Stress Effects on Your Mind and Body

1. Whatever happens when you’re sexually excited has begun to work in reverse. And it might be permanent.

• You slept for eight hours and it felt like four.
• Your general disposition has transformed you into Robert from Guess Who?
• Your brain is so frazzled that ADHD is an understatement. The only information you can process comes in the form of cat animated gifs.
• Your diet has is best described as “Diabetic Suicide.”
• Of all the things to be thankful for, you’re grateful that only you can see the dozens of canker sores that line your mouth.

• Somehow crying and yelling have combined into one emotion that you all Crelling, and you’ve been doing it a lot in the shower.
• You haven’t been outside in days, but every few hours you cheer yourself up by googling “Sun”
• You slept for four hours and it felt like two.
• Your eyes are red and crusted over. You haven’t blinked in hours. Vision is an endless, painful misery. You convince yourself that it’s time for more caffeine.
• You keep saying that “you’ll go down with the ship,” but you aren’t sure if you’re the captain or the ship in the metaphor.
• Your digestive system has grown accustomed to you eating nothing but Milk Duds and coffee.

• You’ve become so angry that your life has become a game of Counter-Strike or Dota2 where you’re on permanent tilt.
• Your fingernails no longer grow back leaving the tips of each finger looking like some creepy nodule of self-inflicted pain. 
• Your empty promises of how you’ll change after this get so desperate that even you don’t believe them. Like you’d really “start helping the homeless” or “stop procrastinating.” Yeah right.
• Your heart rate tops out at a level only reached when someone is running from the police.
• Your body hurts. You can’t get any more specific though.

• Your stomach seems to have produced enough farts for a year and is now releasing the surplus.
• You try to think of what is needed to fix this situation and you’re only coming up with crazy shit like a time machine or a bunch of sharks or a brain like in The Matrix where you can just download knowledge instead of having to, like, read a million pages by Friday.
• You scratched your scalp to one bloody scab and now your dandruff is just pieces of flesh you’ve scrapped loose.
• You didn’t sleep at all and it felt like it.
• You’ve reached the serine acceptance of your own doom. 1/2 Obi-Wan being struck down, 1/2 Jack saying “I’ll never let go,” you’re at peace.

– Ian "Salmon Season" Golding (@iggolding)