Sitting on the bathroom floor for forty minutes

Started 17 October 2025 · 17 replies · 133 hearts · read 2.1k times

PerrineStrasbourg, FR · 17 October 2025

9 months ago

Sitting on the bathroom floor for forty minutes — putting it in its own thread so it does not get lost in the check-in.

I have avoided asking about this for six weeks out of pure embarrassment.

Nobody warned me about this specifically and I am starting to think that is because it is common enough that everybody assumed I knew.

It is not severe. It is relentless, which turns out to be a different problem, and one I have found much harder to describe to anybody.

I have read the guide on this and it covered the ordinary version. Mine is not quite the ordinary version and that is why I am asking.

The figure in the title is not rhetorical: forty minutes is what my own notes actually say, counted back through them this evening rather than estimated.

Thank you for reading something this unglamorous. Any experience welcome, and timescales especially.

OmarAmman, JO

I did the first four in the bathroom sitting on the floor. There is no correct place and nobody is watching.

EsiFacilitatorToronto, Canada

Speaking as a facilitator: a symptom that is frightening you is a reason to ask, regardless of whether it turns out to be anything. Nobody qualified will think you have wasted their time.

OttaviaBologna, IT

Counting down out loud sounds silly and was the only thing that stopped me hovering. Three, two, one, done, and the hovering was where all the fear lived.

DelythBala, UK

The dread built through the day and peaked about an hour before, so I moved mine to first thing in the morning and cut the anticipation to ten minutes.

10me too 5

GavinDundee, UK

Gently disagreeing with Delyth, or rather adding the other half of it.

My nurse talked me through the first one on the phone and stayed on the line, and I have never been more grateful for nine minutes of somebody's time.

TabbyMargate, UK

Recognition rather than advice, if that is any use at all.

GaelanInverurie, UK

Cold hands made mine worse. Warming up for a minute beforehand genuinely changed the experience and I found that out by accident.

5me too 9

Ozzy GWalsall, UK

Reading Gaelan, I recognised more of that than I expected to.

What helped was letting it be a big deal at first rather than insisting it was not. Pretending it was nothing made it worse for about two months.

NylaNairobi, KE

Ozzy G has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

I looked away for the first six months and then one day watched, and it was so much less than my imagination had been supplying.

OrlaithDonegal, IE

#10

The anticipation faded for me at around week ten. Not gradually — I just noticed one week that I had done it without the preceding hour of dread.

TedIpswich, UK

#11

The bathroom floor is a legitimate venue and I would like that on the record for anybody who thinks they are the only one.

GwynforLlanidloes, UK

#12

What worked was doing it at the same moment every week rather than at a convenient moment. Deciding when was where the dread lived.

7me too 1

SableCape Town, ZA

#13

I would have written the same thing a year ago, word for word.

BrackAlnwick, UK

#14

Talking to my prescriber about the anxiety specifically, rather than about the medication, opened up a conversation I did not know was available.

BrodyDunfermline, UK

#15

Sable — yes, and the bit that took me longest to accept was the next part.

My anxiety was mostly about doing it wrong. Once my nurse watched me do one and said it was fine, most of it evaporated.

EsiFacilitatorToronto, Canada

#16

Stepping in to say that three replies have described three different timescales, and all three are honest. Bodies vary and that is not a failure of anybody's account.

IslaOban, UK

#17

I still do not enjoy it, two years in. I do it in about forty seconds without thinking, and I do not enjoy it, and both of those are true.