Growing Good Habits

anxiety-problems:

Obviously this is something I knew intellectually, but there’s nothing quite like 15 hours spent on a couch trying not to vomit every time you move that really drives home the point.

Last night was a friend’s birthday party, and it was held at a karaoke place.  Me?  I’ve always been a bit shy about performances of any kind in front of an audience and I’d definitely never done karaoke before.  The very idea made me squirm and fret and want to hide under my bed.  But I like these friends a lot, so I steeled myself, and thought, “Well, I’ll just have a few drinks to loosen myself up, shall I?”

And my friends would ask, “Have you picked a song?”  And I’d lift my drink and say, “I’m working my way up to it.”  And then there was the point at which one of the hosts started pouring me rum and insisting that singing was going to have to happen very soon, and yeah.  That was really the point at which I should have said 1) I’ve had enough and 2) I’m having fun without doing karaoke, so kindly fuck off. 

Anywho, there didn’t turn out to be any singing, but there was definitely some drunken dancing on my part.  A very, very good friend put me in a car and took me to her apartment, where I spent an hour puking and shaking and then four hours passed out on her couch and then I repeated that process a couple of times.  It took 15 hours before I could keep down even water and saltines.

Morals of the story: drinking does not actually make my anxieties go away and I should really stand up for myself when I don’t want to do something.  At least I got those life lessons out of this whole experience. 

And, y’know, thank God for the kinds of friends who don’t let you drive yourself home and hold your hair and bring you saltines and never once make you feel bad about your poor life choices.  My life would could be much worse right now if not for friends like that.

So I’ve been feeling an increasing amount of anxiety for the last few days.  Not sure if it was predicated by something in particular, but I have.  I keep worrying about all the things that I will be doing over the next couple of months.  For some reason, they all seem overwhelming, like I couldn’t possibly have enough time to do them all.

I’m trying to be really deliberate in how I handle my anxiety, though.  I talked to a friend; I read little pieces of a helpful book; I made another therapy appointment; I took some steps to plan for some of the things I’m worried about.  I know that I’m doing good; it’s just hard to convince my body and brain of that.  Maybe this is good.  I’m trying not to worry, because worries don’t make anything better and they mean that I’m trying to predict the future and then generally just make me feel bad.  But also, I’m trying to tell myself that it’s okay to worry, because it’s a normal part of life and it doesn’t have to ruin my day.

I went to bed last night feeling really anxious, and tonight I feel maybe a quarter of that.  That’s progress, I think.

Cleared off the bathroom counter!!

Okay, I admit this was because I was avoiding work.  But now the bathroom counter is clean and I can start work now.  Yes, really now.  Probably.

BUT I DONT WANT TOOOOOOOOOO. THERE IS TOO MUCH OF IT TO DOOOOOO.

WAH.  Okay, chill.  All my many years in therapy tell me that I need to 

1. Break it up into bite-sized chunks.
2. Do a single chunk.
3. Give myself credit for the single chunk.
4. Take a break and repeat.

I can do this.  I can do this.  I can do this.

My plan is to leave the house, because I will not get things done if I stay here.  I will go to the cafe with wifi that I like, I will order a soft drink with caffeine, I will order chips and salsa like the good Texan I am, and I will write a single paragraph.  That’s it, for now.

My StayFocusd browser add-on tells me that I have 30 minutes left of Tumblr until 5pm, after which I can do it however much I want.  I will those minutes it to update once I have actually written my paragraph!!  Yaaayyy.

There’s something about writing down my anxiety and my plan that helps me feel okay about it all.

So here’s the plan.  I’m going to turn on the “nuclear” option on Stay Focusd, which is an extension for Chrome, and block out most of the internet.  Then I am going to do one hour of things: either paper grading or working on my dissertation proposal.  And I will do it for one hour.  And I will be successful.

I’ve tried to do the thing where I only block sites like Twitter and Tumblr and LiveJournal, but then of course I just end up procrastinating in other areas of the internet.  Desperate times call for desperate measures.  The entire internet (except for the part where my students’ papers are) is getting blocked.

I’m at the point where I actually have too much anxiety about the procrastination I’ve been doing to continue to procrastinate.  

LET’S DO THIS THING.

Done.  After much inspiration from Unfuck Your Habitat and the lovely Do Right Woman, and after an ugly day when I got nothing done, angsted about it, ate half a pan of cookies, and then just felt sick and even more angsty, I have decided to make a tumblr devoted to dealing with my shit.  And also to, er, deal with my shit. I’m going to do that too.  But this is the first step.

My shit includes

• my home, which hardly ever gets cleaned even though I know for a fact I feel better when it’s cleaner
• my eating habits, which have recently turned into nothing but eating out because I don’t want to cook.  I also have a tendency to eat to make myself feel better and to eat even when I already feel full, and while I don’t want to diet or worry about my weight, I do want to stop getting to the point where I feel overly full and sickly.  
• my work habits, which have involved lots of avoiding and procrastinating due to fears that I will inevitably fuck it up or that it will depress me or that it will be boring and tedious and awful.  Also, my situation has changed so that I’m working from home more often, which is not working out at all for me.
• my anxiety, which has been on the rise lately, but I think that tackling the bad habits that are causing me anxiety will be one of the first steps to making that one better.  Ergo, the blog.  I also want to try and be more assertive, because rolling over and being nice to people also seems to cause me a low level of anxiety.

Those things are gonna change, I have decided.  I am gonna be a lady who gets shit done.