Hyperawareness of consciousness/thinking

Hi

This is by far my worst symptom, in fact it feels like my only symptom these days, although I had a lot of the classic symptoms of depersonalisation for the first 2-3 weeks of my illness. After 3 weeks I began to develop this strange Hyperawareness of all stimuli I experience (such as vision, sounds and smells etc) and how strange and absurd they all are. They were almost alien. Music seemed weird and so did everything in my field of view, even my field of view itself. I started thinking and being freaked out about my own brain and how it's just this weird fleshy lump. I looked at other people and just saw these weird sacks of meat roaming around. This progressed until I had a panic attack whilst I was trying to get to sleep. I started thinking about the nature of thoughts and consciousness and how weird it is to be a conscious, living human being and how I'm able to experience having thoughts.

Ever since then things have been pretty bad. Living is really hard. I'm scared and too aware of my own consciousness, everything just seems pointless, meaningless, arbitrary, absurd and strange. I hate thinking about thoughts. And then I have thoughts about thoughts about thoughts and so on. I feel like I can never quite describe it. I feel like I've opened up a part of me that I can't close, and I wish I could go back to not being aware of what I'm aware of now. I don't know if I have many other symptoms of DP anymore but I don't know if I can tell. It's been like this for I think 3-4 weeks and it's absolute hell. It's like a living death. I think others have reported the same or at least similar states of being yet I still feel completely alone in this. There are hardly any stories of anyone coming out of this, and what little stories there are never seem to give any advice. I don't know what to do, I can't for the life of me imagine feeling or having a different perspective ever again. I can't imagine feeling 'better' because the idea of feeling 'better' is in itself strange and absurd etc. It's for the same reason that I can never relax. I'm aware of how amazing it is to be alive and conscious and experience the universe etc but I feel like I'm too bewildered and freaked out by it to enjoy it and appreciate it. I literally have a phobia of thinking, which is terrible because thinking is something that you can't really stop doing. I want to go back to my old 'unaware' self.

Has anyone ever 'recovered' from this and what can I try doing to recover? Does it at least get to a point where I can 'enjoy' things again and 'relax'? Sorry for all the inverted commas it's just that these things seem so far off and strange to me.

Hi love! I have depersonalization which is mixed. Sometimes I feel unaware of my surroundings & sometimes im way to aware like you seem to have. I ponder a lot & start thinking in depth of everything and of course it's scary questioning everything from your own existence to things you're very familiar with. It's very hard dealing with this & I'm still recovering but I suggest redirecting your thoughts & don't think to much about anything. As soon as your mind begins to wander to much into a subject, try to distract yourself! Do something you enjoy in a comfortable environment & just remind yourself you are REAL & that you have felt REAL before this junk. try to remember the way you felt about things before you started having these symptoms, try recalling how happy you felt when you per say when you were playing with a pet. if you do a hobby you enjoy, try recalling how much you enjoy it. I hope you recover soon