Thursday, October 2, 2025

What my body tells me

I've spent the last year and half observing my body - weight, sleep, appetite, chronic pain episodes, menstrual cycle, focus and motivation, and now even blood pressure.  It's been really interesting and eye opening to see how my body physically responds to different types of stress.

So my sleep schedule is back to a normal, quite good routine.  I'm back to about eight hours of sleep a night, falling asleep pretty quickly, only waking up once with no issues falling back to sleep, and then waking up before my alarm to enjoy a few extra minutes of early morning quiet.  When I realized that this morning on day two of a government shutdown, it surprised me until I started reflecting over the patterns of the last year and a half.

It's not the threats to my job and my country (which have been great over the last 8 months) that cause me to lose sleep at night.  I won't say those things have no affect on my body because they are a significant stress but they aren't the stresses causing the obvious distress in my body.  I must be managing those stresses reasonably well.

The manifestations of stress in my body correlate very closely to the processing work I'm doing about my marriage and ex-husband.  And the impact of seeing myself in his new girlfriend a couple of weeks ago has resulted in a lot more feelings of peace about the end and a greater focus on how much better I am today.  So it follows naturally that my sleep would return to normal and that my blood pressure would be starting to go down.

It's astounding that the lingering effects of a relationship that ended over a year ago can have a greater impact on my body than the current threats to my job, finances, and freedoms.  That really boggles my mind.

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