High functioning anxiety, most of the time?
The update on my citalopram situation is that I’m now down to 15mg per day. I was alternating 15 and 20 for a week or so, and as of the past five days I’ve been on 15.
I feel… Mostly the same but definitely more irritable. I don’t feel unhappy at all, just sometimes more easily agitated. I should probably keep it on 15 for a few weeks and see if it settles.
So I have been alternating 20mg and 10mg doses of Citalopram for the past four days, which means I’m now averaging a 15mg dose. I was thinking I’d do that for a week and then go down to 10mg daily. I think I’m being too optimistic though. I think I should slow it down, which I can only really do easily by taking a half dose every 3 days (so two days of 20mg and one day of 10mg). But I’m not really sure because I know that citalopram has a short half life (36 hours from memory?) so I’m not sure if spreading variations over three days really has much effect.
The reason I think I might be dropping it too quickly is that I got really frustrated with something earlier and had a (private) tantrum about it. Now – a few hours later – I’m feeling quite emotional and teary about nothing in particular. This is all quite unusual for me lately, so I think it’s a withdrawal effect. Hmm. I think I’ll try the half dose every 3 days approach.
This is just going to be a big summary post.
1. I’ve decided to try coming off Citalopram. I feel happy. I’ve felt happy for months. I feel stable and settled. I’ve been on it since August and I think it’s time to say that I don’t really need it anymore. I’m currently on 20mg per day so I’m going to bring it down to 10mg for a couple of weeks and see how that is. I’ll do it slowly. I’m going to keep a log of the dosage along with heart rate and stress data from my watch, which should be interesting.
2. I watched Belgravia. I didn’t like it to start with, but it’s only six episodes long and by the end I quite enjoyed it. To begin with it just seems like a bunch of dislikable people scheming against each other, though.
3. I ran another half marathon distance on Sunday. It went much better than the last time and I finished five minutes faster. I was pleased with that.
4. I seemed to be doing better with the iron tablets, but I took one this evening and now I have stomach aches. Hmmmm.
I’m back on the iron tablets because I haven’t been on them for a while. What happens with my iron levels is that I’m on iron tablets for a few months and my iron levels go up. Then I stop taking them and my iron levels go down. I’m self medicating this time around because I haven’t been tested since December so I don’t actually know what my iron levels are. I feel a bit guilty about that, because they’re not the weedy little vitamin tablets you find on the shelf at Boots, they’re proper 200mg turn-your-poo-black ferrous sulfate iron tablets. But you don’t actually need a prescription for them (and it’s cheaper to buy them over the counter than pay for the prescription!) and the leaflet says you can take one per day for prevention of iron deficiency anaemia, so it’s fine really.
I had forgotten how unpleasant the first few days of iron are. I took it at about 6PM yesterday and woke up with painful indigestion at 3 AM.
3AM is a strange time. I received a rather immature and maybe sightly spiteful message on LinkedIn a few days ago from someone from the past I didn’t want to hear from. (Actually it was a few weeks ago, but I didn’t see it until a few days ago). It didn’t upset me. I just deleted my LinkedIn account because it’s not like it’s useful. I don’t generally ‘do’ social media under my own name so it was a bit of an odd thing for me to have anyway. I didn’t find it at all useful when looking for jobs, and now I’m not looking, it makes no real sense to have an account. So, I got a message which I won’t dignify with further details, I shrugged and closed the account. Problem solved. Fine.
Not fine at 3AM. Very upsetting at 3AM. I felt very upset and anxious about the whole thing.
Also upsetting was that I need to cancel my Amazon Prime trial before they charge me. It was urgently important at 3 AM, so I got my phone out and saw to it.
Anyway. I took the iron tablet with lunch today, so hopefully I’ll sleep better. I’ve had a somewhat uncomfortable gastrointestinal tract since then. Urrrrgh.
From memory this only lasts a few days, so hopefully it’ll be settling tomorrow.
Rambles 