It has been a month now since I gave up caffeine for like the umpteenth time! To recap, caffeine relaxes me and helps me focus. I haven’t been diagnosed as such, but several people in the health care field have said it sounds like I might have attention deficit disorder. I’m trying to live without caffeine because I’m worried about other health risks. I can’t drink coffee because I have a bad physical reaction to it (apparently an allergy). I hate tea of any kind. So I’ve been getting my caffeine from diet soft drinks but the artificial sweetener and other stuff they put in there really isn’t healthy.
For the first three weeks after giving it up I got nothing done. I was all over the place trying to to ten things at once, which doesn’t work for me. The good news, however, was this time my anxiety didn’t spike as it always did before. Things have been better for the past week. I’m starting to learn my way around facebook and am getting a few friends there now. I’m loving it! Among other things it gives me a little “planned” distraction from a task. But for some reason after taking a short break and spending a minute or two on facebook, I’m able to go back to the task I was doing instead of wandering off and finding myself doing something else. It will be interesting to see if this continues.
I’m really liking facebook for other reasons too. It’s not like I can get out and go places, do things with people all the time, for a number of reasons (lack of a car topping the list). Facebook lets me get glimpses into what my friends and family members are doing. It’s great. Plus I get to share some of my daily activities.
Plans are coming together for the anxiety support group. I have written a press release and have a web site roughed out. I have a list of five potential meeting places. Now I need to go look at all of them and decide which is going to be the best. Once I’ve made arrangements for a meeting place and decided on a time, I can set the date of the first meeting and send out the press release. I will be promoting the group in other ways also… local bulletin boards, etc.
I’m struggling a little with the meeting time. It’s a classic six of one, half dozen of the other thing! If I’m to have any chance of getting people with severe anxiety (like myself) in the door, it would have to be during normal business hours so they could come with a social worker of some kind. But that would eliminate working people, many of whom struggle with quite significant anxiety issues. I’m going to have to pick either a day or evening slot and run with it. Whichever I decide on, I will try to gauge interest in meetings at the opposite time. If there is enough interest, I would be willing to have two meetings a week – one during the day and one in the evening.
So that’s my story for today. I’m going over to facebook for a minute or two, then back to polishing up the group web site. I’ll post the URL here when I have it in a more or less presentable state.