I had a very strong anxiety crisis with depressive symptoms last winter as the last one in a chain of panic attacks and anxiety episodes which started entering my early adulthood, with some precedents during childhood. I've been working my way towards getting better -part of it was readjusting my medication and doing an analysis to discard endocrine problems. And for most of it, it worked. The new medication was making me feel, if excessively sleepy, at least calm. The analysis detected a distubance in my levels of thyroxine and another anlysis was due in three months -that is, this month. Last weeks I was feeling really confident about my capabilities and my ability to do things and get through it. Genuinely happy. And then, it came back.  
Last Sunday I had a celebration my significant other and me had to attend. I fully recognize the celebration as a stressor, but it all began as I started to wonder whether I had correctly taken my meds, it evolved to a fear of freaking out... well, most of you probably know how it goes. It lasted just three hours, but it felt much more. I felt trapped and forced to put a good face while inside I was in pain. I stayed as much as I could, then left. That seemed to make me feel better.

Then, yesterday, I woke up activated in the wrong sense, partly in fear of it repeating again. I'm unemployed and I got too much free time on my hands. My distressing thoughts went from fear of death, to fear of cosmic events and the mystery surrounding them, to everything in between. I know that these things don't worry me when I'm calm, but when I'm not, I'm worried there is really something to worry about, like a spiral of worry. It got much better in the afternoon, but fear of activation at night paradoxically activated me a bit and it was no so easy for me to sleep as it usually is.

Today, I woke up activated again, but worse. In a few days I've passed to feeling capable of anything to being afraid to leave my house. And as much as these fearful thoughts are persuasive, I understand they're part of the problem -not that much a cause, but an effect. Now I'm wondering that one of three things have happened to me:  
\-I do have indeed an endocrine problem that the next analysis will point out.  
\-My process of tapering diazepam is giving me a hard time and I have to go through it (I'm currently having 7,5 daily miligrams, from 15 miligrams in January and having had 5 daily miligrams for far too long, around 10 years. I have what I consider a reasonable fear of benzos and I need to reduce and eventually suppress intake even if it hurts). Still, the initial months of tapering gave me no such problems and this is happening the third week after the last reduction, so I don't know what to make of it.

\-This is mostly psychological and my thoughts are aggravating it.

And then there's the fourth option: a combination of the other three. In either case, even knowing this is temporary, I can only think about how much I need to be who I was barely four days ago. I'm afraid of repeating the January cycle.