Yes i attempted to get off lexapro but i ended up drinking hoping it would fix the brain zaps. The sad part is i am truly more intelligent then this.
I am sure you all understand. I felt better and the i thought i didnt need the meds. Wound up with a major panic attack or depressive episode. So i went back on the meds. The culprit really was the drinking.
Anyway i stole dees article from new comers sinces it worth a read and sharing it.
take charge of your life ---- story of the frog in boiling water
remind yourself that you are too smart to be complacent about a steadily deteriorating situation.
you’ve no doubt heard the story of the frog in boiling water. If you drop a frog into boiling water, it immediately jumps out (or so the story goes). However, if you put a frog in a pot of room-temperature water, and then bring the water to a boil very, very slowly, the frog will stay in the water until it dies. It’s an odd experiment that i have no intention of testing in my kitchen, but it’s an apt metaphor for how people sometimes deal with slowly deteriorating situations.
When we are confronted with an abrupt negative change, we tend to react immediately and decisively. Coming in contact with a flame will cause us to pull away instantly to avoid getting burned. We don’t think about it; we just react. Yet we will sit in the sun for hours and get badly burned. We know full well that we’re getting burned, but we tend to sit there anyway, because there is no instantaneous sensation to trigger a decision to get out of harm’s way.
It’s this absence of decision triggers that causes people to miss opportunities or to get into trouble that could have been avoided. Fortunately, being smarter than frogs, we have the ability to create decision triggers for our own good. If we’re sunbathing, for example, we might place an alarm clock deliberately out of reach and set it to go off every half hour. When it goes off, we have to get up, go over to it, and turn it off. This triggers a decision: “should i expose myself to another half hour of sun, or have i had enough?” without the clock, deliberately placed at an inconvenient distance and annoying us every 30 minutes, we are likely to keep telling ourselves, “just a few minutes more,” and then a few minutes more after that, and so on, until it’s too late. The “time to get out of the sun” decision trigger arrives the following morning when we turn over in bed and wince in pain. By then, it’s too late to avoid the trouble.
The frog-in-boiling-water syndrome, as i like to call it, can arise in other, more serious, situations throughout our lives where we willfully ignore an increasingly dangerous situation, telling ourselves that we’ll do something about it “soon.”
take putting on weight as an example. Nobody decides to get fat, yet many people will just keep putting on more and more weight without doing anything about it. They keep telling themselves, “i’m going to lose some weight soon.” similarly, people don’t make a conscious decision to keep smoking until they get lung cancer. They tell themselves, “i can stop anytime, and i will, but another day, or week, or month won’t matter.” so they remain like the frog in the pot, slowly burning up their lungs.
The frog-in-boiling-water syndrome doesn’t apply just to self-destructive behaviors. It can trap people facing important career decisions. This is the case for people who stubbornly remain in a job or occupation that isn’t satisfying or isn’t offering sufficient opportunities. Like the simmering frog, they stay where they are, telling themselves that things might improve while knowing they won’t, instead of changing employers or acquiring new professional skills. They may complain about the situation to others, but they never do anything about it until they find themselves trapped in a miserable, dead-end job, or worse, they lose their job without any updated skills to go forward in a more successful direction.
People stuck in deteriorating or stagnating relationships also fall prey to the frog-in-boiling-water syndrome. They are unhappy, but they just go on being unhappy without deciding to do anything to improve the relationship or to get out of it. Just like the frog, they stay where they are as the water slowly reaches the boiling point.
This syndrome can also trap people who are not in a relationship but would like to be. They do not take any action to help themselves meet someone, and the years pass. Slowly they lose their “window of opportunity” to meet a person who might become a lifetime partner.
Some people even believe that the frog-in-boiling-water syndrome applies to the way a society can ignore critical decisions. For example, we may be gradually depleting our limited resources without making any conscious decisions about replenishing them or slowing the depletion. Instead, we’re letting the situation boil away until it becomes too late to preserve a sustainable environment. We may be creating global warming, yet we ignore or reject any solutions until our polar ice caps melt away and we find our coastlines submerged. Likewise, as the economic gap between the lower and upper classes increases, we do nothing to avert the inevitable ramifications from such a gap. We sit in the water of our own apathy and denial without taking action.
Don’t be like our friend the simmering frog. You are smarter than the frog.
Step back from time to time and take stock of situations in your life such as your health, your relationships, your career or job, your business and your investments. Do this regularly. You might take stock on new year’s day, your birthday, or every three months. Set that alarm clock, and put it someplace where you’ll have to get up and go over to turn it off. Remind yourself that you are too smart to be complacent about a steadily deteriorating situation.
Moreover, if you think a friend is falling into the boiling-frog syndrome, share this story. It might save a life.
Taken from
decide better! For a better life
improve your life through better decisions
by
michael e. Mcgrath [chapter 1]