The day does not get to a good start...
For some reason some thoughts come in the evening and capture my mind. Thoughts of not being a good dad, of not securing stability, or being unhappy at work. Thoughts of being useless, feeling out of place. Thoughts of having many problems.
Madness starts when I decide that I want to solve many of these problems once and for all in my mind.
So I take my ipad, browse the Internet to find information and come up with an answer. Like a good researcher in my view. Or like a fool in someone else's.
The other day there was a TV programme about positive and negative thinking. The presenter was like me. He said he was anxious, very difficult to bring himself to talk openly, thinking all the time about what could go wrong in his life. It caught my attention.
He was diagnosed with a strong tendency to be negative and suggested to increase his positive thinking habits. Something he tried to do with mindful thinking and CBS (cognitive bias shifting).
Interesting, but it really ruined my night. I searched online for positive thinking tests, anxiety tests and the like. The result: Yes, I am prone to anxiety, I worry too much.
Now that I am a dad, this is not good news. That night I could not sleep much. Whenever I woke up I was thinking that I was to good enough, that I was not happy.
Next morning I just felt like a spectator after the lack of sleep. Wife making all the decisions, twins being there but me not feeling them really close or feeling attentive to their needs.
The day continues, I am prone to irritability, I feel that I am not much of a good company, I feel worthless. I wish I would not have woken up this day.
I notice that I am not ok because I tend to eat more as a way to fill my anxiety.
So whenever this happens, and believe me it is not that rare, I try to keep telling myself that I am not good or bad; that I am not my job; that I am not my journal articles; that I am not whatever people say about me (good or bad). I try to tell myself that whatever people are or choose to be (positive, negative, happy, unhappy), good for them.
It is difficult to let go of these thoughts. Wife helps to encourage me to think of other things. Nice things, like our plans with the twins.
So the only advice i can give is to avoid watching or reading serious things at night. And if anything useless crops up in your mind, challenge it: it might not happen; it is not entirely true. And if needs to be done, it can wait, as I am just a human being.
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