I’d had a lot of ups and downs during a long and brutal period of anxiety, stress, and depression, but I’d never stopped working on trying to get better and happier. I am a self-improvement junkie, in some senses. It’s just what I do. I’m in love with ideas and thinking and figuring things out.
I’d done a lot of changing, so much so that I feel my life has been a constant struggle. Yet, successfully changing so often had created another burden of its own: I was particularly down on myself that I hadn’t seemed to figure out enough about life to put me on par with plenty of people decades younger than I was. But I was still working, on myself and on the rest of the normal things that we do to get through life. That was part of it. It wasn’t as though I was not trying. I was always trying.
Down on myself or not, effort has its rewards, and I was realizing some deep truths. One of them was that I was probably never going to reach a clear limit to the amount of stress I could bear. And this was a problem. I could keep trying, and trying, and trying. But persistence towards goal has a feel of moving forward, even if it’s difficult. This type of feeling was different.
I started to suspect that this wasn’t the persistence of an achiever, it was the persistence of a beast of burden. I kept taking steps, and the load I was carrying kept getting heavier and heavier. And I just kept stepping forward. But I was burning out, not getting better.
I was by now “piling it on” endlessly. Trying to gird up my motivation, my determination, just push through a few goals that were really weighing on me, few tasks I had to do, and then things would get easier, and I can start working on what I “really want” to be doing. I was telling myself this, all the time.
Another realization was that I was never going to know what my “true calling” was. It just never happened. It was these questions that really got to me. I have always been nearly stupidly optimistic. Always working on the assumption that someday I’d be happy. Maybe that’s why suicide was never really an option for me. In spite of my determination to be a rational problem-solver, I just wasn’t paying attention to the empirical evidence that decades of effort hadn’t produced a level above misery. Or, wasn’t I? I had never thought of it in quite those terms before. And yet, I was always making over my life. I guess I can give myself that credit—there was at least a trial-and-error approach. But now, when I really started asking myself if this was all worth it, assuming things were just going to go on like this, I knew this just wasn’t what life should be.
I’ve had all the epiphanies a person can ask for in life. the problem with epiphanies is that the only tell you need to change, you don’t tell you what to do (well, sometimes they do) or how to do it. But now, my epiphany was that I didn’t know what the hell to do.
The first glimmers of insight that would actually make some positive changes in my life started early in the pandemic. Working from home, hunched over my laptop on my sofa, taking home three quarters of the not very impressive pay that I normally made, and yet working longer hours than ever. And given a few things that I was hearing from work, I was also realizing that I wasn’t just feeling unappreciated, I really was unappreciated. I realized everyone in the world was stressed out and we all needed to give each other a break. But I wasn’t getting one.
I had started my efforts some months prior, as I said, with medication. I would deal with various side effects affecting my sleep, energy, appetite, and mood. And then those side effects would diminish and level off. As would any benefits I was getting from any of this medication, and one of those medications, which was an appetite stimulant, I think I gained must have gained 15 lb in the first 3 weeks. it didn’t help if this was early in the work from home phase. I’d been trying other things too, reading psychology articles as I frequently did, Googling various ideas. I’m always trying something.
I think I would date the real difference makers to a few things that I started doing before I saw any real improvement. There was a lag time, in other words.
To be clear, I’ve been referring to depression. But actually, I felt the root of my problem was anxiety. This is what I sought help for back in the 90s. Intense anxiety, the sort of level I would associate with acute anxiety issues. Only this was chronic. My anxiety levels would go up and down, of course, but my baseline level was so high, that I often couldn’t believe that it had sustained for so long, I’m not talking hours or days. I’m not even talking weeks or months. I’m talking about years.
This had been my baseline for so long, I didn’t have the slightest idea how sick I really was. I was groping toward the idea, just realizing that my day-to-day life was pretty miserable.
“I’m really very ill.” There are a lot of phrases like that in my journal. So I was trying to treat intense, relentless anxiety that seemed to spoil everything. I knew of course that there might be some depression associated with it. But all I could feel was anxiety. It felt like unbearable tension, just all the time, and I had been feeling it so long, so obviously I was bearing it whether it felt unbearable or not.
So this is what I was trying to change.
In part, the first idea that really worked, at least that began to help eventually, came from Gary Keller’s book The One Thing. At first, I used the ideas in this book for long-term goal setting, and I still use those goal formulations now. But the other big idea—the main idea in the book—is that you can only focus on one thing at a time. And you can really only focus on one goal at a time. So I made some early efforts at lightening the load. I divided my work tasks up into chunks instead of packing bunch of tasks into as little time as possible, based on a hypothetical idea of how rapidly I should be getting through them. I tried to focus on certain things:
• Family
• Work
• Self, daily mindset
Before that, my calendar was a ridiculous, impossible to-do list every day. I never got through it. And there was good reason for that, but instead of recognizing it and taking things off my to-do list, I just constantly berated myself.
Because berating yourself for not getting more done, every day, for decades, is the road to waking up someday as a different person, who can suddenly get everything done. Right. Is that honestly what my fundamental idea has been, all these years? I really am pathological.