Abigail's Anxieties

  So over the past year or so, I’ve been looking more and more into what I can do to look after my body and my mind, which as someone with a number of physical and mental health problems, I believe it is always worth exploring different avenues of help and coping strategies.   Now I love modern medicine and I’ve had my fair share of medical treatment from scans, x-rays, blood tests, operations, etc. I am so grateful for ate fact I was born in a time I have access to all this, but when you’ve been in so many hospitals and are on so many daily medications you do sometimes find yourself yearning for something a little more natural and familiar. In my personal opinion, I don’t want to use natural methods to explicitly treat my conditions as even the medical community doesn’t have complete understanding about some of them, and I already get overwhelmed with my symptoms and working out which one is caused by which condition. It is for this reason that I would prefer to look into usin

  I’m not too sure if anyone will have noticed, but now that I’ve decided to come back here to my little corner of the internet I decided that a new beginning calls for a new look. Many years ago when I was setting up this blog, I had rather different tastes and so it was time for this blog to now show those tastes. It started with a new logo. My old logo will always be special to me, it was made in the early stages of this blog but looking back on it I’ve now realised I needed something a tad simpler. So I loaded up Canva and started to think about what exactly I wanted in a logo. I settled with a simple black background with white detailing; something not too overwhelming and gets to the point. Then obviously the name was needed, but something was still missing. I then decided to go for the simple depiction of the brain as what I talk about here more often than not discusses matters of the mind.   I then went about changing the background of the actual blog pages themse

 As the title would suggest, I want to get back to writing. It’s been a good while since I’ve posted anything on here and in that time so, so much has happened, I don’t want to get too much into all that stuff just yet, that’s something for the future. Let’s just say that one of the simpler things that has happened is that as of October 2022, I’m now down a gallbladder. What I’m trying to say is that the last few years of my life have been.. a lot and very much out of my control. So it was during one of the times I was yet again frozen with anxiety that I remembered my little corner of the internet over here. Now the reason that I say I’m scared to come back to writing isn’t because of the actual writing itself, but I’m scared I’m not going to be able to hold myself to standards that my conscious mind knows are not obtainable, but somewhere in the back of my unconscious mind, there’s still a small part of it that believes it should be possible despite all the obstacles in my way.

  Foods proven to reduce anxiety (featuring science) Image from NHS https://www.uhb.nhs.uk/hiv-healthy-eating.htm  It is currently estimated that each week, 6 in every 100 people in the UK are diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder, also known as GAD ( McManus S, Bebbington P, Jenkins R, Brugha T. (eds.), 2016) and that 18% of the population of the USA, around 40 million people, are struggling with some type of anxiety issues at any one time (Naidoo, 2019). While many will find their own ways of coping with their anxiety such as therapy and possibly medication, there is one way of helping yourself that many always look over; food and diet. Many a study has been carried out in many countries looking into the effects of different nutrients and food groups on peoples moods. I myself have even looked into it as part of my degree: BSc (Hons) Food Development and Innovation, and it will also play a part in my future research projects in my career. So with my experiences with food, my ex

 I wear a corset for back pain and no...it's not painful It's no secret that I have many a medical health problem, I mean, they're the whole reason that Abigail's Anxieties exists in the first place, and one of those medical health problems is fibromyalgia. There are so many things about fibromyalgia that unless you have it you may not know about it, but one of the more widely known symptoms of this is widespread pain in the body with certain "tender points" being worse than the rest. For me, one of my worse tender points is my lower back. Sometimes the muscles in my lower back go into overdrive and spams, many times for hours on end and then sometimes it just decides to stop working and I'm stuck sitting/lying wherever I happen to be at the time. While I have taken medication in the past to try and help with it, and often find myself using deep heat/heat therapy on my back, I can't go around my everyday life putting on deep heat every hour or so, and

 The best-laid plans...2 weeks later So in case you didn't read my post called "the best-laid plans", which you can catch up on  here  then here is a rapid recap of what happened. Basically just over 2 weeks ago, the same week I re-launched this blog, my appendix decided to develop access, make a kink in my fallopian tube, cause me a lot of pain and in short, I had an appendectomy. It took a toll on my mental and physical health which you can read all about in the original post, but now I'm here to tell you about how I'm doing 2 weeks later as my body now gets used to having no appendix.  Firstly, I no longer have to take painkillers, not even my regular painkillers for my fibromyalgia but that's more down to the doctors telling me not to for a good while after surgery as it could make my full recovery time even longer. But to be honest, I've found I no longer need them. Since my appendix went bye-bye, my pain levels throughout my body are the lowest they&