Month: July 2016

The anxiety of procrastination

~ Superfluous G ~ Leave a comment

I should probably apologise for the delay between posts. It’s been hot, I’ve been busy, and I’ve been putting it off.

I put a lot of things off.

In all aspects of my life, I am constantly kicking the can down the road to be picked up by future me.

I consider procrastination to be my single biggest flaw. I’m always thinking about what I could be doing instead, what I’d like to be doing, and what I’ve failed to do.

I’ve been writing for over twenty years, and still haven’t started writing a book. I’ve wanted to make music my whole adult life, and only picked up a bass guitar for the first time a couple of years ago. I want to travel, yet rarely get further than the sofa. I want to be fit and healthy, but I eat shit instead of putting effort into my diet. I want to find my perfect woman, and yet have done literally nothing in the year I’ve been single to meet her.

It’s not just the big ambitions, either. It’s the small things. I first wanted to write this post three weeks ago, but didn’t. And it’s not like I spurted out some gibberish and have been feverishly tinkering with it. I’ve barely thought about it, other than to boot it firmly into tomorrow’s problems. Even now, by writing it, I’m procrastinating – I should be working on a project I’m overdue on, another victim of my casual attitude to life.

It’s a snowball turning into an avalanche.

I despise feeling like this. Every time I procrastinate, it’s like being grabbed from behind with two gigantic hands. The pressure of the palms around my back, the fingers tightening around my ribcage, the thumbs pressing down on my neck and digging into the back of my head.

I am being suffocated by the weight of my own inaction, contorted by stress, asphyxiated by anxiety.

When something is weighing over you, everything you do in the meantime is tainted. Every distraction is hollow, anything you engage in is meaningless. Physically, you are doing nothing. Mentally, you go into overdrive. You question your ability, your talent, all the bullshit you tell yourself about the person you are.

I begin to knock myself. I tell myself that I’m no good, that my self-professed talent is just a lie, that the worthlessness I feel in myself is the only truth I know. My inaction serves to confirm that – if I’m not an imposter bullshitting myself about being a better person, then surely I’d be on top of things?

As the list of stuff that isn’t getting done goes up, my self-belief continues to spiral. The life I lead is a reflection of the person I truly am, and through a lack of achievement, I see that my life isn’t worth shit.

By this time, I’ve beaten myself black and blue. I’m as exhausted as I would be if I’d done a whole day’s work, and I haven’t even lifted a finger. All the good intentions and self-realisations and epiphanies about who I am – they don’t add up to anything. They are just words. I’m talking the talk, but not walking the walk.

Procrastination is a major catalyst for anxiety and, frustratingly, is also a symptom of both it and depression. In failing to get a handle on it, the stress goes through the roof, and anxiety gorges itself on the cortisol. I’d argue that procrastination should be recognised as a mental health condition in its own right, but I can’t be arsed.

To compound the issue, it’s an ingrained approach to how I deal with a problem. When I was growing up, I relied heavily on my intellect to get by. I still do. If you learn from an early age that you can coast to get by, chances are you’ll repeat the behaviour often and to great effect. The result is that concepts like hard work, applying myself, and discipline are somewhat alien to me.

From my point of view, this would be absolutely fine if I could just turn it on whenever I needed to kick it up a gear. I find that doing nothing is a great way to spend your time – in fact, down time is essential to achieving some sort of balance in life. But when I’m faced with a problem that needs consistent, sustained effort, I crumble.

I’ve read a ton on how to tackle procrastination. I’ve made to-do lists. I downloaded The Rock’s alarm clock so I can get called a jabroni in the morning. I’m always making plans for how to overcome procrastination. How this time it’ll be different. How I’ll finally crack it. That I’ll get going and become that productive, useful person I’ve always wanted to be.

But whenever the moment comes, I fall. I set my alarm clock early to get those exercises in, and just use the extra time to stay in bed. I clear the day to start writing my book, and spend the day abusing assclowns on Facebook. I put together my diet, buy all the groceries, and dial in a kebab when I get hungry.

However, I can see now where I have been going wrong. Whenever I make these plans, I leave it for the ever resourceful future-Gregg to sort out. He’ll have the energy. He’ll have the tenacity. He’ll feel how I feel now, and know we can no longer feel like that.

In short, I’m expecting someone who isn’t me.

When the time comes to face a problem, it’ll always be me who gets there. I can’t expect me to be someone who rises to the occasion overnight. To become that person requires effort, it requires discipline, it requires sustained focus. It requires all the things I lack.

Worse, I’m arriving at these situations with the weight of the world on my shoulders. I’ve beaten myself into a hole. I’m piling on all the pressure I can – I have to do it this time, I will be that different person.

Problem with talking to myself about it is that it’s just talk. It’s not walking the walk.

I realised this was a problem well before anxiety came along and took my life for a joyride, but it’s through understanding anxiety that I’ve begun to realise just how powerful an effect procrastination has on my life. Given the choice, I always take the easy route. I’m not challenging myself. I’m not being true to myself.

When I pull back the layers, I see that same familiar beast of worthlessness staring back at me. It’s telling me that I won’t succeed, so what’s the point? It’s telling me that I’ll fail, so just avoid the problem until it goes away. In listening to it, I confirm the worthlessness. In believing that I can’t, I’m ironically setting myself up to fail.

If you don’t try, you’ve already failed.

A few months back, along with giving anxiety the finger, I decided to say fuck you to procrastination.

The approach has been similar to anxiety – you cannot expect to be a different person instantaneously. Instead, you have to challenge your behaviour frequently, consistently, and patiently. You have to build up a body of evidence that says you are a person who can get a handle on things. You have to walk the walk.

In this, I came up with a simple yet effective approach. Each time I’m in the situation where I can either drift or jump on something, I tell myself “just act”.

Whenever I’m dithering on whether to go to the gym or not, just act. When I’m sat in front of a blank page watching the cursor blink back at me, just act. When I’m lying in bed unable to grasp a handle on things, just act.

I’m taking the time I’ve been spending sitting around criticising myself, and kicking that into the future instead of the experience directly in front of me. I see the self-doubt, the self-criticism, the apathy all lining up to take shots, so I get moving before they get the chance.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The point here isn’t to beat myself up when I fail, but to celebrate when I succeed. I’m retraining myself, and that takes time. It takes patience. It takes a willingness to experiment, and to allow myself the opportunity to fail. It takes being challenged by every fucking thing that comes along looking to steal myself away from what I want to achieve, and saying “get fucked, I’m doing shit here”.

Leonardo Da Vinci – one of the greatest polymaths to have ever walked the face of the planet – once said “I have wasted my hours”. Not years, not days, but hours. At the time, I thought this incredible – how can a man who’s achieved so much believe he has wasted his hours? And should I be thinking in those terms?

I thought it was inspirational – a way to live my life by. Now I realise my folly. I’m judging myself on those terms. I’m spending my hours criticising myself and standing in my own way. What I should do is just act, and let the chips land where they may.

I don’t know if I’ll ever write that book, but I certainly won’t if I don’t put pen to paper. The probability is that I won’t be making the Olympics this year, but it’s certainly not going to happen when the only weight I’m carrying is my inaction. There’s a good chance I’ll never meet the woman of my dreams, but I’m damned sure it won’t happen while I’m curled up in a ball of self-doubt avoiding the world.

And it’s making the difference. This blog – despite its brief hiatus – is the most writing I’ve done for myself in years. I’ve got a copy of Ableton, and working on my first real attempts at making music. I’m hitting the gym three times a week, and feel stronger than ever. I tore into that project this week like a goddamn hurricane, and I’m just getting warmed up.

It’s a matter of perspective. It’s a matter of focus. It’s a matter of knowing what you want, and knowing that not working towards it will leave you feeling hollow, empty, and stressed.

Be brave. Take chances. Just act.

Sure, there’s other stuff I want to do, things I need to achieve, a life I want to lead just waiting for me to get my hands on it. But I shouldn’t expect or want it all to be done right now. After all, you’ve got to have something to do, right?

Thanks for reading. As always, likes help me see my work is appreciated, will do my best to respond to any comments, and encourage shares in case my battle with anxiety can help others.

I’ll get onto those coping strategies next week. Or maybe the week after 😉

Anxiety and depression: two sides of the same coin

~ Superfluous G ~ Leave a comment

The Catholic faith has this thing called Purgatory. Not quite Heaven, not quite Hell, it is a whole lot of nothing where souls sit for all eternity until judged worthy enough to enter Heaven.

For me, there’s no better analogy for what depression is like.

It is the Endless Void.

The Bottomless Pit.

The Big Empty.

For much of my life, I’ve struggled with depression. When things get tough, when I’m down on my luck, when I feel I have no one in my life and I’m all alone, there it is. Waiting for me. Ready to drown me with its dark, black tendrils and I, defenceless, let it envelop me.

At its worst, it tortures you while offering a knife to your throat, goading you to lean forward and set yourself free.

My worst bout came after finishing my final year of university. It started – as these things typically do – when I lost a girl I loved. She’d gone home to visit her parents in Sweden. By the time she was due to come back, the place we both worked had shut down – a place I adored working at and other kick to the mental scrotum.

There weren’t any other jobs – this was 2009. I graduated during a recession in full swing. As the months dragged on, the chances of getting her back or even finding any work at all seemed increasingly more remote. My heart sank, and I sank with it.

Depression can a suck a person dry. Even the strongest of us can be drained by its embrace.

Sending out a single CV in a day became a major achievement. Hell, even getting out of bed and playing Call of Duty was an arduous task.

What I had all the energy in the world for was self-loathing. I spent every day beating myself up. Every hour reminding myself that I’m a failure. Every minute wishing it was my last.

Eventually, I decided I needed help. I booked an appointment with a doctor, inventing a fungal infection as an excuse. So there I was, one fungi-free sockless foot stinking up the surgery, balling my eyes out.

She stuck me on citalopram. Aside from playing havoc with my sex drive, flipping me from ravenous beast to impotent failure at random, the drug created a wall between me and the depression. It was the strangest thing. I knew it was still there, but I couldn’t access it. Yet, it gave me the space to realise much of what I felt was due to my situation.

The solution was obvious: change the situation.

After ditching the drugs, I managed to get a job looking after autistic children and met a lovely lady. Things began to look up. It didn’t last. The job was a dead end, working for fascists more concerned in profit than a child’s health. They soon twigged that I gave a shit, and I was promptly shown the door. Freshly unemployed, the girl quickly ditched me for some flash wealthy prick laughably called Rich Forbes.

Hurt though I was, the inevitable spiral downward got put on a brief hiatus. I’d soon end up back in my hometown looking after my mental mother, then in the full swing of a bi-polar breakdown.

The novelty of the change kept me occupied, but soon wore off as tedium replaced it. Jobs were still scarce. Life at home was an unending horror. I couldn’t seem to get a break, and life moving forward looked ever more bleak. The only joy I had in my life was the odd occasion I could scrape together enough pennies to get drunk out of my skull.

The whole process robbed me of two years of my life before I started to get back on my feet. Even then, depression would haunt me.

I never looked up suicide techniques online, didn’t ever put myself in harm’s way with the hope of ending it. But I thought about it. I thought about it all the time. I understand why people do kill themselves. It seems easier than another day of the relentless dirge. When you are in that state, it is without end. The only light at the end of the tunnel is death.

It was therefore with a healthy sense of irony that I began reminiscing over those good old days when anxiety really began to take hold. Here I was, a few short years later, panicking over tumours, cancer, and any other ailment that looked vaguely pointy and dangerous. Somewhere along the line, I realised, I’d actually come to care about being alive. I wanted to be alive.

Let me tell you, when it heard about this travesty, depression was not impressed.

Despite splitting on the issue of pro-life/pro-choice, I’ve come to realise that depression and anxiety are very much two sides of the same coin.

Granted, there’s a few more differences. The lethargy of depression is not reflected by the bouts of energetic neurosis of anxiety, and depression doesn’t seem to exhibit anywhere near the number of side effects several gallons of cortisol pouring through your veins has.

Yet, there are strong links. Where anxiety seems to be a fixation on the future – what could happen – depression dwells on the past – what has happened. If anxiety is panicking over what seems like inescapable doom, depression is being trapped in your past.

It uses the exact same mental circles. The rivers of shit I spoke about before run just as strongly in depression as they do anxiety. You are trapped in the exact same loops. You will still continually fuel your own circle of despair.

I mentioned before that I’ve been doing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – which I should add has been going extremely well – and had somewhat of a revelation in a session this week.

At the heart of both my anxiety and depression is worthlessness. They are intrinsically tied. Both feed and draw strength from the same core feeling that I’m nothing.

In depression, I scour my past for evidence to back this idea up. Once I’ve found it, I linger on it. In anxiety, I actively hunt it in the present. If I can’t find it, I just invent it.

In figuring this out, I confirmed a long held belief that they were tied together – that the anxiety had been there all along, lurking behind the bouts of depression. I’d searched for the connection, and now I’ve found it.

In discovering it, many things suddenly make sense. When I went through those suicidal months, I’d figured that much of my condition was situationally-based. I was broken hearted. I was destitute. I felt there was no hope.

It made sense to me that the condition was superficial. At the time, when I looked back at other depressive periods, I could normally find a cause – a trigger. But now, I can see how all of those events and see how they exacerbated the feeling of worthlessness.

My broken heart; evidence no one loves me. The lack of jobs; proof that I’m not of value. Returning to my hometown empty handed; confirmation of my failure.

It’s all linked. It’s one and the same. It is not the ebbs and flows of life that cause it. It is my response to it. It’s not the dark things my inner child is pointing at. It is me at the age of 31 still thinking like the sad, isolated, bullied child that lingers in my memories.

More recently, I became depressed in the run up to my redundancy last December. After it was formally announced, I sat at home in stasis for a whole two months, incapable of grasping hold of the situation. I was immobilised by my failure, and the reinforcement of my worthlessness narrative.

It was different this time, though. The finer details of how I broke depression’s spell the first time around will be the subject of a future post, but the experience imbued me with a deep sense of hope. Hope that I’m stronger than it. Hope that I can beat it. Hope that no matter how I feel right now, there will always be a happier day.

Everything is temporary.

Back when I started writing this blog, I said I had to grab the root of anxiety in order to uproot it. From where I sit now, this feels like it. This is the deepest part of it – the origin of it all. The past three months, I’ve been diligently analysing the root, understanding what it is, and what it’s made from.

Now, the real uprooting process can begin.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to discuss some of the techniques I’ve been using to combat anxiety, as well as some of the epiphanies I’ve had along the way. I’ll be talking about meditation, coping techniques, medication, exercise, CBT, challenging my biases and ideas about myself. There’s even a love letter to cycling coming up.

Oh, and I’ll finally get onto addressing a substantial elephant in the room: psychedelics.

Likes, shares, and comments not only let me know my work’s appreciated, but help it reach others who may draw some strength from it. I’ll also endeavour to reply to anyone going through the same issues I’ve faced, so please reach out. You are not alone.