my own. Like, if I would be feeling irratible again, I could deal with it by not letting it become a problem for others, by going away, read a book, whatever. Now, even if she isn't there, my new girlfriend is pretty much always with me. We share everything. And she notices these things, probably like anyone spending enough time around me would have.

Hm.. this is what comes to mind off the top of my hat about your questions. I'll have to think more thoroughly about triggers. What I might mistake for a trigger (someone being a bit sourfaced to me, for example) seems equally likely to just be an exclamation of something that happened prior to that.

I have to get a bit more sleep and think about it this Sunday.

[Fljotsdale]

Hm. No easy solutions, I think. I tend to be something that way myself, and my son is decidedly that way most of the time. I suspect it is mostly stress-related. Currently, my son and I are living together, and we both find it highly stressful. He has never been a patient person, and I only have an equable temperament if I live alone! We just don't cope very well with stress. I wonder if that may be so with you?

From what I can tell from your posts, you have been living in shared accommodation for a while. Try to remember if you were reacting the same way when you lived alone. Did extraneous noise bother you as much then as it has since? Did you get the same instant-trigger reaction to minor annoyances? Did you rip up your work and start over so much?

Does caring so much about your girlfriend - who sounds lovely and supportive - add to the problem in any way (not the girl herself, but your CARING so much)? Obviously, you are not going to stop caring about her - it's just something to ask yourself.

I have no solutions for you, because our life situations are different. For myself, I'm just waiting for my son to leave again!