anxiety

[Guest_42887650]

When ever I start working I feel very anxious and feel like quitting. Even when I am not doing anything, my pending tasks keep bothering me. I am a mother of 11 years old, married. I don't even know how to put my feelings into words. 

[therising]

The warmest of welcomes you you 🙂

Sometimes I think we're not entirely conscious of our feelings until we have to put them into words. So then it becomes about how to describe them in some relatable way so that we and others can make better sense of them. It can definitely be a challenge, especially when dealing with new feelings or new levels of feeling.

Being a sensitive 53yo gal, I'd have to say one of the bigger challenges in life has involved becoming more sensitive as I've gone along. For example, when I was younger I couldn't sense the need for compassion as well as I can now and while I typically asked 'What's wrong with me?' when I was deeply depressed at times, I was never led to consider the idea of getting a better sense of what was actually depressing in my life. I was just led or left to believe I was 'broken'. Life's kinda become 'How to do sensitivity like a pro' or 'How to get a better feel for things'. Every time I come to define an emotion (a particular type of energy in motion that I can feel), it becomes a part of my 'emotional dictionary' or feelings to relate to. Hope that makes sense.

Just a few examples

• Twisting in the wind with no sense of direction: Can feel depressing, lonely, frustrating, hopeless. Can come with a sense of feeling completely lost. Can dictate a need to seek guidance and/or set goals
• Mental hyperactivity: Can feel stressful, overwhelming, exhausting, out of control. The speed at which thought is being processed can be felt through the nervous system and other energy systems linked to that (such as vascular and respiratory systems, impacting blood pressure and breathing). Can dictate a need to develop skills in slowing thought processing or emotionally detaching from thought processing in favour of pure analysis. Can also dictate the need to manage the nervous system in relation to thought
• Depressing inner dialogue: Can feel stressful, hopeless, heartbreaking, misguiding or misleading (with no constructive sense of direction), soul destroying etc. Has a very heavy down feel to it. Can dictate a need to better understand how inner dialogue works etc

As I mentioned, my feelings have gone from triggering the depressing thought 'What's wrong with me?' to 'I have no idea what the heck this particular feeling or energy is but I'm determined to figure it out (so I can add it to my dictionary for future reference)'. I should add that some feelings can be impossible to identify without certain resources. For example, 'next to no energy' is technically a feeling, with us feeling a lack of energy. It can be described as depressing. While I've jumped to the wrong conclusion in the past, believing I was returning to depression, blood tests confirmed a seriously depressing B12 deficiency. Hard to feel what your B12, iron etc is doing exactly but easy to see in a blood test result.

The business of feeling can be a seriously tough business at times, that's for sure. When you can feel just about everything, from a lack of energy through to someone degrading you, stressing you, depressing you or not helping you or you can even feel someone else's anger, there's just so much to feel and make sense of. Being sensitive to what we feel can require a lot of detective work at times.

[sbella02]

Hey there, thank you for reaching out and welcome to the forums. I'm sorry to hear what you're going through, and I'm here to build on what Therising has already expressed.

Sometimes if certain places make us feel anxious, it is either a matter of acknowledging and mitigating or confronting what is making us anxious (which can bring about its own challenges), or changing our environment if applicable. If anxiety starts causing us significant distress, it can disrupt our ability to perform well at work.

Do you happen to know when your anxiety started, or what situations you experience it the most in at work?

I have previously experienced anxiety regarding work. In one of the more sentient instances that I remember, the person who was causing me anxiety ended up getting fired, which eased my distress significantly. Back when I was a lot younger and changing jobs was a lot more feasible, there was an instance in which my boss had told me off for something that wasn't my fault nor did it have anything to do with me, and I realised that my place as an employee there was fully transactional - they didn't care whether I was actually in the wrong or whether they'd upset me, so long as I was making them money, and these were not values that I aligned with. These are just two examples of environmental changes that reduced my work anxiety, although these are both fairly extreme.

Feel free to chat with us as much as you'd like to... the more you can express in a verbal sense, the more you may feel better or be able to recognise what's causing you the most distress, and the more specific advice we can provide.

Wishing you all the best, SB