💾 Archived View for synthe.ist › log › anxiety.gmi captured on 2023-03-20 at 17:23:06. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Anxiety

2021-08-12

About a year ago I had anxiety attacks, so much that I just curled up in a fetal position on the toilet at work, unable to do anything. I think the worst time was about an hour of that.

It is hell.

I finally got myself psyched up to talk to my team lead, then HR, and got to work half time for a long while (2 months I think), then gradually increasing to full time according to my own schedule and what I felt safe to do, while starting metacognitive therapy.

Wikipedia article: “Metacognitive Therapy” [via gemini proxy]

It worked.

Anxiety comes from worrying about the future (and depression from ruminations about the past), according to the metacognitive view. The Cognitive Attentional Syndrome (CAS) consists of:

Worry/Rumination
Threat monitoring
Coping behaviors that backfire

The first two are perfectly normal things to do, the problem is when they dominate your inner life and you need to develop coping strategies to handle the pain. It creates a negative feedback loop that needs to be stopped.

Since I have been fired from my job about a month ago I now have ample reason to worry about my future, so my CAS looks roughly like this right now:

Worry about not findig a new job by October 1st
Monitor all the ways in which I am not good enough at what I do
Get away from it all by playing CyberPunk 2077

Spending my free time playing CyberPunk 2077 is not a way to find a new job. But it is an effective strategy to cope with the pain of not feeling good enough.

I should add that I have other coping behaviors, but sitting down in front of the TV and turn on the PS4 and play is the biggest waste of my time and energy. So I will stop that now. Wait here, I'll go and delete the game...

There, deleted it.

I can of course just download the game again, all 100+ GB of it, but at least that'll be so time consuming that it can never be the quick fix I crave. So it works. And then I can get back to looking for the good jobs I want, put some serious work into the application process. Forget about CyberPunk 2077, Job Hunting is my new favourite pastime, eventually removing the need to worry.

Step #1: update my CV, basically a complete rewrite, based on some feedback from a friend.

Bye.