Dark place with anxiety - self pressure

[Munki]

Recently I seem to be finding myself in a dark place with anxiety. I say anxiety but I'm wondering if it is crossing over to depression at the moment.

My biggest problem is that I put so much pressure on myself, does anyone else find this? For example, my husband is a keen snowboarder so we're going away for a few days in Feb. I had lessons at the start of this year but went along last week and fell over several times. Rather than just take it with a pinch of salt, I've obsessed about it and actually lost sleep over it. It keeps going over in my head like a mantra, 'you have to be good, you have to be good.' Its driving me mad and I'm like this about everything.

Please can someone tell me how I can stop being my own drill sergeant? its sending me over the edge.

As if its not enough that I work for myself, am in the final year of a degree and do some acting too. I'm trying to be a superwoman and its killing me. Help please. :weep:

[wabbit1]

I know how you feel and unfortunately I don't have any answers. I wish I did.

You're not alone. No one is perfect.

[leolight]

Hi Munki I know exactly what your going through. I used to make myself ill by thinking that I always needed to do better and if I was not as good at something the next time round I used to feel like a failure and that I couldn't do anything right, and the same as you it took me to a dark place. My therapist said that Im making myself like a robot, or machine, and humans arnt like that, we can't possibly be the same everyday we are not built to be like that. For some reason this realisation that I was being a robot and not a human helped me to gain alit of perspective and now I don't treat myself like a robot. If I'm not great one day thats fine, cause Im only human. Maybe this could help you to?
I write a blog and actually did a piece on this, you might find it interesting? the blog is www.leolight.life and the post is titled 'being robotic'

Your not alone in your thinking. Try and be positive and not get to down on yourself

[MyNameIsTerry]

I can understand this. I found within my career I was constantly reaching for perfectionism, micro managing things, wanting all the little details resolved when sometimes you can let them go and I had issues with delegation later on (although much of this was based on issues caused by people and becoming more specialised with other specialists leaving the company without replacement).

I spent time trying to understand this because I recognised this as a negative character trait. I didn't always have this, it became part of me due to the environment I was in for years. I thought if this carried on, my anxiety will always follow me around in any job.

Its called Cognitive Distortion and it has various elements, some of which were relevant to me and I suspect to you. For example:

All-or-nothing thinking (or dichotomous reasoning): seeing things in black or white as opposed to shades of gray; thinking in terms of false dilemmas. Splitting involves using terms like "always", "every" or "never" when this is neither true, nor equivalent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_equivalence) to the truth.

Example: When an admired person makes a minor mistake, the admiration is turned into contempt.

Overgeneralization: Making hasty generalizations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hasty_generalization) from insufficient experiences and evidence. Making a very broad conclusion based on a single incident or a single piece of evidence. If something bad happens only once, it is expected to happen over and over again. Example: A person is lonely and often spends most of her time at home. Her friends sometimes ask her to come out for dinner and meet new people. She feels it is useless to try to meet people. No one really could like her.

Filtering: focusing entirely on negative elements of a situation, to the exclusion of the positive. Also, the brain's tendency to filter out information which does not conform to already held beliefs.

Example: After receiving comments about a work presentation, a person focuses on the single critical comment and ignores what went well.

Disqualifying the positive: discounting positive events.

Example: Upon receiving a congratulation, a person dismisses it out-of-hand, believing it to be undeserved, and automatically interpreting the compliment (at least inwardly) as an attempt at flattery or perhaps as arising out of naïveté.

Magnification (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaggeration) and minimization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimisation_(psychology)) – Giving proportionally greater weight to a perceived failure, weakness or threat, or lesser weight to a perceived success, strength or opportunity, so the weight differs from that assigned to the event or thing by others. This is common enough in the normal population to popularize idioms such as "make a mountain out of a molehill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_a_mountain_out_of_a_molehill)". In depressed clients, often the positive characteristics of other people are exaggerated and negative characteristics are understated. There is one subtype of magnification:

Catastrophizing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decatastrophizing) – Giving greater weight to the worst possible outcome, however unlikely, or experiencing a situation as unbearable or impossible when it is just uncomfortable.

Example: A teenager is too afraid to start driver's training because he believes he would get himself into an accident.

Should statements (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscience): doing, or expecting others to do, what they morally should or ought (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontology) to do irrespective of the particular case (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casuistry) the person is faced with. This involves conforming strenuously to ethicalcategorical imperatives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative) which, by definition, "always apply," or to hypothetical imperatives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_imperative) which apply in that general type of case. Albert Ellis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Ellis_(psychologist)) termed this "musturbation". Psychotherapist Michael C. Graham describes this as "expecting the world to be different than it is".

Example: After a performance, a concert pianist believes he or she should not have made so many mistakes. Or, while waiting for an appointment, thinking that the service provider should be on time, and feeling bitter and resentful as a result.

[Munki]

Thank you so much for your replies. Yep, they all apply.

I'm wearing myself out. Literally. I work out 5 times per week. I run my own business. I am in the final year of a degree (OU so its from home). I'm trying to find an acting agent (I'm an actress). Then, I decide I need to be an amazing snowboarder.

It's too much :(