Up the River

The trouble with hypochondria is that your wildest fears are confirmed randomly and just frequently enough to keep your anxiety going. In animal studies, this so-called intermittent reinforcement—rewards at irregular intervals—is powerfully addictive. I’m addicted to hypochondria as a result of the fact that occasionally a condition I’ve worried about actually turns out to be real. I fight this hypochondria, but truthfully I’d like to move into my doctor’s office so that she could monitor me continuously throughout the day. I try to be brave and soldier on against my crazy fears. But sometimes this backfires.   A few weeks ago, I felt a peculiar flutter in the left side of my chest. My chest often flutters—anxiety, panic attacks, a sloppy tricuspid—but this time I happened to be wearing my daughter’s Apple Watch. She had bought it on a whim a year ago and then gave it to me so I could count steps. It didn’t work for counting steps, but I was still hopeful I could find some use for ...

Today I spent a few minutes organizing my underwear drawer—or my drawers drawer, you might say. I wasn’t organizing it to make it neater. I was organizing it to help me remember which day to wash my hair.  You see, I wash my hair every other day, which you’d think would be simple. But since my hair is basically pretty clean, I can’t tell by just looking at it whether it’s a hair-wash day.  I mentioned this to my husband. And amazingly he used to have the same problem—until he came up with a solution. If he’s wearing a dark-colored pair of undershorts, he washes his hair. If he’s wearing a light-colored pair, he doesn’t. And because he gets dressed after he showers, he always know what shade of underwear to put on, which twigs him the next day whether to shampoo or not. I decided to make this solution even more mindless by alternating and restacking my briefs—light, dark, light ... It’s embarrassing how big a breakthrough this is for me. What other wisdom has my husband been hu...