I can relate to the anxiety/firmware thing. I had never really experienced that sort of generalized anxiety before, but the weird thing for me was that it was preverbal. So I couldn't even put it into terms like "buried/lost somewhere"; it was more like a feeling. Like the feeling you would get in your stomach if you showed up to an important class one day completely unprepared for a pop quiz. Just that feeling, constantly. Luckily for me it was directly correlated with (lack of) sleep, so once that got better the feeling went away.