Lavender & Decaf

It's funny what little things I've acclimated to over the years, telling myself that's just how things are and they won't change even if I try. Funny how, when I actually give sustained, serious effort to making a change, it turns out that far less is set in stone than I assume.

Managing my emotional state, to one degree or another, has been an issue since I was a kid. I buried my head in novels. I self-medicated by constructing fantasy worlds so deep, I could tune out reality. This shifted into text-based roleplaying on a scale that disrupted my real life in ways a 12-stepper could point out in a heartbeat. I pulled out my hair and picked at my face because of a background anxiety that hummed along all the time, like a piano wire strung just a bit too tight. Every now and then, it would spike hard, making it difficult to function or even think straight. For many years, though, I barely noticed how anxious I was because depression took center stage.

In recent years, the major causes of my depression have been peeled back a bit at a time. It feels like I have been in a lengthy recovery of the soul. The trouble with peeling back the depression was that it exposed that anxiety in all its screaming, unattended rawness. I was bewildered when it showed up. The tools I had learned were all for managing depression, not anxiety. Where did this come from? My therapist was long retired and I'd never found one of the same caliber as her. What do I do about this?

One of the biggest things I learned about anxiety in this time period was that the anxiety comes first, and the reasons come later. My anxiety is rarely caused by something external in my life at this point in time. Most often, the anxiety is already there and my brain scrambles for The Reason This Is Happening, then latches onto at least one (but often several) things that are VERY CLEARLY THE REASON. Almost every night, in conversation with Sergey, I would have some new worry to talk about or an old one to chew over again.

Previously, Sergey had worked with me on how to improve my nearly insomniac existence so I could fall asleep more easily. He spent a couple years trying different things out with me, and over time we got my incidents of can't-sleep-must-stay-up-gaming-until-I'm-exhausted down to roughly once a month. With that same mindset, and after we prayed together over finding a solution for my anxiety issues, he kept his eyes peeled for ideas.

He follows a person previously known as Slatestarcodex, a blogging psychiatrist who has long been frustrated with the side effects of anxiety medication. Said psychiatrist wrote a blog about the possibilities of Silexan, which is derived from lavender, and pointed to a reputable lavender supplement as worth trying. With no serious side effects to contend with and no possibility of addiction, we opted to get me a month's worth of lavender supplements and give it a try.

Two pills a day. There were no noticeable effects at first. Between a week and a half to two weeks in, I felt like my baseline emotional level was calmer. Anxiety was still a thing for me, but it was like the ever-present edge had been dulled. When I checked in with Sergey about what he saw, he noted that our evening conversations were now on topics that did not have my personal anxieties as their center. Hope dawned. I started telling a few people about the good news.

Then the anxiety started lapping around the edges of the calm again, and I panicked. I am doing it wrong. The lavender isn't enough. I am never going to be stable, I'll always be wrestling this. I'll always be a wreck.

Then, one day, the thought came to me--Should I yank the brake on my caffeine consumption?

It started at my Seattle Subway job, popping caffeine infused chocolates--Rocket Chocolate--to stay alert when I was exhausted. At my next job in Ontrix, I developed a taste for the instant mocha mix provided in the employee snack area. I didn't like coffee, I said, I could never like coffee, but chocolate and sugar took the bitter edge off enough for me to like the stuff. By the time I went to work at Brandstorm, I could mix hot chocolate with coffee brewed into it to formulate my own version of a mocha. Then, when I began staying at home, I took to making my special spiced mocha most days. It helped me stay awake, especially when I had to manage contractors coming in the early hours to fix the house. Cut to now, and I'm drinking it every morning whether there are contractors or not, because the taste and aroma have become a comfort to me and I look forward to the stimulation that sometimes produces a couple thousand words of writing. My go-to writing spots are all coffee shops with some kind of unique atmosphere. I can't drink straight coffee to this day, but give me a frappe or a latte and I'm happy to set my fingers to the keys and crank out some words.

Coffee. Every. Day.

I rationalized that I had limits on it. No caffeine after 2pm so I could get to sleep at night--unless I felt willing to risk it. Only one cup a day--unless I felt like gambling my emotional stability on a second cup with the 30% chance that it would give me a fabulous creative boost. That's setting proper limits, right?

Sergey mentioned a few times that caffeine in his green tea had a cumulative effect on him over many days, and how he had to cut back, only drinking it on occasion.

Naaaaaaah. I haven't noticed any cumulative effect, I thought, sipping down my umpteenth daily mocha in a row.

But. Of course I wouldn't. It would have been gradual. Wasn't pulling the plug on coffee worth a try? How much was peace of mind really worth to me?

As I type, I'm one week cold turkey on my spiced mochas. The first thing that happened was a day-long headache, though that was likely a cluster of several factors. The second thing that happened was I was tired. All. The. Time. I took more naps this week than I have in the past month. In addition, those naps in no way impacted my ability to go to sleep at night, like they usually do. I still knocked out when it was time to go to bed, which is unheard of. It's not complicated math, me + nap = trouble going to bed on time. Wait, not anymore? What is going on???

Oh, yeah. And that anxiety edge that re-emerged around the lavender calm? It went up in a puff of smoke.

I still have more experiments to run. I'm going to brew my spiced mocha with decaf beans and see what comes of it, but I'm already pretty sold on backing off the caffeine in general. I'm finding alternatives, like having a low-sugar chicory-cocoa mix in the morning that comes close to the bittersweet taste of my spiced mocha without the major dose of caffeine. I have also--after many years of moaning about how much I want to find a tea that doesn't taste like light leaf juice--found a (non-caffeinated) tea that I like. And if I can like this tea, maybe I can find other teas.

Coffee--mocha, really--was just such a given for me. I liked the taste, the kick, the comfort of it. It was such a part of my routine for so long, I didn't bother asking whether it was causing me problems. Was it single-handedly responsible for my anxiety issues? Doubtful. But it seems that it was a supporting pillar.

I'm learning a lot about sacrifice in the tangible, day-to-day realm. One of the things I'm learning is that I don't get to choose whether or not I sacrifice, I only get to choose what I sacrifice. In this case, do I sacrifice some habits I really enjoyed, or do I sacrifice slices of my mental health? I've talked up a lot about how much it's important to take care of my mental health, but I whine about the cost of leaving behind a comforting drink.

Why can't I have both?

Because the world doesn't seem to work that way. So I can either accept there's a trade-off, or live with the consequences while denying the way things work. At this point, I'm pretty done with the trade-off that supports my anxiety.

Currently I have chicory, hot chocolate, chicory-cocoa, and hibiscus tea (steeped at 10 minutes). The jury is out on decaf coffee, but if coffee as a whole has to go, I'm okay with that. The newfound baseline stability is worth the sacrifice.

Please pass the lavender.