I am feeling sort of unwell today.

I keep cycling between sleepiness and painful wakefulness. I can’t seem to catch up with whatever it is my body and my brain want me to do. When I lay down, I lose the desire for sleep. When I stay up, I become very sleepy. It is really quite maddening.

More Wellbutrin adjusting, I suspect.

I had an anxiety attack last night. I was watching an episode of Mythbusters where they are testing a myth from a viral video that shows a guy surviving a fall from a three story building because he is wrapped in four inches of bubble wrap.

The video is obviously fake, because that is seriously not possible. Not only was it obviously a dummy shot when the daredevil was supposedly plummeting to the ground, but basic high school physics will tell you that falling three stories is like getting hit by a dump truck going the speed limit.

I think we tend to think of falling as a linear thing, where falling three times as far is only three times as bad. But gravity means acceleration and acceleration means a square function because the speed is always increasing. So three times as far is actually nine times as bad.

And I have to say, just as an aside, whoever made that viral video is an irresponsible douchebag. Sure, any intelligent person should be able to figure out that it must be fake, but people are not always intelligent, especially young people, and someone might just get the idea into their heads to emulate your oh so amusing video (after all, it must work, I saw it on YouTube), and end up seriously hurt or even dead. And that is way too high a price for YouTube hits.

Anyhow, Jamie and Adam did some small scale tests that pretty much totally confirmed what physics says, which is that four inches of bubble wrap does jack shit to improve your odds of survival.

It changed the deceleration force from 300 Gs to 260 Gs. Sure, that is a reduction of a little under fifteen percent, but either way, you are a bag of very dead goo.

But they wanted to see what it would take to actually make that kind of thing survivable, so after some highly scientific fiddling around, they decided to wrap Adam in layers of coils of bubble wrap, kind of like bed spring coils, and drop him from fifteen feet.

And they had a camera in with Adam to show us what this was like from the inside, and as the layers of bubble wrap were applied he looked at the camera and said “Good thing I don’t get claustrophobic!”.

That started my own claustrophobia kettle boiling, and then he started complaining how much all that bubble wrap weighed and how much it was pressing on him, and I guess I was over-empathizing because before I knew it, it was panic attack city.

I was seriously freaking out. I had to just mute the show and close my eyes and slow myself down so I could get a grip on myself. I really felt like I couldn’t breathe and the air was being squeezed out of me and I was about to suffocate.

So that was…. bad. I am guessing that I need to be a little more careful about anxiety triggers now that I am on less Paxil and plenty of Wellbutrin. I don’t feel like having to be even more careful in life, but I have to protect my precious emotional state.

Hell, I am feeling anxious just writing about this and remembering it all. I never truly appreciated how protected from my anxieties I have been all these years.

I guess I has forgotten what it was like for me in the bad old days when I was a ball of anxiety, neuroses , and irrational fears. I would really hate to end up there again, to be honest.

That would be the opposite of making me more functional. I hate to say it, but I think I would prefer being an unmotivated lump of lard that never gets anywhere in life if the alternative is to go back to being scared all the damn time.

But I am not anywhere near giving up on Wellbutrin just yet. I knew going into this that higher anxiety levels were one of the risks of going on Wellbutrin and that I might just have to deal with that on the way to becoming more well.

And I know that my anxiety levels are rising partly because my energy levels are rising and all that energy has to go somewhere. I need to learn to take that energy and use it and thus dissipate it via useful activity, instead of leaving it inside me like a stored charge just looking to arc out as a rush of panic or anxiety.

So my journey, as always, is all about translating potential into actual. For my own sanity, I am going to need to learn a new way of living, with more activity in it, rather than simply becoming a more frightened and unhappy lump of lard.

I have lived the life of an energy miser for so long that it is going to be incredibly hard to change that deep set habit.

I keep trying to tell myself, “I will be happier if I go find something to do!”, but I am having a very hard time making myself believe it. The opposite attitude runs so deep with me that it will take an effort equivalent to digging the Chunnel in order to drill through it.

But I will persist. This resistance is now my enemy, and I will continue to combat it until I defeat it.

After all, if the alternative is to be freaked out all the time, what choice do I have?

Now if you will excuse me, I am going to go lie down and think about all this.