Hi anon,

  I’m sorry you’re dealing with both physical and mental co-morbid illnesses/disorders. I can’t say I know exactly how you feel, but I also struggle with both physical (IBS) and mental illness. It can feel exhausting; you have constant medical needs due to your physical disorder, whilst also struggling with mental illness, which can be just as draining. It’s hard to feel in control of your life when both your physical and mental well-being aren’t healthy.

 Although dealing with both mental and physical illness can be draining and exhausting, fortunately, there are a host of things you can do to make your life a little easier. If you took a semester off university, I’m assuming your university is aware if your disability. Have you tried contacting them and inquiring about online classes? If your disability has you homebound, you can possibly take online courses if you have regular access to a laptop or computer and the internet. This way, you can still complete your university requirements whilst taking care of your physical health needs. In addition, completing online courses can give you a deserved sense of accomplishment, which can help with your depression.

 Some other things you can do for your depression and anxiety include talking to a therapist our counselor and/or seeking a psychiatrist or medication. If you feel like most of your depression and anxiety result from your autoimmune disorder, seeking out a therapist or counselor who specializes in patients who live with physical illness may help alleviate some of that stress. If you feel like your depression or anxiety stem from somewhere else or you can’t find a specialist in your area, generalized therapy may also help you. (Good) therapists will often educate themselves on the other medical illnesses their clients are dealing with. In addition, if you feel like antidepressants or similar psychiatric medication would help you, I would suggest seeking out a psychiatrist. Make sure to consult with your doctor to make sure that neither your autoimmune disorder nor the medications you take for it will interact with psychiatric medication. 

  Sorry this was so late. I hope you get a chance to read this response!

Bree

Okay, listen, it’s good that you want to do well, but no matter how much you learn, there is going to be some part of you saying that you could have done better. And it sounds like it’s at a point where it’s having a pretty serious detriment on your well-being. 

So,one obsessive over-achiever to another, it’s okay if you don’t get perfect grades. I swear, I got a C (it would have been a C- if my school used them, but I digress) and it was not actually the disaster that it felt like it would be. A lot of my friends have been getting lower grades than they expected this semester, but they are still going into programs that they want, even though they aren’t getting perfect marks. You can take time for yourself and think about things other than school without the world falling apart around you. And, if you need a justification outside of it being good for you, you will actually be able to learn better if you can lower your stress levels. It’s easier to make things stick when anxiety isn’t clawing at your attention and distracting you.

So, my two main suggestions are:

Things really do feel easier when you are able to have more than one thing to focus on, and are also able to give your brain a break from the thing it’s stressing over.

--Luke

Unfortunately, I think this is one of those situations where there is no good answer. No matter what I say, you’re going to feel like you aren’t able to do enough. But it is important for you to tell yourself that you are not being a bad friend just because you can’t do something.

Losing someone can feel pretty isolating, so if you feel up to it, it may help just to send her a message saying “hey, I can’t do much to help right now, but I want you to know that I’m thinking about you,” or similar. Or stopping by with her favorite snack and saying that you can’t stay, but you thought it might help her feel better. Literally anything that shows that you’re thinking about her works. However, if you can’t come up with anything that isn’t straying too close to getting pulled into a conversation that you can’t handle, that’s okay. You need to take care of yourself, too, and  chances are that she has other people who are able to be there, family and such.

Again: this does not make you a terrible friend. Sometimes in life things come up that prevent us from being there for people even if we want to be. That’s not some sort of moral failing on your part. And it’s already hard for the average person to know how to help someone who has just lost a person they care about without throwing their own major issues into the mix. Please try not to blame yourself for that. 

--Luke

I mean, technically you can, but it’s not necessary as the skin isn’t broken so there is no way for bacteria to breach that barrier. Cool water can be soothing, as can arnica gel if you have any. Just try to keep it cool and you should be fine.

--Luke

First off, everyone deserves to get better. Everyone. You are not an exception to the rule. Now, I’m gonna take a wild guess and say that you want to go to med school at least in part because you want to help people. There may be other reasons as well, but I’m willing to bet that at least plays a role.  So, if you want to do that, know that you will be better at that if you take care of yourself first. If you can’t believe right now that you deserve to get better on your own merit, know that getting better will help you be more effective and let you make a bigger difference in people’s lives. You are actively helping other people by trying to take care of yourself.

Probably the most effective suggestion for dealing with your situation is going to be to consider talking to a professional; they are going to be the most equipped to helping you develop skills to manage your feelings at your own pace as well as giving you a place where you can talk openly about your feelings, which can make them easier to handle in general. 

That aside, there are little things that help most people to cope. A lot of them boil down to trying to accept how you feel.

Generally the best way to deal with intrusive thoughts is to just acknowledge them for what they are. They are a thought that shows up and disrupts whatever you are currently doing. It is not anything more than that. Having a thought does not mean that you have to act on it, and having a thought is not a failure on your part. Notice that it’s there, acknowledge that it’s happening, and then try to redirect your attention to something else; homework, a coping tool, your favorite movie, anything that is less distressing, really. Intrusive thoughts happen, but they are just thoughts, and they will pass if you can wait them out.

If you find the intrusive thoughts overwhelming enough that you have trouble trying to come up with what to do next while they’re happening, try to write down a plan for how to handle them in advance. For example, let’s say that you want to try a particular breathing exercise next time you have an intrusive thought. You could have the instructions for that breathing exercise written down on a sticky-note where you’d see it regularly (you don’t want to have to go searchign for it) so that you wouldn’t really have to think about it when you needed it. 

Feeling like it would be easier to just give up is also just a thought. It happens sometimes. If you’re tired or stressed, it’s  more likely to come up. That’s okay. It is unpleasant when it happens, but it isn’t a permanent feeling. Try to take it as a signal that something in your thoughts or feelings might need to be addressed: again, it shows up more when you’re tired or stressed. What can you do to try to make things feel a little easier right now? etc.

For basically all of the above, also consider Googling either DBT or CBT worksheets. They will have most of the skills that ou would be learning in therapy; reading the worksheets might help you get a sense of things that you can work on or suggestions for what to do when you’re feeling a specific way.

--Luke

First off, I know that we say this in every answer, but if you can I would recommend trying to talk to a professional about what you’re feeling. In addition to being able to help you work through anything that you need to, they can be a sort of objective third party in looking at your life and might be able to help you see areas where you can improve things that you might be missing because, you know, distress is pretty good at clouding our view of things.

Now, that aside, there are no shoulds when it comes to emotions. You can feel something or not feel something because of the specific chemical cocktail that your brain mixes up in reaction to what is happening around you, and no amount of should is going to change that. 

How anyone feels in response to something is going to be just a little bit different than how anyone else will feel. That’s okay. You are not obligated to see happiness where you don’t see any, and you are not failing by not liking where you think that your current path is leading. But you also are not obligated to stay on that path. Changing it may not be easy, and it may take time to figure out a plan or even to see that places where you can change things. But that doesn’t mean that you are stuck if you want to go a different way.

Sometimes it can be hard to not see everything as all-or-nothing. Either you have the life of your dreams or one that you don’t want at all. But, really, everything is kind of a mixed bag. The life of your dreams still wouldn’t be perfect--you’d still have bad days and times where you wouldn’t feel like doing anything and have to talk to yourself into it anyway and you’d still get stuck in traffic jams. But even if you don’t have quite the life you were hoping for, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t good days and things that you enjoy and opportunities to make things better for yourself. 

I’m not going to tell you that you can make the life that you mentioned thinking of in the first sentence. I don’t know what that life looks like, so I don’t know if it’s possible, and if I told you that you could do it without knowing more then I might be wrong and you probably wouldn’t believe me anyway. But whether you can have exactly that life or not, you can still look for ways to build pieces of it for yourself.

To end this, I want to leave this link here to Bukowski’s poem the Laughing Heart. I don’t know if it will be as helpful to you as it was to me when I felt that way, but, hey, can’t hurt to share it, right?

--Luke

I can’t find anything that specifically talks about different types of binges. All that I’ve really seen is discussion of binges as a single thing with various types of triggers, much like how writing a research paper and writing a novel are likely to be sparked by different things, but are still both writing. 

So, going off that information, I would assume that an emotional binge is simply a binge triggered by strong emotions.

I’m not sure if I may have missed some extra context for this question or even just had a failure in my Google-fu, so if I’m missing something here, feel free to add on/correct me/whatever.

--Luke