Fighting Tiger

For a while now I’ve been wanting to write more openly about my struggles with anxiety disorder and its effects: depression, procrastination / perfectionism, feeling like an imposter, the mess it’s helping me make of my professional life and the difficulties it causes my fiance.  Basically, I Think Too Much about many things and when it affects how I live, work, love and relate to the future.

It’s a lot to write about, so let me first set the scene.

I’ve been aware of anxiety’s presence in my life  since 2005 when I was working in the games industry and suffered my first panic attacks. Panic attacks are often the terrifying first sign that something is not quite right with how you’re thinking and are often triggered by extra stressors and things to worry about.

Looking back before 2005, I can recognise the beginnings of poor thinking habits that make me far more worried than should be normal. That said, working in games (the stress, the late hours etc) definitely provided a good trigger for overthinking and made it much harder to maintain good mental health.

I’d been working the ridiculous hours that somehow add to the glamour of technology jobs, particularly games development. Then I went to hear Greg Bourne deliver the Hawke Lecture and then spent the evening and next days in total terror of climate change. And that weekend I woke up so so sure that my heart and lungs were being squashed by everything that was wrong with myself and the world and that I was going to die.

One of the things to know about anxiety disorders is that you take a normal, healthy amount of concern required to manage a difficult situation, and multiply that by many factors of overthinking and add reactions evolved millions of years ago.  Evolutionarily anxiety worked for us like this: see a tiger pacing by, start thinking of places to hide or sticks to use as weapons, then release a bunch of adrenalin as you fought or fled. The problem is that tiger-appropriate adrenal responses – increased blood pressure and heart rate, restlessness and muscle tension are inappropriate for most modern challenges. Today, tigers aren’t an everyday threat, so a difficult situation might just involve applying for a new job or discussing a problem with a friend and normally we don’t need the fight or flight response in those situations.

Work and environmental and social collapse as a result of climate change are two of the main spaces where I see tigers and am always pretty sure things are going terribly, horribly wrong. See, it’s logical that work and enviromental contexts are both very important spaces in which you should be concerned about threats and make appropriate responses. The problem for people like myself is that the thinking gets stuck in the identifying threats mode far too much of the time and makes it harder to actually get anything done.

Luckily for me,  panic attacks are relatively few and far between but as with that first panic attack when they do appear, it’s to signal that I really do need to start paying attention to my mental health. Of course, there are other symptoms but despite being really quite serious they are easier to ignore than a feeling of imminent doom: -

• • holding your breath and grinding your teeth while emailing?
    this email had better be perfectly worded and leave no room for misinterpretation. That next email is far too scary to answer. I’d best ignore it.
• Feelings of mild paranoia while in face to face and online meetings?
  They’re going to realise I know nothing about doing this job, I’ll get fired and no-one will ever employ me again.
• Hiding in bed in the morning
  It’s not worth getting up, everything I do is worthless and I’m sure something terrible will happen if I even just go to the shops and have to speak German.
• Lying awake at night feeling very aware of all the things that could go wrong ever.
  I don’t have proper curtains, people will come to visit will see this,  tell Tim I’m an unfit fiance and he’ll break up with me and we’ll never live the rest of our lives with the happiness we deserve or the family we were meant to have and our children would have been born with major health issues anyway. Really, it’s all fucked so why even bother with the curtains let alone eating breakfast tomorrow?

In between panic attacks and weeks of feeling generally horrible and exhausted there are times when I feel totally fine: confident and powerful enough to change the world. I’ll be happy and calm, inspired and productive at work,  I meet new people without fear, leave the house and confidently speak poorly structured German, face the world and the future full on and trick myself and others into believing that everything is okay and will forever be amazing.

These days exist and they are what I want to have more of. Too much of the time though I’m not okay, I’m not getting things done in the way with the ease or capacity I should.

Sometimes I feel like a mouse being played with by a cat – the type of play where the cat seems to take a vicious delight in playing with the mouse and then seemingly ignores it before pouncing again. I’ll get over a phase of anxiety without much effort on my behalf and feel great. Then, weeks or months later I realise I’m not free of worry and I find myself hopeless, unproductive and tense again and I know that I never really solved the problem.

I’m hoping that by writing more publicly about anxiety I will actively do more to challenge my experience of this disorder and to follow through with the positive behaviours  and thinking changes that will help me improve. When I next return to this topic, I will write about how I hope to improve this situation, the tools I’ve used to good effect and the challenges with maintaining and setting good habits and living in the real world.