I don’t know if what I’m experiencing qualifies as racing thoughts. They are loud and repetitive, with a kind of “pressure” associated with them. Like chitter-chatter in an echo chamber. If I let myself “listen” to them, I withdraw a little. I don’t know what I look like, but I’m thinking I get that blank, space-cadet look (with occasional twitching…how attractive I must be!)
Maybe getting drunk will make things simmer down? I don’t drink, so I have never tried this out before. Who would be able to answer this question best? People with ADHD? People with OCD? Manic-depressives? I really don’t know what kind of disorder is associated with spirally, repetitive, nonsensical thoughts.
It may intensify them. Alcohol is a depressant, but it doesn’t always work the way you want it to.
I’d suggest trying to get to the root problem and then treat it in such a way that it doesn’t have the ability to ruin your life. When I had health insurance, I took Klonopin. It helped. Maybe what you need is a fast-acting drug for your issues. I have epilepsy with echo-y racing odd sounds at times - and I can tell you that alcohol can make it very much worse.
At any rate, no one should have to feel like that. I hope you can figure it out. (Though if you’re a seasoned casual drinker, everyone understands having a glass to calm down sometimes. ;-))
I’ve had issues with anxiety, and one of my anxiety manifestations is racing thoughts. For me, a glass of wine does relax me somewhat, but it really didn’t stop the racing thoughts (they just didn’t bother me as much… and they were much stupider thoughts racing through my brain).
Then again, I rarely have more than one glass of wine (if I do, I fall asleep–I guess you could say that stops racing thoughts), and it may work differently for you, particularly if your racing thoughts aren’t generated by anxiety.
I’ve tried xanax, but it doesn’t really stop racing thoughts either. Like a glass of wine, it just makes them bother me less. What helped was training myself to deal with them (CBT techniques), deep breathing, and an SSRI.
There are times when I still get them and can’t stop them with my normal techniques. In those cases, I decide to just go with them for a while. I’ve found when I stop fighting them and let them play out, my brain gets kind of tired of them and they stop.
Damn. I had 6 mgs a day, but I have epilepsy. And that does suck. I have sympathy for you. I think of ‘disease’ as ‘dis-ease’. Like, you are literally not at ease.
So do it if it helps. I have sensory-type coping issues and I think it’s perfectly fine. But in the meantime, maybe your doc can help figure out the rest. Does he/she know about the chatter? Audio hallucinations aren’t that abnormal, but it could be an underlying symptom of other things. Not that any Doper with a brain would peg you as schizophrenic.
Can you make out what the chatter is or is is just noise? Have you seen a hearing doc?
It’s not voices. I know they are my thoughts–although they are so spontaneous and crazy that it is incredible to me that I’m the one generating them. If I lacked insight, I could totally see myself thinking they were being broadcast from somewhere.
My doctor knows and has tried. Abilify helped a little, but I started to get tardive dyskinesia from it. If it’s not one thing, it’s another!
When the red tide comes in–and it’s due any minute now–maybe things will not be so loud.
Have you tried going on the pill? I only tend to have racing thoughts when I am at my most depressed but I find that being on the pill tends to smooth everything out for me. As a matter of fact, because of my age and other risk factors I had to switch to the estrogen only (?, too lazy to look up right now) pill Nora-Be and now I don’t have a period at all and as I said my moods (I’m Bipolar II) don’t get so crazy.
I have what I call ‘compulsive thought patterns’ where I have a thought, process it, figure out all the implications of it, file it away, then turn to the next thought… only to find it’s the exact same one. Sometimes it ramps up into an anxiety attack/crying spell, sometimes it just stays in the background using up half my CPU cycles and dropping my IQ by twenty points. It’s like a car spinning its wheels in the mud.
SSRIs have brought the thought patterns under control for me. I’ve found that alcohol tends to magnify whatever I’m already feeling, so I do NOT drink when I’m feeling anxious. I was prescribed Xanax at one point, but found that it slowed down only my body and left my brain still whirling, which was very unpleasant. Regular meditation (at times when my thoughts aren’t racing) seems to lower my overall anxiety levels, but I haven’t been very consistent about it.
When my mind was whirling too much to sleep, the best way I found to calm myself was to go lay on the floor in another room and read a book that required concentration, but was emotionally neutral. (I have a book on cults that I like for this. It takes some mental effort to figure out what these people believe, but it doesn’t provoke any feelings other than curiosity.) It was enough of a distraction and a change of scenery that I would slowly calm down and be able to sleep in half an hour or so.
Good luck. It ain’t fun having your brain hijacked like that.
Oh yes, good point! I almost forgot about this. I got through my worst episode of deep, ugly clinical depression by forcing myself to read something lengthy and interesting. I did this until the antidepressants started to kick in. I always joke that Harry Potter saved my life in spite of all the ‘Christian’ hate for the series.
I have been tempted to go on the Pill. Estrogen has been shown to modulate dopamine levels, which I think would help both my motor problems and thinking issues. But I’m also feeling anti-doctor lately. And after dealing with horrible side effects from an increase in Wellbutrin last week, I’m also feeling anti-medication too. I don’t know how to overcome these negative feelings. All I know is that every time I decide to give it another whirl and try something new, the resulting disappointment drops me harder than the last.
I guess that’s why alcohol seems so tempting. It doesn’t require a doctor’s visit and I can experiment with the dosage all I want.
I don’t want to play this game and suggest self-destructive behavior, but it can cut the trains of thought down to one. Or two or five. Beats the shit out of nine.
Don’t get drunk. Leave that to those who are good at it.
A little bit shouldn’t hurt; you are an adult, right? But it is a depressive and you might not be able to tell when enough is enough and find you’ve crossed the line to too much.
Could what you’re experiencing be compulsive rumination? I used to do that a LOT, now only occasionally. The thoughts kind of take over control. You could ask your doctor about it.
Since you’re just coming off some meds it could be a residual effect that will eventually fade. At one point I was literally “hearing” a TV playing in the next room and my psychiatrist thought I was getting worse. But it turned out to be a reaction to a medicine that when he stopped it, it stopped. Drugs work because they change things in our bodies, not always for the good.
Try not to let it freak you out until you’ve had a chance to explore some different avenues.
Benzos will work, but I don’t recommend long term or casual use.
Anticholinergics are fantastic for racing thoughts. Benedryl is easy to come by and works great. Sedating anti emetics are even better (stuff like phenergan).
Alcohol will work against you. It preferentially inhibits the frontal lobe and cerebellum, decreasing the frontal lobe’s inhibition of subcortical structures and increasing racing thoughts. Thats why drunk people make bad decisions and walk funny before anything else.
SSRIs might help, but might not.
All in all, I recommend benedryl. Cheap, easy to get, effective anti cholinergic that will shut your subcortex up but good! Less is more, is often the case with benedryl. Start at a low dose, and work your way up till you find the lowest effective dose. I do not recommend alcohol AT ALL.
I also recommend practicing mindful relaxation. It takes a lot of practice, but it will make turning off your brain easier. It takes a lot of time, discipline, and effort to do. Once you have gotten good at it, you will find that your mind doesn’t race to begin with.
Also, I really don’t like wellbutrin. My patients just don’t seem to tolerate it very well.
Sort of. I experience fairly regular intrusive thoughts (is this like the racing thoughts you describe?) and alcohol makes them more bearable. Alcohol just makes you happy about everything, really, so even if the thoughts keep coming, they don’t bother you. But I’ve decided that the side effects aren’t worth it. I didn’t start getting hangovers until I’d been drinking for several years, though, and I definitely overdid it in the beginning. Now I get a nagging headache shortly after just one drink, and a hangover leaves me essentially incapacitated (with nasty gastrointestinal side effects and reflux) for a good 4-5 hours the next day. I also can’t sleep for more than a few hours after drinking any significant amount of alcohol… it helps me get to sleep initially, but then my body rebounds in the middle of the night and I wake up. And I can’t fall back asleep no matter what.
All of this might be because I used to drink *way *too much in college (I barely drink at all anymore–haven’t had any booze in a few months, as a matter of fact). But since you’re a non-drinker, I’d say a couple glasses of wine or mudslides could help, without the worry of negative side-effects. All things in moderation. Of course, you’ll never know how it affects you until you try it. A bottle of wine is just a few bucks, so why not pick one up? Test it on a day where you can sleep late the next morning, just in case.
Wellbutrin has been good, I think. It’s supposed to make me less anhedonic, and I think it has been good at inviting that when my brain is willing. But I still slump into “non-feeling” phases. I tried a boost a couple of weeks ago, thinking it would bring with it some more feeling and less apathy. It made me extremely sad and depressed and more self-pitying than I’ve ever been in my life. I’d rather go back to feeling dead than experiencing that (plus dealing with really bad nosebleeds and angioedema).
I really need to work on relaxation. What I end up doing is channeling the restlessness that the thoughts bring into purposeless movement. Like rocking and spinning and head shaking. It brings comfort, but I also look strange. And maybe it makes it worse.
I have noticed something. When my thoughts are erratic, my gait becomes less awkward. When my thoughts are normal, that’s when I have increased difficulty walking. So on some pre-menstruation days, my warning sign is the inability to walk normally, without jerking and stopping. On others, like now, it’s the inability to think normally. Only occasionally do the two problems come together (usually when I freeze all together, which doesn’t happen often). If I were a neuroscientist, I’d be able to figure it all out.
rachelellogram, I guess the thoughts are intrusive, in that they are unwanted. But they don’t bring with them distress and they aren’t anything I can reason with, since they are essentially noise. The hangover effect that you mentioned is probably the thing that is holding me back. That, and the fact that I’m not supposed to take alcohol with benzos. (I’d also hate to see what a drunk me looks like. I look drunk when I’m sober!)
monstro I get the same thing, not all the time, but especially when trying to sleep. It’s one of the major causes of my insomnia. Not intrusive thoughts or voices in my head, just nonsensical ‘chatter’.
I can’t recommend anything for you, but I can say is that alcohol does help me. Don’t drink too much, just a couple of beers, and it definitely slows it all down.
However, if I’m not drinking, having someone else’s thoughts to focus on really helps to drown it out. I have talk radio on, timed to go off after about 20 minutes. I concentrate gently on other people burbling away and eventually I’m asleep.
Don’t. Don’t worry about overcoming these negative feelings. They’re perfectly cromulent feelings. You’ve been through a hell of a time and you have every right to be pissed off at your doctors. And Wellbutrin? Fuck Wellbutrin. That stuff is evil in a pill. Any reasonable and “normal” person would have negative feelings in your position.
Have all the negative feelings you want. While you’re phoning your gynecologist’s office, rage about how horrible the wait in the office is going to be. While you’re talking with the clerk to make the appointment date, wait and gnash your teeth that you can’t get in for medical care for 3 effing months. Bitch and moan when you realize your appointment will probably get cancelled at the last minute when someone goes into labor. Tear your hair while you’re taking the bus to the office. Shake your fist at the sky while you explain you would like to talk about The Pill or estrogen therapy.
The best thing about negative feelings is that they’re feelings, they’re not actions. You can have negative feelings and productive actions, I promise.
