Abigail's Anxieties

  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

  I could do with your support (but only if you feel obliged of course) Hello everyone, just a small impromptu post today to ask you for your support. I have been blogging on the side of being a full-time student for several years now, and now that I have made the commitment to post once a week (every Wednesday in case you're new here!) and as I continue with my education, I could really do with a little support from my readers to allow me to keep writing and bringing the support and education people are looking for.  Hence why I have decided to set up a Patreon page where for either £3, £5 or £10 a month (it may also show itself as $4, $6.50 or $13), you can help support me and my writing so that I can continue to use my time outside of my education to offer support and education the rest of the internet about life with both physical and mental illnesses.  My Patreon page can be found  here The tiers are as follows: £3 = Thank you so much! Thank you so much for your support! Your

 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&

 What it's like to go through a costochondritis flare-up So as some of you know, as well as having an anxiety disorder and depression, I have a multitude of physical health issues, including costochondritis.  The  NHS website  gives good information about costochondritis along with another similar condition called tieze's syndrome, which doctors still can't decide if I have or not instead of costochondritis... For the past 3 years, I have been dealing with the pain that comes with the inflammation of the cartilage in my ribs and sternum (aka breast bone), with the pain being at a constant 2-3/10 at all times. And let me tell you that constant chest pain and a family history of heart issues doesn't really help my anxiety, especially when the pain was just starting and we had no blooming idea what was going on.   The reason I say doctors cannot decide which of the two conditions I have is because while I am under the age of 40, and my pain has lasted many years which are

 The best-laid plans... It is often said that the best-laid plans go awry, and in my case, it seemed that my plan for a come back to regular blogging had a little hiccup and so on the first scheduled Wednesday at 9:48pm UK time I find myself writing today's post.   But I can assure you that there is a pretty decent explanation as to why the writing is a little late. I actually had another post almost complete for you all last Thursday and was planning to have it finished Friday ready for today, but that plan definitely went very awry. On Friday 4th September 2020, I woke up with costochondritis pain yet again and prepared to have a day of taking painkillers, which trust me, got taken, to try and control it, but there was something very different about this pain, the main difference being that there was a pain in another part of my body, more specifically my lower right abdomen. This was immedietly where we (i.e. me, my mum and my dad) focused our attention to because this was most