Category Archives: Home etc.

My Biggest Motivator

Fear

Yup… that is it.  And I am not alone in that.  There are many of us.  Fear completely over-runs all other motivations.  It is far too powerful for mere humans to overcome.  At least for this human.

Fear comes in to play as anxiety.  It can spike up so high I become immobile.  I can not move… My body will not respond to my thoughts.  It is a very strange feeling.  There is a lock in my brain that stops signals from getting to my legs.  There is something deep going on.

Anxiety to the actual stopper… but fear is the greatest anxiety producer.  And I have a lot of fears – going out, crowds, dogs, meeting people, failure, heights… the list goes on.

There are things I try to do that combine some of those into one.  It gets pretty bad.

If I just stay home, I don’t have too many problems.  But even here things happen.  Staying home saves a tremendous amount of energy because of so much less anxiety.

The issue then becomes – can I live a good happy life this way?  Yes… I can.  I can still go out locally for things I need.  And I can still go on trips, and visit places I want to see.  There are issues with those trips, but they are well worth it.

So why should I push harder?  I am happiest when I can just life my life at home.  I do need to find ways to make some things work better, but I can do that.

That is my goal… at least for now.  Once I get this working, then I can think about ways to get out more… perhaps.

Too Tired to Go On.

I have struggled with anxiety, and depression all my life.  I had my first full-blown panic attack in the 2nd grade.  I can still see it all happening very clearly in my mind.  I started having bad depressive periods in middle-school.  Of course I did not know what they were at the time.

I am almost 60 years old… I do not have the energy I once did.  But life demands that I do as well (or as badly?) as I always did when I was younger.  There are things I can not do anymore.

I can not play volleyball, or racquetball… I can not hike high mountain trails.  And I can not push myself mentally as far as I once could.  So what do I do?

One of the first things I learned in session was to pick my battles.  I can not solve everything… some things I will never be able to resolve.  But the most important point of this is that I have to pick which things I can improve, and which things I can’t improve.  But I also have to look to which things are more important – which will give back the most rewards.

A few months back in session, we worked out a plan for cutting back on things that were disproportionally stressful – things that cause way more anxiety than they were worth.  And that has been my approach the last several months.

It works great!!!  Now I am getting far more done on my own at home.  And with far less total anxiety.  This does not deal with my phobias, or depression, but it is mostly the anxiety the stops me.  So things have taken a decidedly positive turn in my mental life.

But there are other battles, and I am losing them.  Even my first success is falling into question.  I can not keep following that path.  I have to get “better” and get back to doing more – doing things I used to do.  So rather than moving forward, I now have to move back to putting more energy into going out for errands and such.

That means less energy for all other things… including the having fun part.  Once more into the breach… with no hope of success.

I have responsibilities that I can not ignore.  Not that I have actually ignored them.  I have been trying to obtain balance.  But I have to balance that with the lives of others as well.

So I need a totally new plan.  What I really need to do is be like I was 20 years ago… well… only the good parts of it.  I need to be able to DO more.  I will have to deal with the turmoil in my brain some other way.

When Thinking is Too Much

I think too much.  Just like the Paul Simon song – “Maybe I Think Too Much”.  There are times when I can not control the direction my thoughts will take.

When I have things to get done, I have to build a careful plan.  I need to consider every aspect of what I need to do, and set priorities for each thing.  This helps me get thru tasks without having to rethink them too much.

So I have a sort of outline for the day – when to think about what.  I can put off thinking about something, if I schedule when to think about it, and I already know the basics.  It works pretty well for me usually.  (“when” means in what order, not what time).

If I do not plan, and control where my thoughts go, and when, then my brain runs rampant, and I can not control where it goes.  All other considerations get pushed aside.  I get stuck in a loop of over thinking.

So this plan works… some of the time.

The problem comes when something upsets the “plan”.  It can be any of a number of things (yes… zero is a number, but I mean a bigger number).  Once that happens, everything falls apart, and the planning has to start from scratch.  And that usually means planning on the fly, which is almost always doomed to failure.

Last second planning takes on a life of it’s own.  My mind becomes swamped with some new direction of thought.  And I can not control where it will go.  But for sure, the old plan is dead.

This is how things I really want to do, don’t get done.  Those things invariable fall to the end of whatever “list” I might have, and those things usually do not get done at all.  There will not be enough energy to fill in for that planning by late in the day.

Sometimes the upheaval is so strong that I end up getting nothing done, because the planning stage burns me out, and I shut down.  This happens a lot!!

This is where most of my least productive days come from.  One small event, and the whole thing – water, tub, and baby – all get thrown out, and I fail.

Sadly… this is one of the things I had been working on in session before it’s early demise.  I will slowly figure it out though – it actually is a lot better than it used to be.  Removing the grocery shopping has taken away a lot of my Stoppers.  That alone accounted for at least 2 lost days per week.

But I can not eliminate all the Stoppers, so I need to find a way to deal with them.  I will keep looking.

Talking to Tech Support

Most people hate having to call tech support.  I don’t like it much either.  But I found a way to make it a LOT better for me.

What I do is chat in a friendly way with the tech support person.  I ask how the weather is there when there is a lull in the conversation.  Sometimes you are waiting for something anyway.  It’s interesting how the conversation can go from there.

I was just on the phone talking with a tech rep at DIRECTV and while I was waiting for things to happen when I tried them, I found out she lives in Missoula, Montana… the weather there is about like here today.  Also, she is recently separated, and now living in a small apartment, instead of a big house.

And we got everything fixed and straightened up, and she is sending us new hardware for free – it would normally be $40.  So it worked out pretty well, and it’s a lot less frustrating for me.

This took a while to get used to because tech support can be so frustrating… but once I did get used to being extra cheery, it got a lot easier.  And it does not take longer because there are usually things that you have to wait for.

Give it a try!