Anxiety Pit - What helps me to get out of it?
Its been a tough week.
I was so burned out of project manager's work that it took me a while to make it out from the pit. Its not the first time, and pretty sure - not the last, but every time i gather new instruments that allow me to save some time for myself and get back to normal life and even high spirits. In that post I wanted to share some of the flows that help me, and might some day help you (just maybe). I also provide some examples that I have found interesting but these might be radically different for you!
Most of the mechanisms I will describe below require certain focus and will. Sometimes it is more - building a system even. If you feeling awful, please use professional help immidiately, I'm not a doctor even closely, but a dude who shares the things that helped myself.
Professional Help
First massive burnout happened in 2022, i was so deep in anxiety that decided to take some help immediately as all of this of course started to relate with family and close friends, also the derealization came in too quick. The psycologist stated low level depression and warning anxiety disorder. First steps were implemented only thanks to him - emotional journal.
Doesn't matter if you will use paper, or Windows's notepad. The main thing is - to start! Below I will give one of examples on how I use it personally. The thing is, it has to be comfortable for you and you should be able to to use it asap after feeling the new anxiety attack. The flow is also pretty much simple as soon as you have notepad in the hands:
- What is situation? in couple of words\sentences. - it helps to reflect on the situation more objectively; \\ my yougurt has fallen on the floor :(
- What emotions do I feel? - helps to analyze and later understand the feelings you are dealing with. If youre able to give it a grade (0-100 in my example) - perfect, as it will allow to estimate the impact (if it way more then 30, then it definitely worth to check.) \\ sad 30, anger 20, vulnerability 20
- What do I think about it? - just quick thought on how you feel \\ im tired of being in hurry and always fail in small things, I think that my colleagues watch me all the time and then laughing behind
- How this affects my behaviour? \\ i became more anxious and feeling myself as a failure, dont want to be around many people at work
Then leave it to at least an evening, let it marinate a bit. As soon as it comes and you have a spare time, at least 5 minutes, run through it.
Let's take a look at my silly example above, we can clearly see that main problems in the situation are - fidgeting (which is the anxiety marker btw), and shame of other's people's attitudes. Let's imagine if you continue to drop your yougurt every day, what's the most scare thing that might possibly happen to you? I guess nothing that special, colleagues who laughed will just tire of this after couple of times. Will someone punch you in the face because of that? I doubt. Will the boss fire you? Also don't think so. Conclusion? - There is almost no possibility to suffer any consequences and to beat yourself that much if something similar happens next time.
And look at that, we just quickly ran through the situation and understood that nothing bad has happened and no one will blame us for that, or at least to the point when it can relate to you somehow!
SummaryThis little emotional journal can help you to look at the situations you've written down and look at them from aside as a spectator but not the action figure and JUDGE (kiddin'). Basically it just shows how some of the situations you feel overwhelmed about are little and don't lead to anything bad most of the time, it's just the brain who makes a mess.
Physical Activities
I know, I know, everyone said that already, will not expand this topic too much.
I was fighting my boredom and procrastination too long to try to convince you that I almost hated any kind of sports,
until I've bought a bike! What a relief it was to find out that you can do 30km\h somewhere in forest and not only it is awesome as it is,
but when you come back home, even if there are bad thoughts, you kinda dont have a capacity to continue beating yourself.
And what a wonder it was, after two weeks of 10-30km daily my body started the transformation from "what a beer belly"
to "boy I'm couple years younger now (not that good, but result is still great), and its just couple of weeks of exercise!"
Everyone around continue saying that I became much more fit.
Summary
Any sports is not a panacea from all of the problems we have,
but a great step on this long stairway and might be the way to find a new hobby and community around it.
Try to find something new once in a while
Don't allow yourself to get into the situation like "I don't like anything, I'm boring". Do it other way - as soon as you feel some energy at least try to look for something you haven't heard about earlier, check youtube for the things that are unusual and totally different from your interests and understanding (I wouldnt recommend financial content in this case, and self-development - I truly believe this shit is business-wise stuff for setting infinite unrealistic goals and grinding instead of living, then getting more upset because in one of the days you weren't able to get up in 4 am to run 1000km in the sunrise, after which you had to go to the gym and then grind the shitty work 9 to 5 and so on and so on. I was in the pit for some time, just believe me - it's not worth it at all)
Below I tried to provide some random examples of what possibly can be kinda interesting, don't hesitate to search for the most dumb and random stuff too :)
And so on. I will not even try to move into gamedev and coding stuff, as I'm pretty sure you are aware of these things at least because you are visiting the oldweb site lol.
Task Management
I've read a huge longread couple of weeks ago, and found out I used to do this one year prior. I had (and now revised and improved) my task management system. I personally use TickTick (https://ticktick.com/). The awesome thing in the longread stated, that before doing any system, just check if you need it, do you have things that are constantly make you anxious? A lot of tasks? Working with people and managing some stuff? Put 200 (!!!) tasks, wishes, ideas, plans that you can think of in one or two days in the inbox of your planner and then make it into the system. Put everything that overwhelms you even once a day for a minute, and believe your system. So it's kinda requires some of the will to keep working with it, but in exchange it gives HUGE amount of will-space in your head. Prepare the tasks for tomorrow from evening, revise all the tasks once a week. Keep the system alive and allows yourself to have a free brain time as everything you have to do on that day is already written and waiting for you. I'll share the longread link, but please consider that it is written on russian (any browser translate deals with it pretty good)
Do the things you find most satisfying
Don't listen to people that constantly abuse you with phrases like "Go outside, see the people, find a job", etc. Of course it's a good stuff to walk around, take a bike trip, have some money from the job, but try to cure the procrastination by focusing on search of something you might like at least hypothetically. I didn't think, even didn't imagine that some day I'll find Neocities, then Nekoweb to make my website, and didn't expect that it will give me so much positive emotions, and probably I wouldn't ever even wrote this article. Keep searching, dreaming. The best stuff will find you by itself one day, but you can definitely help it to do so!
