I seem to be able to triggers symptoms just by thinking if I am experiencing them. I can go awhile without a hallucination but as soon as I ponder if I have heard anything lately I immediately get one.
If I think to myself anything about sleep I will have a hard time falling asleep. If I think to myself I will not wake up and have any food in the middle of the night, I wake up hungry.
If I think to myself I am not disorganized I suddenly get disorganized.
If I exaggerate my symptoms I suddenly within a day or two get to that level of exaggeration.
I can trigger itchiness on my body just by thinking about it. Racing thoughts by just thinking about it, intrusive negative thoughts by thinking about it. I believe I have heard something like this occurring in other people like myself but not to the extent of which it happens to me.
When I do not have analytical insightful thoughts I feel completely fine and healthy as if I do not suffer from this horrible disease called schizophrenia.
I can induce a lot of anxiety in myself, and my anxiety can spur on a lot of different symptoms. So in a way I can vicariously induce some symptoms by first inducing anxiety. Obsessively thinking about things is one way that can happen.
Another way it can play out is that I disassociate from certain symptoms that have been happening, and when the disassociation breaks, it can seem like what happened is that I suddenly thought about it and then it happened, when in reality my awareness of it is all that happened. A combination of trauma mechanisms and psychotic illness is quite the adventure.
Other times my mind just tricks itself into thinking that I prophesied something when I didnāt.
My brother is capable of creating symptoms in certain areas of his brain as well as shifting sz symptoms from one area to another in order to help him to function.
I have triggers due to the trauma of breaks with self and psyche. I at one point used to tell certain people I had āmore triggers than an arsenal half of which I donāt even knowā just upfront like as a forewarning, but that was my mid 20ās, my cowboy days I guess Iāll say.
I do though, even thinking of what Iāve been through the past couple of years during my episodes the likes of which if Iād experienced I didnāt remember. I basically donāt even give any of this a thought as even thinking back to these times is a trigger enough. I just leave evil enough alone and donāt go back there in my mind. Imagine being lucky to get an hourās sleep a night for four months straight and spending the days pacing back and forth until nightfall, trying for naught to watch tv which would go from getting HBO to getting 3 channels and having to sleep in a bed that reaked of dead fish. Everyday I lived as if it was my last and when I finally begged for it to end the next day the police chief showed up and I faced an unknown which could have been anything, everyday as if it were my last and on that day I didnāt know that it wasnāt going that way. Luckily I checked in willingly having been brought against my will.
I have no set triggers myself, almost anything can set me on the road to an episodeā¦last time it was seeing a dog running loose with no collar, I just started crying and freaking out about my dead GF, no association between the trigger and the subject of the episodeā¦
But I can get some symptoms by thinking of themā¦if I think about being depressed I get tired and depressedā¦
I kind of get the opposite? I mean i understand the magical thinking aspect of this ā the superstition of it: āif i think about x, it will happen! o noes!ā ā but i have the inverse: iāll start thinking i am doing better, only to be brought face to face with how badly iām doing, and then spiral downward into shame and fear, etc.
for example iāll be at the bus stop and iāll think āwow, no paranoia today, and iāve been out for almost three hours, thatās pretty good!āā¦ and then iāll think someone at the bus stop is talking about me, laughing about me, and iāll be on edge and agitated until i get home
or iāll be eating lunch and think to myself āhey, iām not having one of my āoffā days where i canāt eat or where everything smells bad! yay me!āā¦ and thenā¦ boom. food smells / tastes like garbage, canāt eat, donāt want to eat anymore, no matter how hungry i am.
i jinx myself. but i think itās psychosomatic ā triggering a negative reaction that mimics a symptom just by thinking well of myself, rather than experiencing an actual symptom. but that doesnāt stop it from happening!
Maybe you could think of some kind of low stress activity to distract you, like maybe a computer game, or cleaning the house, or reading. Try to relax and not dwell on negatives.